How much can you shape your story before it stops being memoir? Every memoirist asks this question sooner or later. Maybe you’re tempted to conflate two friends into one character to streamline your story. Or create more tension by presenting a string of events over one (fictionalized) summer rather than three (lived) years. Or you want to write a conversation you never got to have with someone before they died. So, when should you fictionalize your memoir?
What does it mean to “fictionalize a memoir”?
As the examples above show, fictionalizing your memoir means changing what actually happened. Fictionalization is not a technique; it’s a departure from what actually occurred. And the question it raises is this: When do you stop calling what you’ve written “memoir” and disclose the changes you’ve made. Some well-known memoir writers have handled this question in a variety of ways. Looking at the choices they’ve made can help you decide how to proceed with your own story.
Memoirists who’ve traveled the road before you
Mary Karr
In The Liars’ Club, Karr leans hard on the truth of her Texas childhood, letting real people and real dialogue carry the story without much reshaping. Her approach reminds us that the truest version of events can also be the most compelling one. We don’t necessarily need to invent situations when what actually happened is unforgettable.
Augusten Burroughs
Burroughs’s Dry opens with an author’s note, in which he explains that names were changed, characters combined, and some scenes recreated. Yes, Burroughs used composite characters and reshaped the timeline, but he told readers exactly what he was doing before they invested in his story. That transparency is what keeps his book in memoir territory.
James Frey
Frey has become a poster boy for fictionalizing without disclosing. His A Million Little Pieces was sold as memoir. It even became an Oprah’s Book Club pick. But then large portions were discovered to have been fabricated, rather than reasonably reconstructed. The scandal wasn’t about whether Frey shaped his story—every memoirist does that. It was about the gap between how much he invented and the claim he made that it was all exactly as he’d lived it.
Alice Sebold
Sebold wrote the same story in two different forms. Her memoir, Lucky, recounts her rape in college in unflinching, factual detail. Her novel The Lovely Bones, about a girl who is raped and murdered, draws directly on Sebold’s experience, but it’s presented with a different (and impossible) narrator and a tragically altered outcome.
Sebold has said she wrote Lucky for herself, to get her own story down in plain, truthful terms. She wrote The Lovely Bones for her fictional character Susie Salmon, who she said, needed to go somewhere Sebold’s real life hadn’t.
So, when should you fictionalize your memoir?
Where your own memoir falls depends on, among other considerations,
- craft concerns: what does the story actually need in order to work on the page?
- creative opportunities: how much freedom do you want as a writer?
- and ethical and legal issues: how do you protect the people named in your story—and keep yourself safe as well? (I’ve written a post that looks at some of the ethical and legal aspects of this issue.)
Here are some questions worth sitting with as you decide:
- How many moments do you feel need to be compressed or reshaped to serve the story? At what point do you think you’re crossing into fiction?
- How would writing a novel based on your life experiences serve you differently than writing the lived memoir version?
- Would you be willing to list, specifically, every place you’ve changed something? Or is there a change you’d rather keep vague? And if so, why?
- Are you changing details to protect someone’s privacy? Or are you avoiding a truth that’s just simply hard to write?
- Have you asked, or could you ask, the people involved how they feel about how they’re being portrayed?
- Are the changes you’re making small enough that they would hold up against someone else’s memory of the same events? Or are you more completely rewriting what actually happened?
- Are you fictionalizing—making changes—to reduce legal exposure, or to avoid a conflict you’re not ready to have?
- If you call your book a “memoir,” could you defend every scene it contains if you were challenged about its accuracy?
No hard and fast rules—but reader trust matters
There’s no universal rule about fictionalizing your memoir. What matters is being clear about your choices and being honest with your reader about the book they have in their hands. Writers don’t get in trouble because they’ve reshaped their material; they get caught out when they let their readers believe something other than what actually happened.
Are you wondering whether to fictionalize your memoir? I work with memoir writers—and novelists—at all stages of the process. Whether you’re just finding your way into your story or have a complete draft, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect.
If you’re interested in my approach to writing, you might take a look at my books, Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.