Dear Betsy:
At work yesterday, I flipped quickly through an advance reading copy of somebody’s upcoming memoir and noticed what looked like many pages of dialogue. It’s my guess that most of us don’t really remember conversations well enough to quote them at length (Boswell’s recollections of Dr. Johnson notwithstanding), so whenever I see extensive dialogue in a memoir I have to wonder whether it has been reconstructed and if so whether this is, on the whole, good or bad.
I suppose the answer is the old familiar “It depends.” Personally, I’m suspicious. And I have a personal reason for wondering: I’m writing the first draft of a memoir, with reference to journals, phone logs, and other documents, and in most situations I’m finding little more than a sentence or two I can conscionably quote. Am I too stuck on mere facts?
Sincerely, Name withheld
Dearest,
Why stop at the dialogue? Aren’t most memoirs from memory, and much of what we remember compromised at best? Who is to say whether the wall was burnished gold or piss yellow? Who is to say if he held me tight or let me go? If his eyes were blue grey or slate blue. Yes, I know how I felt, but how am I presenting those feelings to you? So you like me, have sympathy, so you’ll laugh, cry, so you’ll turn the frickin’ page? Where does feeling/memory stop and calcuation begin? I would say at conception.
You know what else? I don’t even care if dialogue is fabricated or embroidered; just please write good dialogue. Dialogue is such a beautiful thing as a tool to enhance, enliven, etc. your prose. But it’s not a toy. You have to know how to use it.
“Kyle, can I ask you something?”
“Yeah.”
“How many pills does it take to overdose?”
“I dunno, ” he said. “I didn’t exactly succeed.”
“Ballpark.”
Okay. There’s a snippet of dialogue from my ferschluggenah me-moir. Thoughts? Feelings? I kept extensive notebooks when I was hospitalized and believe the dialogue to be accurate — or as accurate as my notebooks were. Tonight, I don’t really care about truth. I want writing that commands all my attention. I think memoirs are true novels. In non-fiction, journalism, etc. I care a great deal about the truth and believe the less you embellish, the greater the truth you will find.
Now, that is enough of me. Except to say that when my mother read my memoir the first thing she said was that it was a pack of lies. I told her she was welcome to write her own pack of lies anytime she liked.
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Dear Ms. Lerner:
My office is starting to look like a maternity ward at the full moon; it feels like all my clients are delivering their pages at the same moment whether it’s a final manuscript, a draft, a chapter, a treatment, a partial. If I know one thing about writers it’s that they hate waiting to hear what people think. The minute they hit send, the bomb starts to tick. Lots of writers go right to the dark place, imagine the worst. Though some are confident, and when they hand you the pages they will tell you so. It makes me think of a small child proudly handing you a page from a coloring book, the crayon insanely outside the lines. Some go into free fall and pick at their own flesh. Some start shooting off revisions: Wait! Read this draft! or If you haven’t read yet! It’s the worst, like waiting for a guy to call after you’ve fucked him.
Today, a 
Do you ever regret anything you’ve written, wish you hadn’t published it, or even just shared it with another person? Now that my daughter is a teen, I sometimes gulp hard to think of what she will think of me if she reads my memoir. I was quite cavalier when I wrote it. My motto: secrets did the most damage. It was the stuff under the carpet that kills. Now, the carpet’s looking mighty fine.
I’ve been trying to write about something that happened two weeks ago. I was in therapy and I did something I’ve never done before: I told my shrink what my screenplay was “about.” Actually, I told her the plot, more specifically about the two main characters and how I couldn’t write what I had planned about them. Just as I said it, I knew for the first time what the story was really about, who these characters were. I had led myself right back into the central drama of our family (once again) even as I believed I was writing about entirely different creatures.
Exhausted. Fell asleep on the train. All my manuscripts slipped off my lap and on to the floor. The woman next to me didn’t flinch or shift her legs as I frantically gathered my pages (today’s haul: four new chapters by a client, 50 pages of a project my business partner wants a second opinion on, four prospective proposals, and two contracts). The bitch who won’t move is immersed in a library copy of Debbie Macomber’s novel, A Good Yarn. (The head line on Debbie’s website is, “Wherever you are, Debbie takes you home.”) Debbie, can you take me home?
