“Do you swear to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” We’ve heard this intimidating oath in every television show with a courtroom scene. Fortunately, writers of memoir and personal essay don’t have to make this declaration – at least under oath. Or, if they did, it would be with the caveat that, “this is my truth. This is the way it was for me, so help me Goddess of Imagination.”

It turns out that arriving at the fundamental “truth” in memoir requires excavation. For most of us, our truth is what we think we remember. And, if what you are writing is an essay or memoir about your life, be prepared that someone who witnessed the same event at the same time might have a different recollection. This is an important possibility to keep in mind when writing memoir because, if you are swayed to consider some other rendition, based on what someone else claims is the almighty truth, you may not get to the essence of what you are trying to describe.

Intention matters. As Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz describe in Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction, “If our intent is to capture the messy, real world we live in, we fulfill the first obligation of creative nonfiction. Intent helps us resist the urge to change facts, just to make a better story. It stops us from telling deliberate lies, even as we let our imagination fill in details we only vaguely remember.”

Here’s an example; in my memoir, Those Who Remain: Remembrance and Reunion After War, I describe the experience of losing my husband in the Vietnam War. There is a scene at his funeral in Connecticut during the month of May at the cemetery where it was so hot that my uncle, wearing a dark wool suit, passed out from heat exhaustion. My brother recalls the same day as cold: “It was freezing,” he said. “So cold that I’m sure it was February.”

The weather may or may not be a crucial element in your story, but this is a good example of how differently two people can remember a traumatic experience at the same point in time. I have no doubt that my brother remembered feeling frozen that day for reasons other than what he imagined was the weather. First, his anguish over my husband’s death and, second, the realization that he was at risk of being drafted into the military momentarily.

Perl and Swartz would explain this trick of memory – the insistence that it was February rather than May – as an example of the storm of controversy that rages in any writers’ conference on creative nonfiction – the battle between discovering and telling emotional truth, and factual truth. They would likely take my brother to task about his insistence that it was winter and encourage him to write his own memoir about his fragility in the face of the looming iceberg that was the Vietnam War. What matters is the story that is being written. In stories of early trauma, childhood and coming of age, the discovery of emotional truth is essential.

In memoir and personal essays we are in search of ourselves; the “I” that was in the past and the “I” that is now. Abigail Thomas says in Thinking About Memoir, “Writing is the way I try and make sense of my life, try to find meaning in accident, reasons why what happens happens – even though I know that why is a distraction … Truth is what I’m ultimately after, truth or clarity. I think that’s what we’re all after, truth, … and I write nonfiction because you can’t get away with anything when it’s just you and the page. No half-truths, no cosmetics. What would be the point? …Be honest, dig deep, or don’t bother.”

When writing memoir the goal is to present our “best evidence,” selecting what we need, omitting information that does not serve a particular moment, striving to share that interiority of feeling that lets the reader in and allows you to share your truth. And, the truth shall make you free.

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If you would like to dive deeper into the exploration of memoir and nonfiction while working on your own stories, please join me for a weeklong writing workshop on beautiful Cape Cod at Truro Center for the Arts at Castlehill from June 23 – 27, 2025. Information and registration available at: www.castlehill.org (508) 349-7511.