A Million Little Truths

In his new memoir, New York Times reporter David Carr describes soaking his arms, with their "pus-filled track marks," in a tub of detergent, as well as other low points in his life as a junkie. But those graphic details aren't the reasons why his addiction memoir makes me nervous. It's because of what he implies about the genre of memoir itself.

To write the book, Carr conducted interviews and extensively researched and fact-checked his own life, intentionally exposing how our memories are often fabrications. On his Web site, he writes that "sometimes the stories we tell about ourselves are just that: stories." The implicit suggestion: We must question whether those stories are in fact true.

Like Carr, I've written a memoir. That means that I've written a history of my memories, that I've taken a part of my life and put it down on paper for others to read -- and perhaps judge. I thought I was ready for that, as much as anyone could be. What I wasn't ready for, though, was the call earlier this year from my editor, asking me to send along digital files of my diplomas. She assured me that she wasn't fact-checking my memories. "I'm not questioning the truth of your story," she said, "but others might." She added: "I know your degrees won't really prove anything, but since you have a masters in counseling psychology, it does show, in kind of a roundabout way, that you went through something that you tried to make sense of in your life." Then she laughed and said, "At least it proves that you are who you say you are." I sent the documents, along with a short note reassuring her that I hadn't been raised by wolves.

My memoir, "Loose Girl," was published this summer in the wake of several false memoirs. First, there was James Frey, who notoriously manufactured a good deal of "A Million Little Pieces," in which he tells his tale of drugs, alcohol and criminality. Then came "Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival," the fabricated foster-child-and-gang-member book by Margaret B. Jones. Jones, as was soon revealed, was actually Margaret Seltzer, who grew up in a privileged household with her biological parents. Add to the sullied shelf the made-up Misha Defonseca, who claimed in "Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years" that the Nazis had taken her parents and that she had grown up, quite literally, with a family of wolves. After her story was proven to be fake, she said: "There are times when it is difficult for me to tell the difference between what was reality and what was my interior universe."

The publishing industry reeled from these betrayals. Books were recalled, and memoirists like myself were suddenly put in the awkward, often impossible position of having to prove that our stories are factual. In light of this roll call of impostors, Carr's shoe-leather approach seems inevitable: Memoir 2.0.

People don't want to get fooled again, and who can blame them? Reading is an act of trust, and the relationship between reader and writer is intimate. Memoirists urge us to believe in them, and when we do, we open ourselves up to them, as they have supposedly opened themselves up to us. We make ourselves vulnerable, exposed.

Frey, perhaps having learned his lesson, marketed his latest book as fiction. Carr seems to be marketing his book, in part, as journalism. I'm hyper-aware of these choices -- not only as a memoir writer but as a novelist. Before I wrote "Loose Girl," I wrote a young-adult novel called "Easy." It's not autobiographical, but it has the same theme -- a teenage girl's promiscuity -- as my memoir. I wrote a fictional account first because the theme isn't generally one most people want to see explored, and I knew that if I tackled it as memoir, I might be attacked.

I thought that publishing the novel would satisfy the part of me that needed to tell my story, but it didn't. Honesty mattered most. I knew that some people would judge me and others would doubt me, but I believed that if I told the true details of my story, other girls might feel freer to confess theirs.

My memoir begins when I'm 11 and goes on to the years when I slept with and otherwise engaged sexually with more than 40 boys -- many of whose names I can't even remember. As I suspected, people took offense. Some claim 40 is a paltry number, as if the number -- that fact -- were anything but beside the point. I didn't write the book to parade my conquests or establish what has been called my "slut cred." I wrote it to examine the reasons I chose to harm myself -- constantly needing the sex to mean more than it did, constantly letting it define me. I wrote the book to make sense of my past and because plenty of girls and women are still living this same story. I told the truth, drawing on the benefit of experience and the imperfection of memory, always aware of the difference between what could and could not be substantiated, always aware that I would need to protect the other players in my story -- all those boys, the friends I betrayed, my unknowing parents.

Some readers are disappointed to see that I didn't become a person who no longer craves male attention, that I didn't transform myself into someone new. They see it as a flaw in the book, a plot device I should have employed. They can't fathom that I might be both the girl that I wrote about and the woman I am today. I wish I could prove to these readers that these facts coexist, that my story has an ending of sorts, in which I'm still me. Carr seems to wrestle with the same thing -- which is why, I think, he offers different versions of his life, why he looks to others for verification. Was that really me?

But how can we prove any of this? Must we all report our stories the way Carr did? I could put someone on the phone with my gynecologist, I suppose. I could try to track down some of those boys. Imagine that conversation: "Um, hi, John? Remember Jones Beach back in July 1987? It was a Wednesday?" But at the time, I hid most of my behavior, so I'd be out of luck trying to get corroboration. I withheld the truth back then as something few girls would want to admit to. I kept it from family and friends alike. My memoir is the story I didn't tell when I was young. It's the real one, but I have no way to prove it.

Even now, my family could easily call out the ways in which I portrayed them. Margaret Seltzer's sister revealed her sibling's lies. Couldn't my family do so too? Aware of the ways in which they might feel harmed, I gave the manuscript to my sister, who makes an appearance in it. She admitted that she doesn't imagine herself the way I described her, but she also recognized that the memoir is told from my perspective. My family will see themselves differently and might not want to see themselves the way I do. I've recounted plenty of events to my parents that they tell me I've remembered incorrectly. But whose version is correct?