Free Good Prose by Tracy Kidder

remembered exactly. Memoirists do this so often as to leave a reader with only two options: to stop reading most memoirs, or to accept remembered dialogue as artistically licensed in this genre, as a convention of the form, like a papier-mâché sky at the back of a stage or the propensity of characters in an opera to break into song.
    In her classic growing-up memoir,
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
, Mary McCarthy talks about this very problem and sets out an unusually clear and thorough set of rules for writing engagingly in the present while being faithful to the past. “Quotation marks,” she tells us, “indicate that a conversation to this general effect took place, but I do not vouch for the exact wordsor the exact order of the speeches.” She reflects on the memoirist’s dilemma, particularly if the memoirist happens also to be a novelist. “Many a time, in the course of doing these memoirs, I have wished that I were writing fiction. The temptation to invent has been very strong, particularly where recollection is hazy and I remember the substance of an event but not the details—the color of a dress, the pattern of a carpet, the placing of a picture.” But she resisted.
    A candid admission of the frailty of memory can certainly be overdone, but it can establish a bona fide with the reader, and perhaps achieve something more than that, by naming, at least, what cannot be re-created. Mary Karr, in her memoir
Lit
, describes a domestic quarrel in some detail, but then remarks that its aftermath, a reconciliation, is irretrievable: “If we talked about the night before, I don’t recall it, which isn’t fair to either of us, for it doesn’t show our reasoned selves paring away at our scared ones.… The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.”
    For some writers there comes a moment when the “truth” of experience seems not just out of reach but somehow at odds with the facts, or when the facts seem simply insufficient. Maybe that is the time to forsake memoir and write a novel. Something like this seems to have happened to one prominent memoirist, Tim O’Brien, but with the unusual result that the facts refused to be ignored.
    Perhaps no contemporary has better demonstrated the tension between memory and memoir than O’Brien, most of whose writing life has been informed by the harrowing year he spent asan infantryman in Vietnam. Soon after the experience, in 1975, he published his memoir of the war,
If I Die in a Combat Zone
. Critics honored the book for its immediacy and its honesty. None expressed any doubt as to its authenticity, but it seems to have left O’Brien himself unsatisfied.
    Years later he published
The Things They Carried
, which drew on the same experience but which he described as a “work of fiction.” If you were an appreciative reader of the first book, then
The Things They Carried
, though equally if not more powerful, was oddly disconcerting. The book seemed to insist that
it
, not the memoir, was the true story of O’Brien’s war. “I want you to feel what I felt,” O’Brien writes. “I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” This can be understood in a perfectly straightforward way: only by heightening reality could O’Brien communicate the true dimensions of his own emotions. But things get more convoluted than that. This is a “work of fiction” that insists on its own veracity. To start, O’Brien refers to himself by his own name, and as the book’s dedication reveals, he also uses the real names of the men he served with. (Their names had been changed in his memoir.) And after more than one scene, he disowns what he has just written, stepping back to say: No, that wasn’t the way it was. Here’s the way it really was.
    Take for instance the chapter “Speaking of Courage,” which tells the story of a soldier named Norman Bowker. We see Bowker