“We are the most vocal of the primates”: Keep It Real Edited by Lee Gutkind

Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction

Ed. Lee Gutkind

New York: Norton, 2008.

This handbook to writing creative nonfiction came into existence in response to the controversy that arose with the revelation of the fictionalized events in James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces.  As Lee Gutkind writes in the introduction, “Each time a new controversy rages I cringe, for the media tend to indict the genre of the form along with the individual violators of the basic line between fiction and nonfiction” (24).   Creative Nonfiction, of which Gutkind is the founder and editor, did a special issue, “A Million Little Choices,” to lay out guidelines for the genre.  This book expands upon the original journal issue.

So that there can be no doubt about his view on the role of imagination in the genre, Gutkind defines the term in his introduction.  “Creative” in creative nonfiction denotes the use of literary craft in presenting nonfiction—”that is, factually accurate prose about real people and events…. [It] presents or treats information using the tools of the fiction writer while maintaining allegiance to fact.” (12)

The book is organized into short chapters that cover the ABCs of writing and researching creative nonfiction.  The essays include legal topics like Acknowledgment of Sources, Defamation and Libel, Facts and Legal Responsibilities of Publishers; topics on craft like Composite Characters, Compression, Metaphor and Point of View; topics on method like Quotation Marks and Tape Recording; and topics on the history of the genre like Evolution of the Genre, The Memoir Craze and The Narrative Impulse.

It is this last category that most interested me, and I thrilled at seeing a scientific discussion of the narrative impulse.

In 1996, James Atlas declared, none too joyfully, that the late twentieth century is the age of the literary memoir.  The writers of this collection respond to the denigration of the genre by writers like Atlas:

Some claim it’s a fad, a filling of the literary troughs with sentimental slop.  Yet recent research regarding the brain would suggest that narratives of self—both the telling (writing) and the hearing (reading)—stem from impulses basic to our being.

We’ve learned that the mind is malleable, that the brain’s neural pathways constantly rewire themselves to order sensory input, creating connections among disparate facts and ultimately spinning explanations about the self in the world.  In essence, the mind is “telling itself a story,” notes David Suzuki in The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature.  He argues that this knack for narrative enabled our ancestors to recognize, understand, and remember the meaning of patterns in nature, such as the migrations of animals, the sequencing of the seasons, and the duration of night and day. … [T]aken together, our memories and perceptions form an autobiographical self, a set of personal myths and stories that give our lives meaning.  …

The story-telling urge begins early in life, notes Alice Weaver Flaherty in The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain.  She observes that children “compulsively narrate their experiences and desires,” as anyone who has been subjected to a three-year-old’s running commentary can attest.  The act of autobiography forms in our frontal cortices, while the will to write likely lies in the limbic system, one of the oldest parts of the brain, governing not only basic desires for food and sex but social bonding, learning, and memories.  We are the most vocal of the primates, and sharing the intimate details of our lives has many functions: The act makes us feel connected to others, alleviates stress, and makes us healthier.  Writing about emotionally laden events increases our T-cell growth and antibody response, lowers our heart rate, helps us lose weight, improves sleep, elevates our mood, and can even reduce pain.

Given the importance of sharing stories, we should not be surprised that the age of literary memoir has flourished in an age of disconnection. (109-110)

Now, I will say that the pace gets rather too breakneck with that long list of all that writing can do for you (increase our T-cells?  Really?), but I am a sucker for brain words like “limbic” and “frontal cortex.”  Perhaps having served so much time in the humanities, I’m easily charmed by a little brain talk.  Who knew that memoir writing had such august origins and so many therapeutic uses?

I am no fan of the memoir of raw pain and humiliation, of exposure for exposure’s sake, but this description of the urge to tell and to listen struck a chord with me. 

We are wired to create and to share narrative, but our wired lives keep us more and more alone for longer parts of our days, weeks, years.   Some of my screen time is social, and I have met, in real life, several people I first met through books or blogs.  But those real life encounters are, sadly, too infrequent and too often interrupted by our little people narrating their desire for juice, that piece of lego there that she has, attention or sleep.  

The result is that I read about others’ responses to books far more than I listen to my friends and acquaintances when they talk about books, and I write about my reading more than I talk about it.  I would love to be able to chat about my book loves more often and with fewer distractions, but the fact is that I have to have those interactions in bound or digital form if I want them at all.  And I do, I do want them.  Sometimes, the thrill of reading a superbly written account of another’s bibliophilia is better than the delights of reading the book itself. 

So bring on another century of memoir, the more bookish and bibliophilic the better.