appeared, in 1967, it became the literary equivalent of breaking news. The original dust jacket bore just two blurbs—one from William Styron and one from Norman Mailer, two of the most respected American novelists of the day.
Stop-Time
is an account of growing up rich and poor. (Conroy’s mother was divorced from her well-off husband and took up with a drifter.) It was far from the first memoir about childhood, but it had a freshness and immediacy that made it seem like something new. The book served as a rebuke to the conventional sentiment that a writer ought to have achieved something in the world before presuming to write a memoir. To people who felt that way, young Conroy (and his young followers) said implicitly,
You are holding my achievement in your hands
.
An intensity of detail distinguishes
Stop-Time
, as one can see in any number of passages. Here is a scene set in a hardscrabble shack in a failed real estate development in inland Florida:
At just that moment the screen door opened and Mrs. Rawlings threw out a basin of water. It flashed through the air and struck the ground where the light spilled from the window. A thousand gleaming flies lifted from the greasysand the instant the water hit, and fell backward the instant afterward, like a green blanket.
You don’t have to read more than those few sentences to realize that you are in the company of a good writer, and when you read a succession of such sentences your appreciation is confirmed. You also may find yourself thinking about the nature of memory. When he wrote the book, Conroy was thirty, recalling events two decades past with a precision that we know the mind provides only on rare occasions. That blanket of green flies has the insistence of a memory, but did Mrs. Rawlings throw the water on that day or another, did the water land in the spot where the light spilled from the window, were the flies out that evening or on some afternoon? Does a reader care? The particulars are inconsequential, and yet it is the particulars that help to persuade us of the reality of the experience. More simply, they provide much of the pleasure of the book.
Many moments in
Stop-Time
must have been remembered in just this way, at once remembered and reimagined. These are memories that happen as they are being written. They are not fraudulent. They are completely unlike the made-up events of hoax memoir, but they are not reliably factual either.
Memoirists operate on a continuum between recollection and dramatization. Once one decides to re-create scenes, a line has been crossed and some invention necessarily follows. “Imaginative memoir” might be a good name for Conroy’s book and the subgenre it represents. Even if most memoirs are not as fully imaginative as his, none that strive to dramatize moments in the past can be wholly faithful to knowable fact.
Clearly, the rules for reporting and remembering have to be different. For remembering, they simply have to be looser. How much looser depends on the writer and the writer’s material. Some writers in some situations are strict constructionists. For example, Geoffrey Wolff in
The Duke of Deception
, an admirable, scrupulous, and extremely entertaining book. The book’s two central characters are the author and his father, a confidence man, or, as Wolff calls him in the first chapter, “a bullshit artist.” It must have been obvious to Wolff that some readers were going to wonder:
Like father, like son?
Factual accuracy is usually an implicit issue in nonfiction, but Wolff makes it explicit.
The Duke of Deception
is a reported memoir. Wolff interviewed other people, including his mother, and he makes those interviews part of his story, complicating and sometimes contradicting his own memory. He lets the reader see how he knows what he says he knows. He is also unusually restrained in his use of dialogue.
Many memoirists quote pages of talk that was uttered decades back, dialogue they can’t possibly have
Stop-Time
is an account of growing up rich and poor. (Conroy’s mother was divorced from her well-off husband and took up with a drifter.) It was far from the first memoir about childhood, but it had a freshness and immediacy that made it seem like something new. The book served as a rebuke to the conventional sentiment that a writer ought to have achieved something in the world before presuming to write a memoir. To people who felt that way, young Conroy (and his young followers) said implicitly,
You are holding my achievement in your hands
.
An intensity of detail distinguishes
Stop-Time
, as one can see in any number of passages. Here is a scene set in a hardscrabble shack in a failed real estate development in inland Florida:
At just that moment the screen door opened and Mrs. Rawlings threw out a basin of water. It flashed through the air and struck the ground where the light spilled from the window. A thousand gleaming flies lifted from the greasysand the instant the water hit, and fell backward the instant afterward, like a green blanket.
You don’t have to read more than those few sentences to realize that you are in the company of a good writer, and when you read a succession of such sentences your appreciation is confirmed. You also may find yourself thinking about the nature of memory. When he wrote the book, Conroy was thirty, recalling events two decades past with a precision that we know the mind provides only on rare occasions. That blanket of green flies has the insistence of a memory, but did Mrs. Rawlings throw the water on that day or another, did the water land in the spot where the light spilled from the window, were the flies out that evening or on some afternoon? Does a reader care? The particulars are inconsequential, and yet it is the particulars that help to persuade us of the reality of the experience. More simply, they provide much of the pleasure of the book.
Many moments in
Stop-Time
must have been remembered in just this way, at once remembered and reimagined. These are memories that happen as they are being written. They are not fraudulent. They are completely unlike the made-up events of hoax memoir, but they are not reliably factual either.
Memoirists operate on a continuum between recollection and dramatization. Once one decides to re-create scenes, a line has been crossed and some invention necessarily follows. “Imaginative memoir” might be a good name for Conroy’s book and the subgenre it represents. Even if most memoirs are not as fully imaginative as his, none that strive to dramatize moments in the past can be wholly faithful to knowable fact.
Clearly, the rules for reporting and remembering have to be different. For remembering, they simply have to be looser. How much looser depends on the writer and the writer’s material. Some writers in some situations are strict constructionists. For example, Geoffrey Wolff in
The Duke of Deception
, an admirable, scrupulous, and extremely entertaining book. The book’s two central characters are the author and his father, a confidence man, or, as Wolff calls him in the first chapter, “a bullshit artist.” It must have been obvious to Wolff that some readers were going to wonder:
Like father, like son?
Factual accuracy is usually an implicit issue in nonfiction, but Wolff makes it explicit.
The Duke of Deception
is a reported memoir. Wolff interviewed other people, including his mother, and he makes those interviews part of his story, complicating and sometimes contradicting his own memory. He lets the reader see how he knows what he says he knows. He is also unusually restrained in his use of dialogue.
Many memoirists quote pages of talk that was uttered decades back, dialogue they can’t possibly have
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