She's crafty: Hampl's imagination and importance in memoir

As an only child growing up in the middle of nowhere, I needed imagination to get through the stifling boredom of the farm life. I would make up playmates, landscapes and situations to keep myself company and leave the world I knew. Hampl says that our imagination is a vast, powerful thing; memory is not just a "warehouse of finished stories, not a gallery of framed pictures (24). Memory and imagination come together then, and because these elements of persona come together and allow for all sorts of possibilities, we can get lost in the expanse of our own creations.

"By writing about that first piano lesson I've come to know things I could not know otherwise," writes Hampl in her discussion of memory and imagination. When she says that we must all guard our own truths about what has happened to us (class notes), I believe that she's saying if we cannot figure out a way to tell our stories and comprehend the past so that it makes sense for us, no one will be able to. We tell ourselves stories to live (to borrow a line from Joan Didion), and if we have to tell ourselves some little white lies to get through things, that's what we do. Perhaps we begin to believe the truths we've been telling ourselves for so long that eventually we know no other way to tell the story. Then what? Has it become the truth, or is it still a fabrication? Is our cognizance of the untruth a factor in whether or not it's a lie?
"I realized I had told a number of lies," says Hampl on page 25 or our excerpt; when we realize that we're telling a fabricated story that must mean that we know the real story exists out there somewhere, so shouldn't we go after that? If she realized after her initial drafts that she'd been making things up, doesn't she have the responsibility to tell the reader the truth?

I argue that yes, she does, and so does any writer. But like Karr, who pointed out that her memory had fault lines and fissures, Hampl admits to having problems with her memory and the recreation of her childhood stories. In doing so she's being honest with us about the truth of her book, which is a collected organization of memories.

The word memoir comes from memoria, or memory in Latin. Memory means the "mental faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, etc., according to dictionary.com. So if memory is the act of "reviving" facts, then no, memoir doesn't have to imply a complete factual story. Definitions aside, I guess I feel like memoir needs to be "real life," since it's someone's life we're dealing with in the story. When I think about my contract with readers I guess I assume they're going to believe what I say is real to have been/be real, so I should just tell the truth. Again it goes back to my question of "why not just call it fiction if it's fiction?"

Both Karr and Hampl lead by example-- when they write a scene to say that time compressed and shifted or that they remembered something in a certain way, they're pointing out their memory problem, and for me, that example is better than any kind of "this is how you should do it" advice.

To safeguard my relationship with readers my intro will discuss the fact that I am writing about a time in my life when I was drugged up and recovering from brain surgery, and therefore my memory was compromised, to say the least. I note that the name changes of hospital staff were made to protect them in their careers; I will note that the time sequence I detail was the time sequence as I lived it, but perhaps it didn't occur that way to those not under the influence of morphine and other drugs. I think that's enough to let people know that yes, this is an accurate portrayal of what happened to me, but I'm not even sure if this is how it happened.