A few thoughts after sending North of Hope into the world:

Memoir is a subcategory of non-fiction, even if creative non-fiction or literary non-fiction. Memoir tells a true story.

Except: if you and I have dinner one week, and recall that dinner the following week, it’s likely we both will recall something different, about the light, the music playing or not, the family at the table across from us, the food. Memory is molded by who we are, the genes we carry, the experiences woven together in our lives. Even if we each wrote down what we remembered about our dinner the moment we arrived home, and referred to those notes a week or a month later, we’d likely craft different scenes.

In North of Hope, I tell a true story. In my first writing I told it chronologically, and all the characters could have been found with a Google search. Even in those first drafts I had to choose what details to include, which conversations. The act of inclusion, and perhaps even more the act of omission, shaped the narrative.

Those first versions did not, to me, tell the whole story I was trying to tell. Grief is not a chronological experience. Life rarely is, outside of certain landmarks of births and deaths, a marriage, a graduation. And so telling a story chronologically as a journalist might do, did not arrive at an experiential truth of grief, of my trip on an Arctic river, or of my wrestling with my relationships with my dad and stepmom and trying to find my own reality after they were gone.

And so I rewrote the narrative. I included flashbacks. I built scenes and conversations as accurately as I could using the hard material of notes and the ever-shifting mist of memory. I considered the essence of what each scene would convey. Creative nonfiction, of which memoir is a part, is generally understood to use fictional or literary techniques to arrive at a true story, a story expressing the essence of an experience. I worked on those parts of craft that could make my real story true.

In the rewriting, it did not seem important to me to include the real names of the few characters in the book who might have an objection to their roles in the story; I changed their names and circumstances to something that matched their personalities, but wouldn’t be searchable. I believe a story’s living characters are entitled to their own versions of our shared experience. I included one minor composite character to hold a relational experience of grief I did not want to attribute to living persons. It is possible these small changes might have affected the truth of the story. If my story was about exploring the complications of grief among survivors, it might not have worked. ButNorth of Hope is my journey down a river and through grief; these specifics were not important.

One writer friend who has thus far written straight non-fiction does not agree with this approach. Others embrace these tactics much more fully. Edward Abbey is known to have employed a technique of time compression, writingDesert Solitaire as a memoir of one year as a desert park ranger, when the period covered was actually two years. When I read Desert Solitaire, Abbey’s compression of time is, to me, inconsequential to his story. Pam Houston laughs at the idea of specific details needing to be journalistically accurate. In her outstanding essay “Corn Maze” (included in the also outstanding compilation Metawritings edited by Jill Talbot), Houston readily admits to manufacturing a scene and characters in a story about rafting a river. She claims 82 percent of what she writes is real. I am not so bold. But I agree with her supposition that truth is something hard to define, and that it is not constrained by actual events.

I finished shaping the narrative of North of Hope before studying some of these techniques in other memoirs. I might have taken a few more liberties with the manuscript to arrive at the final truth if I wrote it again. What is true: I lost my father and stepmother to a grizzly bear along an Arctic river, and I went back to take their trip. I sang the Mozart Requiem the year between the trips. I learned from wilderness and music how to live again.

The definition of truth in memoir and creative nonfiction is, for most of us, a gray area. I believe, at this point in my writing, that the general facts should be true, experiences relayed should have happened and that the essence of a story should be true. I do not have a problem with compression of time or character composites. Patricia Hampl says memoir is looking for the “truth of a self in the world.” I like that.

My mother taught me to read when I was three years old, but she will not read my book, or any of my writing. I do not mention her name in North of Hope, though she has had two different last names, neither of which we shared, since I was twelve years old, so you’d really have to research to figure out who she is. She is mostly absent from the narrative, because she was mostly absent from the experience. She will not read North of Hope nor likely forgive it because I have told my story, which is different from the story she tells herself about my growing up years, and because she does not play a prominent role in the story I’ve told. In her mind, I assume (though she will not say), I have committed sins of both inclusion and omission. The sin of memoir is that it reshapes other people’s stories, too.

Patricia Hampl has said she loses relationships every time she writes a book. Sometimes it is because a person sees himself in a character even when that was not her intention at all. Sometimes it is because someone wanted to be included but was not. It is the nature of truth telling that it cannot be everyone’s truth, but must still achieve universality.

So why tell it, if there are all these complications, if truth is so hard to define? Since North of Hope came out, I’ve been grateful for what I’ve heard from people: that it is so brutally honest, so raw. Why in the world would a person write from one’s soul and share it with strangers? I like to think it is because I am responding to a human need to connect at the most human level in an era of superficial connections. Still, North of Hope is not me. When people find out the few facts around my father and stepmother’s deaths, they still respond with horror. I want to share that horror can resolve itself in beauty. That we do not have a choice about living in story, but that we do have a choice about the story in which we live and love. That story, even true story, even tragic story, has strands of beauty which have the power to heal.