Responsibility of the Memoirist

Responsibility of the Memoirist

 From the desk of Scott Catey, ghostwriter with Mangus Media Group

One of my favorite forms to ghostwrite is memoir. And I keep up pretty well with the industry and developments in memoir writing. Lately there had been a fairly loud kerfuffle about the memoirist’s veracity in the book The Salt Path. In a nutshell, the Observer in the UK published a raft of allegations and the author responded with a rebuttal. The fight continues and has generated another episode of craft discussions focused on how much truth the memoirist owes to the reader.

 I won't weigh in on that particular argument; there are plenty of good resources available on the discussion. What I want to discuss is the challenges a ghostwriter faces in writing a memoir and writing the truth.

 As a memoir ghostwriter, I’m at least one step removed from the truth of an author’s life and story. Often, I’m many steps removed. Sometimes that means I do research. Sometimes it means I’ll conduct interviews with others with knowledge of the author’s story. Sometimes it means I’ll triangulate my author interviews, to ask multiple questions that help me to verify a set of issues. And sometimes an author can provide documentation to validate claims. But sometimes there’s simply no way for me to verify and I have to take the author at their word and write the story as they tell it.

 So my questions are: What’s the ghostwriter’s obligation to the author? And what is the ghostwriter’s obligation to the truth?

 For me, I come down strongly on the side of telling the author’s story the way they want to tell it. There are a few reasons for this.

·         First, memory is famously fallible, and I never want to take the position of disbelieving an author. Trust is critical in the ghostwriting relationship, and I start from the assumption that my authors are truthful.

·         Second, I often work with people who may actually experience very different realities: authors with experiences of mental illness, addiction, violence, and abuse.

·         And third, I also frequently work with authors whose stories are specifically about hiding or misdirecting or keeping secrets: people who are LGBTQIA but not out, or people who are required not to divulge information. Think spies, but also CEOs who must not reveal industrial secrets. There are many reasons why an author can’t or won’t divulge the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

 For example, a recent client told me how his mother once stabbed her husband as he was violently assaulting her. The cops were called, but they never came, so there’s no police record of the incident. The husband did not go to hospital, so there’s no medical record either. The mother claims to have no memory of the event. The husband is dead now (many years later, not related to the stabbing). When he was alive, he vehemently insisted that he never abused the mother, that he was an innocent victim of her mental illness. The author was 7 years old at the time of the stabbing and has a vivid memory of the soundscape, but didn’t actually see the stabbing. Didn’t see blood or the knife or other telltale signs afterwards. But he knows it happened, as does his sister, though they have quite different recollections.

 What is the truth of that story, then? For the author and me, it’s a story about domestic violence and the chaos it produces, and this event is a marker of that. Is it documented? Verifiable in an official sense? No, but as a ghostwriter, I have no qualms about helping the author narrate the story in a way that validates their experience and creates a truth that readers can hold onto: for resilience. For the author’s discussion of how he coped. For hope in the knowledge that they are not alone.

 There is much more to truth than simply laying out facts and records. Good storytelling matters in presenting a life story well, with honesty. But there so much more to truth. That doesn’t mean we fabricate. However, it does mean that we must take seriously the possibility that even flawed memory can reveal deeper personal and historical truths.