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IN THE ALBERT Where the Truth Lies: Memoir and Memory By Neena Arndt “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.” –Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending In Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities, Brooke Wyeth arrives at her parents’ Palm Springs mansion for the holidays. In her baggage is a draft of her soon-tobe-published book, a tell-all memoir that dissects her parents’ relationship with her older brother, a leftist activist who was implicated in a bombing decades earlier. Brooke, a gifted writer who loves her parents but thinks poorly of their right-wing political views, has suffered from depression that has prevented her from writing for several years, but writing this personal story has unmuted her voice. She gains strength from telling the truth about her family—but her parents question whether Brooke’s truths are objective truths or merely her garbled, biased understanding of the events of her youth. Her mother, Polly, points out that, “you may of course write whatever you like, but the ice gets thin when it involves we the living. We, the living, would like to go out gracefully.” While novels spring primarily from imagination and non-fiction writing relies on research as its foundation, memoirs depend heavily on memory, personal perception and interpretation of events. But there are at least two sides to every story—interpretation is subjective and memory is unreliable, malleable and slippery. And while events might occur at random, we long to connect our own dots, creating narratives from the scattershot of our lives. To what extent, then, are memoirs accurate? Is accuracy a reasonable expectation? Do other people get a say in our memories? In the past decade, countless incidents of memoir forgery have surfaced; examples include Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence, the touching tale of a young girl passing him food through the barbed wire of his concentration camp, and Matt McCarthy’s Odd Man Out, in which he describes his misadventures on a minor league baseball team. Evidence suggests that neither story is entirely true. But while these authors may have been deliberately deceitful, their stories both sprang from objective “...you may of course write whatever you like, but the ice gets thin when it involves we the living. We, the living, would like to go out gracefully.” —Polly, Other Desert Cities LEFT: Herman Rosenblat and his wife, Rosa, the subject of his forged memoir, Angel at the Fence. AP Photo/J. Pat Carter. truth. Rosenblat, indeed, survived the Holocaust in a concentration camp, and McCarthy, without a doubt, played for the Provo Angels. Because the stories rely on people accurately reporting incidents that happened years or decades ago, teasing out the truth from lies proves difficult. And could it be possible that, rather than being liars, these authors truly believe they remember incidents that never occurred? Since the early twentieth century, psychologists have consistently found that our minds don’t work like video cameras; they neither passively record information, nor play it back the same way they recorded it. In the 1930s, psychologist Frederic Bartlett told study participants Native American folktales with which they were unfamiliar, then asked them to retell the tales. While most participants recalled the gist of the folktales, they forgot details and provided false informa- 6
RIGHT: Dr. Elizabeth Loftus delivers testimony on her research in court. AP Photo/Jodi Hilton. tion to fill in the gaps—without realizing they had made changes. Furthermore, their retellings often omitted aspects of the tale that were inconsistent with their own worldviews: for example, if a tale contained Native American mysticism, participants (who were raised primarily in Judeo-Christian Western cultures) tended to forget those details, and remember the aspects of the story that were more familiar, such as the relationships between family members. Upon being asked to retell the tale several times, people increasingly embellished certain details and left out others with each repetition. Each participant told his or her own version of the folktale, a version shaped both by imperfect memory and preexisting worldviews. Since then, numerous studies have bolstered Bartlett’s findings. Preeminent psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has conducted research on memory for more than 40 years, focusing particularly on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Memories, she has found, are vulnerable creatures, subject to suggestion and outside input that occurs after the event in question has ended. Loftus showed study participants an image of a car near a yield sign, then gave them a written description of the picture they’d seen. Some descriptions contained misinformation—they stated that the car was at a stop sign. Those participants with faulty descriptions were likely to state that the car had indeed been at a stop sign. While this error had no consequences in a laboratory setting, in the real world the consequences can be dire. As a consultant on hundreds of court cases, Loftus counsels legal professionals on when and how to use eyewitness testimony—and when to discount it. When a writer pens a memoir, then, what story is she or he telling? Psychologist and writer Lauren Slater tackles the question in her book Lying. Slater explains, “There is only one kind of memoir I can see to write, and that’s a slippery, playful, impish, exasperating text, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark.” She writes about suffering from epilepsy since age 10, enduring frequent seizures and smelling nonexistent scents. She describes receiving therapy from nuns and learning to ice skate. She recounts, with precise detail, succumbing to and overcoming her illness. But Slater explains unapologetically along the way that we, the readers, shouldn’t take her too literally. Her truths are metaphorical: they reflect her subjective experience, rather than the literal events of her life. She might, or might not, have ever had epilepsy at all. Slater’s evasion of fact is purposeful and transparent; her purpose is to raise questions about the nature of truth and lying. But her lies vary only in degree from memoirs which purport to be truthful. In Other Desert Cities, is Brooke’s viewpoint more truthful than that of her parents? Is the ice, indeed, thin when a memoir involves people who are still living, whose reputations can be tarnished? And can we, amid the muddle of our lives and the chaos of our consciousness, find any truth at all? Individual Support for Other Desert Cities The Goodman is proud to acknowledge the following individuals who support the Goodman’s production of Other Desert Cities. Marcia S. Cohn Doris and Howard Conant Family Foundation Cynthia and Michael R. Scholl Director’s Society Sponsors Commitments as of December 10, 2012 American Airlines Sets the Stage for Global Citizenship With a relationship spanning 30 years, American Airlines has lent its expertise in “making connections” to play a vital role in Goodman Theatre’s productions and programs. American has provided travel for virtually all of Goodman Theatre’s performers, as well as its literary and artistic leadership. This generosity has enabled the Goodman to continue its ongoing collaboration with Havana’s Teatro Buendía and has helped it discover the next generation of theater artists that will light up the Goodman’s stages. American, American Eagle and AmericanConnection operate over 3,500 flights a day to more than 260 airports in over 50 countries and territories. This longstanding partnership between these two pillars of the community allows the Goodman to shine in its role as a cultural gem of Chicago and serves as a reminder of the strong commitment that American has to the communities it serves at home and abroad. 7
Page 1 and 2: January - March 2013 The Personal a
Page 3 and 4: IN THE ALBERT From the Artistic Dir
Page 5 and 6: not permit me to do: to write about
Page 7: LEFT: Rachel Griffiths and Thomas S
Page 11 and 12: IN THE OWEN A Conversation with Chr
Page 13 and 14: ABOVE: Michael Goldsmith and Grant
Page 15 and 16: The young are particularly likely t
Page 17 and 18: AT THE GOODMAN Coming This Spring:
Page 19 and 20: IN THE WINGS GeNarrations: Stories
Page 21 and 22: Cocktails and Conversation On Octob
Page 23 and 24: Center Stage Above: Cherie and Ken

OnStage - Goodman Theatre

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