Two Ways To Tell the Same Truth: Navigating the Boundary Between Fact and Fiction

One of the first stories I’d published was about a highly dysfunctional family. After reading it, my mother called me. She was livid. “How could you?” she asked. “You’ve humiliated us.”

I was confused. The story bore no resemblance to our family, but my mother said, “I know it’s not us. You know it’s not us. But everyone else is going to think it’s us.”

At the conclusion of a public reading from my second novel, in which the narrator was a chronic adulteress, a woman strode over to tell me she hoped my husband was divorcing me. I wasn’t married.

Having read my novel, previous to the one forthcoming, an acquaintance wanted to know more about my sisters. He was utterly baffled when I told him that, unlike the protagonist of the novel, I didn’t have any sisters. “But,” he said, “but…” to which I said, “It’s fiction. It’s not true.”

But what is true?

The Russians have two words for “truth.” Pravda is the literal, objective truth (the eponymous official Russian newspaper notwithstanding). Istina is the malleable truth, a deeper truth.

We trust that nonfiction—biographies, histories, and the like—adhere to the facts. Nonfiction is Pravda. Memoirists invite the reader in, to be privy to their lives, to learn their secrets. Although we know that memory is sometimes faulty or biased, memoirists aim for Pravda, and we can trust that they are telling us the truth as they remember it or believe it to be.

Fiction is, or aims to be, Istina. But regardless of whether or not it achieves the lofty goal of a deeper truth, it is unquestionably a malleable truth. Defined as literature in which the characters, events, and places are imaginary, we cannot, nor should we, read fiction for the literal truth. Reading fiction requires that you suspend your disbelief, a requisite that is obviously a given when reading speculative fiction. Rational beings know that ghosts and space aliens aren’t really real, and we know that the future is not now. But reading mimetic fiction takes effort, even willpower, a need to remind oneself that while it reads like a true story, it’s not a true story insofar as it never really happened. It’s a true-to-life story that did not happen, or at least not in the way that it’s told.

There is no recipe for writing fiction, but there are known ingredients: experience, observation, imagination, transformation, transposition, empathy, discovery, insight, allowing the subconscious free reign, making connections, and inhabiting our characters as surely as if we were method actors. What is unknown is which of these ingredients or in what proportion were they incorporated in any particular work of fiction. I once read an interview with John Cheever in which he said (I am paraphrasing) that writing is like being on a boat in the middle of the ocean, you have no idea where you are going, and there’s a woman standing next to you who looks like your wife, but she’s not your wife.

It takes courage to write memoir, to expose your vulnerabilities to the world, to risk being judged or the subject of gossip. To write fiction takes patience and fortitude to fend off the assumptions that our novels are memoirs. Of course, this doesn’t always happen. Along with the aforementioned speculative fiction, I doubt anyone thought that Tolstoy was Anna Karenina or that Flaubert was Madame Bovary. Even when he made the claim, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” what he meant was that we all are Madame Bovary, that in one way or another, we all are dissatisfied with our lives. Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are Istina.

It often presents an even greater challenge for the reader to distinguish fiction from memoir when fiction is written in the first person and when the protagonist bears a resemblance to the author, when there are overlaps between them. But consider this syllogism: The protagonist of a novel has blond hair. The author has blond hair. The protagonist lives in Vermont where she keeps chickens as pets. The author’s bio tells us that she lives in Vermont with her pet chickens. When the protagonist murders her mother, can we then reasonably conclude that the author has murdered her mother? How many readers will google “author + murdered mother?” But unless the author makes a public pronouncement that she has, or wishes she had, murdered her mother, we can make no such presumption. I think of these resemblances and overlaps like those between parents and their children. They might share physical characteristics and experiences, live in the same house, have the same interests and sensibilities, but they are not the same person.

Not always, but frequently, I use a personal experience as the seed for my fiction, but I do not write autofiction. There’s nowhere near enough “auto” in what I write to qualify for that genre. Rather, the personal experience is like planting a seed from a packet without a label. There’s no predicting what will bloom. It’s the “what if” that seduces me, and the “suppose” that lead me to inevitable surprises.

I agree that to some extent we should write what we know, but I would add that it’s more important that we know more than we do, whether that means to become intimately acquainted with the characters we’ve invented, broadening our powers of observation, traveling beyond our comfort zones, letting our imaginations soar, and when needed, to do our homework, which is to read and research.

My new novel Counting Backwards is the story of a man struck by early onset Lewy body dementia, told from his wife’s point of view. On the cover it’s clearly stated: A Novel, which it is, although the flap copy informs the reader that the story is “loosely based” on my experience with my husband’s illness. While Counting Backwards did arise from my husband’s suffering from Lewy body, and I understood that “loosely based” is a “hook,” as well as a means for establishing authority, nonetheless, I bristled. I recoiled at the prospect of it being read as memoir because, whatever the impetus of the book, it is a work of fiction.

After my husband died, when I embarked on writing the novel, I realized how little I actually knew about the disease. Although I was aware that the primary reason for difficulty in diagnosis resulted from the symptoms of Lewy body being inconsistent and varying, it was not until I began to do research that I discovered the three pages of possible symptoms. The exhausting number and wide range of them, the vast majority of which my husband did not exhibit, ignited my imagination. This extensive list of symptoms that heretofore were unknown to me significantly informed and shaped the novel. Like ordering from a dim sum menu with a multitude of options, I picked and chose those that were instrumental to plot development, that highlighted the horror and the sorrow of the disease in ways that, despite how brutal it was to live through, were made more pronounced. Each of them offered me a plethora of “what if’s” and “supposes.”

They also prompted an adjustment to the wife’s profession. I’d initially conceived of her as a painter, but piecing together myriad symptoms, it occurred to me to make her a collage artist creating nightmarish art from disparate pieces of ephemera. This alteration then led to additional turning points in action and was revelatory to thematic content. But because I knew nothing about making collages, for purposes of authenticity, further research was required. What I learned from reading about the art of collage resulted in added color and texture to the characterization of the wife. And on and on, from the seed of experience grew a novel, decidedly a work of fiction.

But another thing I have learned, not from research but from experience, is that while we have control over what we write, we cannot control how we are read. My mother, my real mother, not one I invented, was right when she said, “I know that. You know that. But everyone else is going to think it’s us.” And that is Pravda.

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Counting Backwards by Binnie Kirshenbaum is available from Soho Press.