Stories can be conceptually true, even if they’re factually inaccurate. James Frey pretty much argued that A Million Little Pieces was true on this level.

Statements or pictures that are factually untrue can be true to the “spirit” of what is being conveyed. A couple of years ago an advertising campaign was criticised for promoting the Costa Brava using a photo that was actually taken in the Bahamas. In its defence, the tourist board said: “What we were looking for was the concept (…) We absolutely didn’t think we were betraying the spirit and the promotion of the Costa Brava, which is what interested us.”

On the other hand, stories can seem authentic even if they’re not. So-called reality TV shows sometimes re-shoot scenes if they didn’t work quite right the first time. We also know that shows like The Hills tell stories that seem real even though they’re at least partially made up. Yann Martel’s Self seems like an authentic autobiography then reveals that it can’t be.

I think we look for signs of authenticity before deciding whether or not to believe a story – but those signs can be misleading. This is one of the problems with our tendency to make a binary distinction between truth and falsehood.

If you were to research your own life, using only the tools available to a biographer, what would you discover?

You might start by Googling yourself, building up a picture of your subject’s online persona. Then you might look for physical records of his past – birth and marriage records, university admissions and graduation lists, etc. That’s before you move on to obtaining letters, interviews with family and friends, photographs and juvenilia.

How easy is it to obtain such information? I have no idea. I won’t know until I start researching the made-up biography of myself, written by someone else, that extends into the future – one of the 10 auto/biographies I’d like to write.

This story would be a mixture of autobiography, biography and science fiction. It’d be about me – or a fictional version of me (a character called Ben Hoare) – and would have as its author my would-be biographer, Nigel Savage. Like Ian Hamilton in In Search of J.D. Salinger, Savage is a fan of the author who has dedicated a portion of his life to revealing the truth about his subject. Like many biographers’ tales, then, this would also be a story about a reader’s relationship with a text.

It would be presented as a biography or biographer’s tale and would claim to be true. It’d be made-up in that at least some of it would be consciously fictional. The ‘hero’ of this particular story, Nigel Savage, would be entirely made up, of course.

The story would extend into the future, which is where the science fiction comes in. This book would show us not only what became of Ben Hoare, but also what became of the world. There almost definitely wouldn’t be any teleporting or time travel, but there might be something almost as good. I like the idea of writing about the near, rather than the distant, future. This is the future we know something about – or, at least, can speculate about plausibly. I can imagine a world that has grown beyond me – a world my son is more comfortable in than I am. There will be things I don’t understand, and many of my thoughts will be nostalgic. Technology I now think of as cutting edge will be taken for granted, and many of the tokens of my youth (CDs, DVDs, perhaps even personal computers) will be considered ancient. This is the world I would try to imagine in the made-up biography of myself, written by someone else, that extends into the future.

In Lessons from Michaelangelo, Sharon Lippincott challenges us to “experiment with writing a short memory in parable form, or as a short story using third person and an assumed name.”

There are many examples of autobiography in the third person, but I am interested in Sharon’s idea of transforming a memory into a parable. Because parables are stories that mean something – they teach us a lesson in some way.

It seems to me that this exercise emphasises the amount of invention that takes place when we remember. As I’ve argued before, memories are not absolute records of our past, but stories that we conjure up to explain the present. When we remember, and particularly when we write those memories down or tell them to other people, we are constructing our identities, telling the story of how we came to be the person we want people to think we are.

Like fables, satires and nonsense, a parable is also a type of fantasy. You see, all these forms are concerned with telling the truth, but they do so by inventing. The fantasy has a metaphorical value: the truth is conveyed through made-up things rather than through accurately reported facts. This seems quite different from what many people claim for autobiography, where we are often presented with something purporting to be definitive truth.

If we write an autobiographical parable, then, we are acknowledging that our memories are inventions, distorted by narrative form and even an inherent meaning that was lacking in the events themselves.

When I read Roman Krznaric’s post on why every city needs an Empathy Museum, I was reminded of something I wrote about museums back in 2006, so I dug it out.

Recently, I visited the British Museum, and was disappointed. Objects cased in glass were explained by printed text accompanied by pictures. It was like reading a book where one has to walk around in order to turn the page. I wondered what the appeal is in visiting a building in order to obtain information that could have been acquired, in much greater comfort, at home.

The exhibits were uninspiring because they were unreal to me, isolated in their cases. I could not imagine them existing in real life. At the same time my mind was divided between looking at the objects and reading the text next to them. I focussed on neither, absorbing nothing in its entirety. I wondered why institutions spend so much money acquiring objects that they do not intend to make fully available to their visitors. The objects mean nothing if they cannot be understood in terms of where they come from, historically and physically.

As I stood there, people crowded around the exhibits, looking at them through digital cameras. I could hear gadgets whirring and voices calling to each other. The exhibition was all about people from other cultures. It suddenly struck me what a shame it was that so many people from such a wide range of backgrounds should pass each other by in this building and never say a word to each other, maintaining the illusion that they were learning about other cultures. I also felt shame at my supercilious disdain for the way in which they pushed in front of me and crowded round the items I was looking at, getting in my way. Talking to them seemed out of the question.

Even more recently I visited the Horniman Museum, which is clearly designed with children and families in mind. Every room has an interactive element, with activities for children to complete to prevent boredom. I wondered what might happen if museums started to make a similar effort to sustain the attention of adults, rather than overestimating their ability to amuse themselves.

I believe that a museum should be more than a collection of objects. The word originally indicated a building connected with the Muses, who inspired mankind to create things of beauty. I suspect that, in many cases, museums are now visited in the same spirit in which they are curated: mankind’s fever for collecting; the desire to be able to say “I own that” or “I have been there”. There is probably a guide book that says, “You must not go to London without visiting the British Museum”, so people go there.

I would like to develop a new way of exhibiting things. I would also like to find new things to exhibit: not just objects, but ideas, real people, the kinds of things that cannot be collected. The word “museum” refers to the things on display as well as the building that contains them. My ideal museum, then, would not be fixed in a single place: it would move around, evolving to fit into its temporary homes; touched, but not restricted, by its physical surroundings. The museum could be exhibited anywhere, and its ever-changing location would form part of the experience people gained from visiting it. It would also change every time it received a new visitor, because the variety of people who walked through the museum’s doors would be part of the exhibition, and people (myself included) would start to learn that their immediate neighbours are as exciting as historically and physically distant cultures.

Previously, when I’ve written about belief, I’ve been interested in what we believe about the stories other people tell – what makes us believe autobiography and reject fantasy as fiction, for example.

But an equally important factor, particularly in our understanding of autobiography, is what the tellers of these stories believe about themselves.

In Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, Lewis Wolpert writes:

Memory can be viewed as a type of belief, not least because it can be unreliable. Indeed memory itself can be shaped by current beliefs. For example, in relationships, individuals’ recall of important events, especially those involving some sort of conflict, can be greatly at variance.

The idea that our memories are conditioned by what we think of ourselves in the present was a fundamental factor in my autobiographical memories project. I also had the idea that you could write about the same memory multiple times – possibly thousands of times – and each would tell a different story. This is still one of the 10 auto/biographies I’d like to write.

When we think of memory in these terms (as beliefs conditioned by the present), our personal histories become stories that we conjure up to explain the present. Our autobiographies explain the people we became, rather than existing as absolute records of our pasts.

But there is also this bizarre account of an inherited memory in Saira Shah’s The Storyteller’s Daughter. The author recounts a story her own father, Idries Shah, had told to her – a memory of being a very small child riding an elephant in India.

Beneath the elephant’s lumbering tread, and as far as the eye can see, lush fields of sugar-cane stretch across the plain. Stooped figures – stunted and deformed by generations of under-nourishment – are cutting the cane in the glare of the sun. As he watches them, the child becomes aware for the first time that these, too, are human beings. His grandfather is with him on the elephant’s back. The old man reads the boy’s thoughts and answers his unspoken question: ‘Yes, we are oppressing these people. And mark my words: although they may seem to you now to be as weak and helpless as twigs, one day they will rise up and destroy us utterly.’

I assumed this was a literal memory. Then, years later, I found almost the same remark in the works of one of the great classical Persian poets, Sheikh Sa’adi of Shiraz. So now I can never be sure that my father really did sit on the back of that elephant, gazing across those endless plains. But because of that image, I will never forget Sa’adi’s words. The myths we choose to tell reflect the message we wish to preserve.

What was presented to Saira Shah as a personal heirloom, something she inherited from her father’s individual history, is in fact indistinguishable from her collective heritage – the myths of her people.

As I’ve said before, collective and individual stories alike often seek to tell where we’ve come from and where we’re going. Myths are stories of our past, that seek to explain how the world came to be how it is. In Shah’s account, such myths are indistinguishable from our autobiographical memories.

I always thought the distinction between ‘The Greatest Hits’ and ‘The Best Of…’ was important. The former is about what’s popular, while the latter suggests an editor has made a judgment of quality. In practice, the two terms are often interchanged.

In any case, I was interested, looking at my visitor statistics, to see which of my posts here have received the most visits (these would be the ‘Greatest Hits’ as opposed to ‘The Best Of’).

I thought you might be interested too, particularly if you missed these the first time around.

My 10 most popular blog posts, from 2006 to 2011, are:

• Conversation dinner
• What is an autobiographical memory?
• The present tense in fiction and autobiography
• Thank you, James Frey
• The ugly duckling
• The sheep-lion
• Intrusive narrators
• Five functions of fantasy
• Lions and tigers
• 20 auto/biographies you should read

Twice in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the wild things “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.” The first time, it is done in a threatening way, and Max must tame them “with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once.” The second time, it is out of sadness that they do their roaring and gnashing – they do not want Max to go home.

There is a symmetry to the whole book. It begins and ends in Max’s bedroom. Indeed, the story takes place in his room, where “the walls became the world all around”. Banished from the rest of the house, Max is able to conjure up an entire world inside his room. Time is also stretched here, for Max gets in a boat and sails “off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are” – then, at the end, sails “back over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of his very own room”.

This apparent symmetry emphasises what has changed. When he is sent to bed without any supper, it is still daylight outside and the moon is only faint. In the final picture, the moon glows in a dark night sky, and Max’s supper is on the table. The food is still hot, which suggests not much time can have passed, but the subtle changes are important.

If we think of the journey to the place where the wild things are as Max’s fantasy, then the wild things seem to be his way of externalising his own wildness. Unlike the film, where we understand Max’s motivations and feel sorry for him, the book offers no explanation – parading around with weapons and tormenting the dog, Max in his wolf suit really is wild. When he meets the wild things, we see that he is like them. In fact, he’s “the most wild thing of all” and becomes their king. Max unites with the wild things in a “wild rumpus”.

Eventually Max becomes lonely and wants “to be where someone loved him best of all.” He smells “good things to eat” and returns home, leaving the wild things behind. Max chooses domesticity, with its nurturing love and hot suppers, over dancing with the wild things – even though they love him, too. When he goes to the place where the wild things are he is an outcast, denied his supper. But he returns accepted, his food waiting for him in his room. By externalising his wildness, Max has been able to leave it behind.

But it is a resolution that does not ring true – at least, not for me. The film ends with Max reunited with his mother, and shows us a close-up of her nurturing face in what seems to be an echo of an earlier scene with K.W., the most maternal wild thing. That the film ends with the mother’s face is significant, for in the book we see no adults at all. His mother speaks once, but she is off-stage – we only see Max alone in the house. At the end of the book, nothing has changed – his supper is there, but still we see no mother. As Phoenix writes of the film: “No matter how hard you try, your family and friends can never protect you from loneliness.” At the end of the book, just like the beginning, Max is alone.

This is a guest post by Phoenix Fry of Deptford Film Club.

I started crying just two minutes into the beginning of Where the Wild Things Are and barely stopped for the whole film. This is no film for kids, despite the story’s origins as a children’s book. Instead it takes the adult viewer back to the trauma of being a child, a place where games always end in tears.

When lonely young Max has a tantrum and bites his mother, he runs out into the night and takes a sailing boat across the sea to the land where the wild things are. This story of a child journeying to an imaginary world parallels that of The Wizard of Oz. Like Dorothy, Max becomes the leader of a gang of vulnerable monsters. And like Oz, this is a classic maturation plot where the journey is more psychological than physical.

Throughout the film the image of collapsing balls/holes repeats itself in the creation and destruction of igloos, snowballs and the monsters’ hedgy houses. The drama of being a child, of course, is that your sense of wholeness and identity is constantly under threat. The emotional demands of others threaten the integrity of your identity, yet it is that very identity that isolates us. No matter how hard you try, your family and friends can never protect you from loneliness.

No wonder children cry so much. Watching Max wrestling with these enormous traumas is almost unbearable; although there are joyous moments within the film, the recurrent emotions are fraught isolation and confused, tearful anger.

In The Wizard of Oz, the conflicting elements within Dorothy’s psyche are personified in the good and bad witches, the wizard, lion, tin man and scarecrow. In Where the Wild Things Are, the roles of good parent, bad parent, good child and bad child swirl around uncomfortably and unpredictably within each character.

If there is any resolution to the film, it is that Max can only survive into adulthood if his identity fractures into countless mutually supporting identities, just as the fragile twigs of the forest weave together to form the whole of the wild things’ homes.

Ghostwriting is where the act of writing is carried out by somebody other than the named author of a text. Put simply, ghostwriters pretend to be somebody else.

Ghostwriting is often presented as a process of revelation: the author provides information orally, and the ghostwriter writes it down. The practice is widespread, but perhaps most famous in the field of celebrity autobiography, where the person whose story we want to read perhaps lacks the capacity to convey that story effectively in writing.

This view of ghostwriting presents writing as a purely technical task. But writing can never be merely technical: it is also artistic, political, inventive. While seeking to give a voice to their subjects, ghostwriters inevitably also show us their own.

There are, in fact, many processes involved in writing an autobiographical narrative, and potentially these processes could be performed by a range of people.

Some of the processes involved in producing a collaborative autobiography

• Live the life
• Remember the life
• Interview the subject
• Tell the story orally
• Take notes
• Devise a structure
• Edit the text
• etc.

The binary distinction of ‘subject lives life / ghostwriter writes it down’ is misleading.

Authorship is inevitably a collaborative act. Even the act of remembering is a collaboration between our present and past selves, just as the act of writing is always a collaboration between the various things we have said, thought and read throughout our lives.

Traditionally, a text is thought to have a single author, who is understood to be the writer, thinker and – in the case of an autobiography – liver behind the text.

Collaborative works betray the delusion here, unveiling the multiple processes at play in all writing.

When we read autobiography, we think we are discovering the real person behind the story.

Philippe Lejeune talks of the “autobiographical pact” – the reader’s implicit belief that the author, narrator and protagonist of an autobiography are one and the same – and there is a similar belief, I think, that the “I” of an autobiography exists somewhere outside of the text. Autobiography, as we traditionally understand it, reveals that person to us.

But many studies of authorship ask us to reconsider the traditional understanding of the author as originator, external to and in control of the text he has created. Roland Barthes suggests that “writing is the destruction of every voice, or every point of origin”. He is sceptical of interpretations that consider a text to ‘reveal’ its author, because “[l]inguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I”.

Paul John Eakin applies this idea to autobiography, suggesting that “narrative is the sine qua non of identity formation”. Eakin cites clinical evidence to suggest that “when the capacity to construct narrative is impaired (…) or never acquired in the first place (…) then identity itself is damaged.” We understand ourselves, it seems, through stories.

The idea that identity is constructed through narrative complicates the conventional way of seeing an autobiography as revealing its subject. Instead, we might think of the autobiographical narrative as creating its subject, so that even when we imagine the ‘real’ person behind an autobiography, this is simply another story to tell ourselves. Indeed, Kate Douglas links this to the way autobiographies are packaged and marketed, proposing that “in autobiographies (…) the constructed author is (…) an integral part of a book’s reception.”

Looking at it this way, the author is conjured up by a text – not the other way around. I can see this, because it is only ever through texts that we understand authors. Whenever we are consuming books, or newspaper articles, or TV reports or blog posts, we are seeing not absolute truth, but truth conveyed through stories.

References

Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’

Douglas, Kate, ‘“Blurbing” Autobiographical: Authorship and Autobiography’, Biography 24.4 (2001) 806-826

Eakin, Paul John, ‘Relational Selves, Relational Lives: The Story of the Story’, in True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern, ed. by G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg (Connecticut; London: Greenwood Press, 1998)

Eakin, Paul John, ‘What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?’, Narrative 12.2 (2004) 121-132

Lejeune, Philippe, On Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), ed. by Paul John Eakin, trans. by Katherine Leary