Helena de Bres, "Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir" (U Chicago Press, 2021)

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We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the new books network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that to love the forum and we can talk. Welcome to the new books network. Hello and welcome to new books and philosophy, a podcast channel with the new books network. I'm Carrie Fickdor, professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Tolis, Sarah Tyson and Malcolm Keating. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books and a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Helena DeBress, associate professor of philosophy at Willsley College. We're talking about her new book, which is Artful Truths, The Philosophy of Memoir, which is just out from University of Chicago Press. What is memoir? What makes a memoir both non-fictional and literary? What are the memoirists moral obligations to the people they write about besides themselves? And to their potential readers? And is the writing of memoir just indulging in narcissism or even revenge? In her new book, DeBress examines the philosophical issues that the memoir genre raises, given the doubts we may have about whether people can write the truth about themselves, whether the demands of literature will overwhelm the demands of truth-telling, and even whether there is such a thing as a unified persisting self to write about. DeBress defends the non-fiction status of memoir while acknowledging that memories fail, we often engage in self-justification, and it can be difficult to draw a line between the experiential truth that the memoirist tries to capture and falsity. She definitely navigates issues in metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and effects in this highly readable examination of an evolving literary form. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Helena DeBress. How are you? Welcome to New Books and Philosophy. Thank you very much. It's wonderful to be here. So I'm very excited to talk about your new book, Artful Truths, The Philosophy of Memoir. So before we get to the actual content of the book, maybe you could tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to philosophy and how you came to write this book. Yeah, thank you. How did I come to philosophy? Well, I've always loved writing, so I've sort of seen myself primarily as a writer since I was a kid, you know, writing novel when I was a leaven, a terrible novel, but, you know, as long as one, that's something, and in high school and college, I was mainly interested in literature to begin with, that I was taking philosophy classes in college too, and at a certain point, my interest shifted over to that academically. I'm not really sure why. I think part of it is I always had an inclination towards order and structure, so I like the way that philosophy helps you to understand the world in a systematic way, break down big problems into little ones, and also just the sensation you get when a philosophical argument breaks through your preconceptions, you know, causes a fundamental shift in how you see the world. So sort of like what Emily Dickinson said about reading poetry, you know, having the top of your head blown off, I think both philosophy and literature do that. So it went to grad school and philosophy and worked on political philosophy for 10 years. Then I found myself missing literature, wanting to get back to creative writing. So post-tenor, and you have a bit more time. I began writing short stories and personal essays, and I also started writing philosophically about literature, more memoir in particular, as in this new book. So that's how I got to what I'm doing right now, I guess. Aha, interesting. So I think you say in the book that, you know, you have been writing a memoir, right? Your own memoir? Yeah, yeah, I did that first. I sort of did a bit of a hiatus on philosophy and did almost exclusively creative writing for a while. And then I missed philosophy, so I wanted to work out a way to bring the two together. So the memoir I was actually about philosophy, and this is a philosophy book about memoir. They kind of twins, I guess, book twins. Yeah, well, I mean, it's a really interesting way to introduce readers to a lot of different, you know, very basic issues in, you know, metaphysics and epistemology and ethics, which, you know, it's kind of a very, and it's very accessible in that way. I mean, you talk about a different, you know, various metaphysical issues with truth and knowledge in a way that somebody who doesn't have a philosophy background would be, you know, very able to grasp sort of the issues. So let's start with the initial question, you know, what is memoir? I mean, what makes a particular writing a memoir, as opposed to say autobiography or some sort of personal essay or something like that? Yeah. There are different ways of defining memoir, so mine is maybe a little bit idiosyncratic, but not very, I don't think. You know, at a very general level, most of us would see a memoir as a non-fiction prose narrative that's written in the first person, and it's about the author's own past experience. That's roughly right, I think, it's not quite right. I don't think that, for instance, a memoir has to be written in prose. You could write it in poetry, like Wordsworth did. It doesn't have to be in the first person. There have been some interesting memoirs that are not in the first person. So the life of Henry Adams, which is written by Henry Adams, is written in the third person, and people are also often write personal essays in the second person. So you could have sort of little corrections of that general definition. That's about right, so it's the sort of non-fiction narrative of the author's own past. But there have been some interesting changes, revolutions in that type of writing over the years. It used to be the case that if you wrote a memoir, you would write a linear account, starting at your birth, and give a traditional story of how you, how you said, came of age, various ways in which your life experiences formed your personality, be focused largely on external events, sort of publicly accessible events. And it was usually written by someone who'd established some other reputation first. So the memoir wasn't what made you famous with the author, but if it wasn't what made you famous, it was your account of what had. So politicians write traditional autobiographies like that, you know, artists sometimes do generals. So there's that kind of traditional form, but more recently, people have not been inclined to do it that way. Those things still sell very well, but in the realm of literary memoir, we've moved towards what I call modern memoir, which is different in several ways. It's not usually a full-life narrative. I mean, no one can write a full-life narrative, you can't narrate your own death, but the modern memoir tries to do something quite a lot more partial than that, and will focus on a particular time period or a scene in the author's life. So narrowing on that, it's not likely to be a linear narrative, I can all jump around in time, the structurally experimental in that way, and there's much more emphasis on the interiority of the author, so reflection on what the experience means rather than just narrating the experience, and more of the literary set of devices, you know, scenes and dialogue extended at length. So I mean, that does raise an interesting question. I mean, you're right, most of the time you think of memoirs, somebody who is already famous and that's why people would be interested in reading about it because of the prior fame of the writer. So what accounts for this, you know, that anybody just about as, you know, can or is writing their own memoir? I mean, what's that? What explains that sort of change of interest or, you know, any person whatsoever, not at all famous, very ordinary life? Yeah, sometimes we would call them "nobody memoirs", so it's one of the any one can write one bit of "nobody can", you know, who are you to do this thing? So yeah, what explains that, I'm not sure it explains it, and I think from a literary point of view, often what we're really interested in when reading a memoir, we're even the personal point of view, is what the experience really felt like to the person living and what it meant. We're not necessarily mainly going to the style of writing for some really impressive kind of catalog of actions that were consequential in the world at large. Often you want to, you know, connect with this intimate conversation or voice of the fellow human, and we can all do that. We do that every day with our friends and family if we're lucky, and so it's that kind of experience that many memoir readers want to be able to access. See another human talking, frankly and candidly, and articulately about what matters to them. And sometimes a focus on narrating, you know, major, officially impressive acts, doesn't let you do that. So the junior wolf said in her little piece and essay on memoir writing, that the problem with the traditional autobiography is that it leaves out the person to whom these things happened. The person itself is not really able to be seen because there's too much standing relation going on. Well, yeah, it just occurred to me there's sort of this also a general sort of move away in literature, literary criticism away from, you know, the great men to, you know, anybody's voice is worthwhile listening to. Yeah, absolutely. I think many people when they're thinking about maybe writing a memoir, I have this crisis of confidence that why would anyone want to read about my life, I've done nothing? Yeah, I think often that thought, which is understandable, is based on this idea that, you know, certain people are important, you know, and interesting to listen to and others aren't. And that's a bad history of that, you know, where it's men who are impressive and privileged powerful, usually white, you know, who are the interesting ones, and that people who don't fall into those categories are not. And I think there's been a general sort of social pushback against that. So yeah, we want to read about people who haven't necessarily got the power already, what their lives are like, sort of shift that value focus. Okay, well, good. So one of the main, one of the first challenges you talk about with this is what you call the fictionalist challenge, and there's, there's a number of different versions. But the basic question is whether we should understand memoir as, you know, within the broad category of nonfiction, rather than fiction, right? It's kind of a basic line, however fuzzy, between two types of writing. And within that, there are three different challenges. One is metaphysical, you know, we don't have a self to write about. So how can you possibly give a memoir of something that does not exist? There is the sort of more epistemological thing that, you know, we're subjects. We're always subjective, and therefore we can't provide an objective account of who we are. So, you know, it's so it's bound to be fictional because of this subjective perspective on ourselves that we can't avoid. And then the third one is one of the aesthetic one where you, you know, that memoirs are narratives, right? They're constructed. There's, there are elements that are put in and there are many elements that are not merely forgotten, but actually explicitly omitted. And that those sorts of selective procedures on the way that various episodes may be presented are meeting demands of narration rather than truth. So can you, you know, tell us a bit about each of these three sort of types of fictionalist challenge to the memoir as a, as a work of nonfiction? Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Yeah, I sort of see this as one of the big criticisms that comes up of the genre as a whole, you know, it seems like it's built into the ambitions of memoirs to give a non-fictional account. And these are various reasons for thinking that's not really possible, in which case the, you know, the whole genre of memoir is aiming at this goal that's unreachable, that seems like a problem. So I wanted to, you know, give people some resources for responding to those worries, writers and readers of memoir who want to say that's not as pressing a problem as you might think. So, yeah, as you said, one reason is a metaphysical one. And the way that you put it was that, you know, we don't have a self to write about. I don't think it's quite that strong, so people might say, yes, we do have a self of sorts, but it's not the kind of self that we would need to have for memoir to make sense, right? So, you know, in a memoir, even a short one, you know, a personal essay as a kind of memoir, but especially in a longer one, your, the assumption is that this eye character, the narrator, protagonist, is the same one at the beginning of the book as they are at the end, right? There's a kind of stable and unified self that persists through the book. And that self matches up with the author, right, the real person who's writing the book. So there are reasons given by philosophers for thinking that we don't have a unified and stable self. So one reason to thinking that is, broadly speaking, David Hume's reason, which he gave him on time ago. They're thinking that, you know, we, we're really just a kind of bundle of perceptions and experiences and thoughts that they pass through us like, well, we're just not really us. There's a kind of theater he sees where these, these perceptions occur, but there's no real unified self beyond individual moments or events. And then, of course, you also see something similar in the postmodernist critiques of the self that came through in the 20th century, and also in the Buddhist tradition, says there's not really a self in the way that we would need better be in order for this picture of the self and then might depends on to work. So what I do in the book is, is it explain why you might be tempted by that idea and then talk about what a memoirist can say in response. One thing you can do is just push back on that critique and say, no, there is, we can give an account of a stable self, at least one that's stable enough to count, and then might to work. But you can also say, even if there isn't a unified and stable self, the memoir doesn't have to assume that there is. You can write a memoir that acknowledges that self's a messier, more fragmentary and transitory than that, and many of the more experimental memoirs of the 20th century and beyond have taken that kind of line, tried to use the book to, in a way, expose the messiness of the self. So if you're writing that kind of memoir, you're not going to face this challenge as much as a traditional autobiography would. So that says a broad metaphysical worry about the very basis of memoir. The epistemic worry is more, you know, the idea is, okay, well, maybe there is a self there to talk about, but how do we ever get the, get it the truth about it? How can we expect to really know the truth about what happened to us, what we did, and what we were like in the past? There are a variety of different reasons for thinking that's a struggle. One is the one that you mentioned, it's worried that, you know, we can never really be objective about the past. We're necessarily subjective beings, we see everything, you know, with our need glasses on, so we're filtering our experience through our own values and priorities and assumptions. So whatever we end up writing about is going to be corrupted or infected by that bias. There's a, you know, history of thinking that memoirists are likely to do that to sort of distort the truth when writing about it in a, what you might call a motivated way, so to engage in self-deception about the past, you know, we're not all lucky enough to have had wonderful pasts, so we have reasons to sort of deceive ourselves about what we did, what others did to us, so it could be that we're engaging in self-deception, but there's also these non-motivated forms of distortion, you know, it's like it's easy to just be cognitively biased, because you're not very good at making the right kinds of inferences, or you don't have enough information, you know, your memory is failing, a lot of people write memoirs later in life when the, you know, the grey cells are starting to deteriorate and it'll bad. So there really is sort of, in a way, less kind of suspicious, or I don't know what you might call sort of, like, morally problematic forms of distortion, then self-deception. Right, and then there was the narrative, the aesthetic demands. Yeah, so the usual way to write a memoir is to form it into a narrative. There are some non-narrative memoirs that are a bit more experimental, but most of us will try and form our story, you know, our life into some sort of story, and narrative has these features built into it, at least the traditional kind of narrative, that look like they're going to throw the truth off, or throw us off the truth. So narratives need to be selective, you can't put absolutely everything into the book, you know, if you're very hard to read, very boring, you're impossible to get published. You put every single thing that happened to you into it. So you have to be selective, and then there's this worry that that kind of aesthetic requirement is going to cause you to misrepresent what happened. You know, maybe you leave out, you know, your first three husbands, you don't have space, you're spitting about. You know, be kind of good to know about those out of three. So there's a selectivity built into narrative that can be distorting. There's also a requirement of unity, so, you know, you want to, once you've picked out which bits you're going to focus on, you want to form them into this coherent shape that holds together in some way. And you know, again, there's this worry that life itself is not very coherent and unified. It's often kind of a hot mess. And so you try to force it into this comprehensive or shape is necessarily going to get you further from the truth. And then, yeah, so those two things, I think the main reasons why narrative has this suspicion hanging over it, yeah. So how do you, I mean, you still, you do defend the idea that it is nonfiction, right, despite these things. Yeah, so what I do is sort of go through each of those types of challenges and show how, in some cases, I think the claims are just overblown to begin with that we, as I said in the case of the self, it may be that the self isn't that more unified than the critique assumed. In the case of the epistemic reasons, I looked at the research on that. Obviously, there are some reasons that, you know, doubting that we can have perfect access to the truth, but the evidence in psychology suggests that we actually do have a pretty good grip on the broad shape of what happens to us, even if some of the details are off. There's not really a reason for deep skepticism about our ability to know what happened there. And when it comes to the aesthetic reasons, yeah, I think that the, again, particular narratives might be overly distorting, but narrative is such, I don't think, is distorting. You know, there's the sense that the fact that something is constructed, right, you construct an area of somehow, shows that it's false. And I think that's a faulty inference. The mere fact that you've kind of made a representation, your all representations are made, it doesn't show that there's no correlation between that and one, and one actually happened. So I try to take kind of measured response, I recognize the challenge, but I don't think that it is this deep fundamental problem in any of those cases, the way that it's sometimes presented. Right. Right. Yeah, I was, when I was reading that part, I was thinking about photography, right, I mean, one of the arguments against photography as an art was precisely because it was just a copy. You know, it was basically just, you know, taking a picture and there was nothing artistic about it, nothing aesthetically interesting about photography. And of course, that, you know, is just, you know, sort of the opposite problem, it was too much truth. Yeah. And that's obviously been overcome. So there's no reason why that particular, you know, aesthetic issue would be a problem coming from the other direction. Right. Yeah. That's a really interesting point. Yeah. I think there is this assumption that there's this deep conflict between art and truth. You know, the book is called Artful Truths. I don't think there is that deep conflict, there's a, you know, closer relationship than you might think. Right. Let me just ask another question. So those pressures, you know, that you all talk about the, you know, the difficulty of constructing a memoir, you know, that would, you know, really be a memoir and not some sort of fictional account. But I was also thinking there's also kind of an external pressure of, you know, marketability or the publishers, you know, and so it's not just that people might, you know, leave out bits over dramatized other bits, you know, the ones that make them look good only of that, but that in fact, publishers are going to impose certain demands for drama and the, and people who are not already say well-known, you know, like Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton or any of these people might be more subject to that sort of pressure and might be more vulnerable to, to dramatizing their lives in ways that depart from the non-fictional aim more than it would for people who are already famous. Is that a, is that a worry as well? Yeah. No, I think it definitely is. I think there's always going to be that temptation. No, particularly if you want your book to be like a mega bestseller, right? It's going to, so you're going with maybe one, they call the big five publishers, you may get that kind of pressure, but you know, memoir is also a, it's an art form. It's a form of literature and a lot of the people who will write modern literary memoirs are not aiming to have an absolute blockbuster. You know, they want to work with editors at more literary presses, maybe small ones or some of the bigger ones. And their priority is to, you know, to write something that is, is a genuine and, you know, well-crafted account of their life and will be resistant to that kind of editing. So I guess, I think it's a challenge, but I don't think that, you know, the good meme was that we see out there are utterly affected by that. I think that the deeper worries sort of why not really about sort of publishing executives pushing you towards a certain kind of narrative arc, but more, you know, cultural sort of culture doing that, right? There's some, there's a lot of evidence in psychology that we all tend to go towards certain kinds of narrative conventions, so there's a, you know, sort of a classical story arc that we've drawn to with us, the setup and rising action is a crisis and a resolution and there are particular story forms that we find in fairy tales or parables or myths that we use to kind of framer and experience. I think it might be more those sort of subconscious promptings rather than the promptings of a publishing executive that are more at distorting there. So, I mean, what does it matter, even, right? You know, there have been big uproars over certain, you know, famous memoirs. I think Rigo Bertha meant too, and then James Frey, you know, and the idea that, you know, they contain lies or, you know, stuff that just made up. And so the very fact that these memoirs or alleged memoirs, I mean, it's hard to, you know, it's hard to know what to call them, but in any case, you know, the fact, the very fact that there is this big uproar about them shows that, you know, first of all, we do distinguish memoir from fiction, you know, however difficult it might be. And it also disturbs us when a memoir, you know, departs from the non-fictional, you know, you know, criteria or conditions, whatever it is that makes it non-fiction. And so we care deeply in some way about it not being fiction. So what's, why do we care? Yeah. You know, you write people very passionate about this kind of thing. I think there are sort of two broad sets of reasons. Maybe the most obvious ones are the moral reasons. So when people engage in this really large-scale fictionalising, or you might just call it lying, well, you know, readers often feel that they've had, there's a certain, their expectations have been by, they've been lied to directly. They may not know the, you know, the author, but they have extended their trust to the reader, there's an assumption within the genre that you're telling the truth. And they've had that trust by later, there's a sense of kind of betrayal there. So this is a sort of personal sense of betrayal. There's also, you know, worries about the actual impacts of the truths that are being told. So James Fraser, a million, a million little pieces, was a substance, substance abuse addiction memoir. It was narrating his recovery, and there's, you know, many people have been through very difficult experiences as a result of substance abuse. And so having someone lie about it in a work is not helpful to that community of people and can be, you know, harmful to their relatives and friends' perceptions of how they will recover the sense of sort of people who take, you know, drugs or liars. You know, there's just kind of, there's just these worries about the impact of the particular lies, too. So there are moral reasons for worrying about it. I also think there are aesthetic reasons. So we do, those of us who love memoirs, want this genre to persist. We want there to be a space in the literary universe for non-fiction accounts. And if this border becomes too fuzzy, it's not possible for the genre to really, it's sort of a threat, an existential threat to the genre. So if you think it's valuable and you care about it for various reasons, you know, we could go into, you'll be worried about the way that it can't really be preserved if people are continually, because you're continuously expecting that people are not really complying with their convention. Yeah. I mean, it is an interesting sort of tension there between, on the one hand, this commitment or this idea that, you know, oh, it's just a, you know, a subjective narrative of some sort. And at the same time, you lied to me. Wait. I mean, that seems like memoirs in this very unstable equilibrium between, you should tell us the truth and you can't tell us the truth. Yeah. I mean, you know, in the case of James, for a he lied, he said, I think he was imprisoned but maybe overnight. He claimed that he was there for three months, you know, so there are certain kinds of, sort of, hoax memoirs where someone pretends it writes a memoir on behalf of someone else without asking them. Or the fake holocaust memoirs, you know, those kinds of lies are not because, you know, the person is necessarily experiencing life in a subjective fashion, they can't really get at the truth of their experience, but they are, you know, straight up misrepresenting. So those are the big three of, so I think readers are going to be tolerant of, you know, the failures to capture the historical truth because that's in the nature of, of humans. Right. Yeah. What is the, what is the harm to the community? I understand the harm that one feels when one is lied to, right? That's sort of a trail. But, you know, clearly it's, it's, you know, it goes beyond that when you, you have sort of a fake holocaust memoir and, you know, actual holocaust survivors feel that they have been, you know, harmed in some way, no matter how, you know, accurate the depiction might be. Well, what is, what is, or, or, you know, people who have genuinely, you know, gone through long periods of jail for, you know, various, you know, drug-related problems? Yeah. I mean, in the case of holocaust and I, you know, I mean, the holocaust memoirs the fake, there is this, you know, really problematic phenomenon of holocaust denial, right? So, people are always trying to say that thing didn't happen. So, if you then have a fake account of it coming out, you're kind of fanning the flames of that really repellent phenomenon. So, that's a clear case. I also think, you know, sometimes people say, is this worry that you're, you're edging out memoirs by, by actual holocaust survivors? You know, there is a limited market, literary market out there. And not very many holocaust survivors lived if you're doing a fake one, you know, and you take control of the publishing cycle on that for a year or two. You know, it's, that is a, I think, almost the, the clearest case of a moral realm. Right. Right. I mean, it's as if, you know, maybe it's something like, you know, how dare you talk about our experience as if you've actually lived it when you happen? Yeah. Yeah. I think some of appropriation, I think, is some ways to worries about cultural appropriation more generally. It's always disrespectful. Right. So, how about the, the other people in, in more, in a memoir? I mean, we, you know, obviously they're not just narratives about the person who is writing them a memoir, but, you know, other people, you know, they're family members, their mother, you know, those ex, the three ex-husbands, you know, whatever. Um, they all get dragged in, or at least there's always this danger that they will be and, um, and there is this kind of issue of how do you, uh, you know, what, what sort of, um, obligations do memoirists have to other people? Yeah. So, this is a really big question. I think it's one that, um, every memoirist just struggles with, um, so one of the reasons I wanted to write the book was just sort of help people, um, who are writing a memoir, just sort of think about this in a stately more, you know, give them some advice for how to think about it in a, a clearer or systematic way. Um, what I did in the book was distinguish between, uh, five different types of rhyme that you might do, um, in the course of writing a memoir, um, and, and give some, you know, some, guidance for how you might, um, avoid those. I think it's hard to reduce this very complicated, uh, subject to a very clear set of principles, um, because a lot is going to depend on the details of the person's particular situation, but it's nice to be able to distinguish between possible realms that you could do and keep them in mind. I think a lot of the time people think, well, the main one is harm, right? Do it first, do no harm, you know, make sure you don't harm anyone while writing. Um, I, I think that's, you know, that's a good idea. But intuition to have that, um, it's not really sufficient for a couple of reasons. One is that, um, harm isn't the only way that you could wrong someone in a memoir. You could also violate their privacy in a non-harmful way, or you could exploit them, so you could, um, take unfair advantage of them, um, even if they somehow benefited from that act, it could still be thought to be bad. Uh, you could betray them by violating their trust, um, and you could possibly appropriate from them sort of steal their story. I'm not unsure that that one's a concern we should be worried about. Uh, so one reason is the other ways of wronging someone and harming them, and also, um, sometimes you're going to harm someone when writing a memoir, but they don't have a right not to be harmed. Um, you know, they don't, the type of harm that they're suffering is one that you don't have an obligation to prevent. So, um, yeah, um, so yeah, I think it goes through each of those, those possibilities in the book, uh, and try and, try and provide some advice about how to deal with them. Uh, yeah, um, so, I mean, there's a, there's a, uh, an issue that, you know, you, you sort of brings up both of these, you know, it's like what, what doom were more, it's, um, oh, to the public, the reading public, as well as to the people that they write about. And I tend to think that this, this is not your wording as the, you know, the larger truth defense or the bigger truth defense, um, which you hear a lot of, you know, it's like, well, it's not quite the truth, but it's, it's the bigger truth, right? Right. And I, and I, you know, it's sort of like, you know, you can allow yourself a certain amount of, you know, literary license because you're getting at a deeper truth, you know, so there's various metaphorical, uh, ways of describing this way of, of, uh, of doing something, which is not exactly like telling a truth, but it's telling a deeper truth or a wider truth or something. I've always been confused by that concept of wider truth, deeper truth, whatever. Um, yeah. But you do distinguish between what you call experiential truth and then this other weird, deeper truth that just seems like so vague and wishy washy that it's not really saying much at all. Um, so can you explain that distinction that you, you do draw, you do try to draw that. Yeah. I mean, this idea from the deeper truth is something to that. I think it's not the thing that people think that they're saying, but it is true that, um, that literary writing, um, is special, it's a special use of language. Um, and, uh, the meaning of a literary text doesn't reduce straightforwardly to the meaning of the individual sentences. There's often something else going on that the truth that you're expressing might be, you know, more or different than the sum of the parts, right? So when you read a novel, it says a set of, uh, statements about things that happen, you know, as Anna Karina and I, you know, in a particular time in, in Russia, but you're getting, you're getting something, you're getting a kind of insight about life, um, that goes beyond those, um, those events or those mental states that are being described. So sometimes, you know, there's something to be said about, um, heading a more flexible notion of what truth would mean. It's not just a matter of each individual sentence lining up. So I think sometimes it is just, it is, you can understand it as a claim of that, the nature of literary truth across the board. Um, but I don't think that you can use that claim that literary language to justify, um, making things up in a memoir in a big way. I do think they're, you know, there are reasons for leaving things out, again, to go back to this idea about the selectivity of narrative. Um, I think it's fine for memoirs to leave some things out, sometimes putting certain details in will distort the picture, um, but kind of making things up in service of a deeper truth. I think you were just moving into, uh, fiction at that point. Um, and as I said before, I think it's helpful for us to have a distinction, uh, between those two forms of, of writing. That's right. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, it seems like with experiential truth, even if it does have sort of somewhat narrative elements or, um, it still maintains that link to reality. Yeah. I think the, yeah. Um, the, the more helpful distinction is between experiential truth and historical fact. Uh, so experiential truth, they use that term to just, um, refer to what it was like to have a certain experience. So what it felt, it is a subjective experience, but what it felt at the time and how you interpreted that later on. Um, so say you had a birth, fifth birthday party that was absolutely, you know, when terribly wrong was chaos, you know, when you're writing a memoir about the birthday party, um, you can, you're expressing your experiential truth of what it felt like and what it meant to you. Um, there could be a difference between that, which is a true expression of what it is that, um, you felt, um, and what actually happened, maybe you're just mistaken as a fibro about what was really going on, right? So it is historical fact. Um, I do think there can be a disconnect between those two things that's kind of invasive. Um, so it's not really a deeper truth, but it's a, it's a question about what the truth is about. Um, right. Yeah. So, um, we were talking before about, you know, how a memoir now is not, you know, seen as something that, you know, only, only famous people do, you know, the ordinary folk are also permitted to write them in some way. Um, we always have been, of course, but we haven't, um, until fairly recently. Um, yeah. But why, I mean, why would anybody be interested in writing a memoir, right? I mean, there's this idea that, well, you're just being a narcissist. Maybe you want to take revenge on other people, you know, maybe you just want to, you know, self justify what you've done with your life, which, um, you know, may be particularly prone to, uh, you know, various forms of embellishment of the truth. Um, so, what, what are the, those are the bad reasons for writing the other reasons they sound bad, but I was just thinking as you said them, you know, Rousseau and his confessions, he's definitely a narcissist and definitely aimed at self-justifying. It's still a great book, you know. Right. Yeah. That morally bad. It seems that they're morally bad. Yeah. Right. Um, so, uh, well, that, that raises an interesting question, um, which is, even if the motives are morally bad, like, so what, right? Um, but are there, are there, you know, positive reasons for, for writing one? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, one, uh, one important one is, um, to make a work about, you know, there is this impression, I think that, um, memoir is somehow less literary than the other forms of, um, the other genres, fiction, drama and poetry. Um, that, you know, he's read, you know, some of the, um, really great classics in the, um, in the tradition and some more contemporary ones can see that they can be just as, you know, well-formed, masterful, um, poetic, you know, beautiful, complex subtle, anything you want to say has literary value, then fiction. So, you may just want to write a work about, and you may be someone who finds it easiest to do that by sticking closely to your own experience of the world and not going too far into the speculative. So, I think making a work about is a legitimate and an important motivation. Um, sometimes people, um, have, uh, some kind of moral, uh, uh, goal in mind too. So, people will write, well, you might call it social justice memoir, right? So, one that's trying to expose injustice in the past or, or the present, um, so you've got a kind of, um, moral mission that you're hoping to promote. Maybe you want to help others with your story, uh, who are going through something similar. Um, so there's, there's those, um, some people just want to memorialize, um, people in their, in their lives who've, um, passed on, um, they might also want to memorialize themselves as a little more self-centred, but other sense that you want to kind of do tribute to an honour, uh, people in your life. It's hard to do that through fiction. You have to depart from, uh, their lives in a more dramatic way. So, I think that's also an important thing for many memoirists is to capture the past, um, and express their, um, yeah, there seems that it's precious and important and matter, particular people on that. Um, so they're all of those. I think there's also some more, um, personal reasons that aren't narcissistic exactly, but many people find the act of writing a memoir to be healing. So, there's a lot of evidence and psychology about how writing your experience that's down can help you to, some would say, sort of, overcome them, but it can also be a matter of taking responsibility for your past. And there's that, um, healing, adaptive, quality to that. Um, so I think those are central, one that comes up a lot, but I think, um, maybe underlies many of the others, uh, is this goal of seeking some kind of meaning in your past experience, coming to understand what it meant, you know, forming, um, the chaos of your life into some kind of shape, um, or locating some kind of form in it, uh, I think that's, you know, an important goal. There's skepticism about whether we can do that, you know, we're talking about that a bit before, maybe there is no form to life, um, but memoir can be one way of trying to get at least a partial and provisional grip on, uh, what your life was and, and what it's meant so far. So I don't think that's inherently narcissistic at all. Um, often when we read a memoir, maybe about the particular person, right? That's how it, how it works. Um, but it's supposed to connect to more universal concerns. A good and memoir starts small and uses that small person's life as a lens to open up to a much broader horizon. I mean, it's a, a wonderful thing when you feel that happening. It's sort of miraculous, you know, you think you're just reading about one person, and suddenly you're reading about everyone and everything. Um, yeah. So has anybody ever like written a memoir and then sort of look back and looked at the memoir and said that that's not me. Uh, that's a, that's a, that's a, there's a narrative self there to use the, the, you know, the common phrase today. Uh, but that narrative self, is it really me? Yes, I certainly think that happens repeatedly in the drafting of a memoir. People will often take years over it and have to radically revise it. I'm sure it also happens after you've published it. And we're in this age now of serial memoirs, so you don't just write one and then you're done. You know, there's one woman, Catherine Harris, and there's written five book length memoirs, so you can always take a second shot at it. Um, more of a first shot at it, as with the husbands. Um, so yeah, uh, I think there is this recognition now that it's, it's, it's, it's really, it's just likely that you're understanding of the past will change. And, and also the meaning of the past changes over time is as new events happen, um, it's not that the past changes, but are understanding of their significance or their actual significance, uh, changes as other events follow. Um, they become part of a new, you know, chain that they weren't in before. So there will be another, you know, story to be told about the same thing once those later things occur. I think that's, you know, fine. I don't think there's anything suspect about that. Right. So what are, what are some of your favorite memoirs and, and why are they your favorites? That's a fun question. Yeah. Yeah. I, I tend to like hybrid memoirs, so ones that are doing personal narrative, but also in connection with something else and, and playing the later most you think sort of play with each other. So, um, you know, there'll be some theory in there or history or criticism. Um, within that category, I have a, I think, a special weakness for, um, for memoirs that combine, uh, personal narrative with literary criticism and biography, but always through the, you know, the writers experience. It's not a simple biography or critical work. So it's not all through the author. So the book's like one of my very favorites is, um, the possessed by a leaf parchment. It's called the possessed. Uh-huh. It's a collection of essays about being in grad school at Stanford, um, studying the great Russian authors. Um, and so it's her experience of being a literature student. Um, but also, uh, she, you know, uses it to do biographical essays about each of these writers. It's very, very funny. Um, and another example is out of sheer rage by Jeff Dyer, which is a combination of memoirs of travel writing. It's about him trying and, and failing to write a biography of DH Lawrence. Just so you know, sort of about procrastination in the various ways we undermine ourselves. And by the end of it, we do, in fact, have a biography of DH Lawrence, but in a very non-standard way, and it's mainly about Jeff Dyer's struggles. So it's still a memoir, but it opens out to this broader subject. So yeah, I like those kinds of books. There's a, another kind of example of that that isn't funny at all, Julian Barnes, his levels of life, which is a tribute to his wife after she died. It's also about hotly at the learning and, uh, Sarah Bernhardt. It's, at first, you're reading thinking, well, what, what's going on here? But it just builds up. It draws together and you get to the last part that matters about his wife. And it's just like a bomb going off. You know, the resonance has just become so, so great. Yeah. How, how about among, you know, more classical memoirs, rather than modern? Yeah, um, I actually really like, I don't know what it is, but it has much literary quality, but I actually really like John Stuart Mills' autobiography. I just, I love getting that sense of his, of his, of his voice, and he's a great writer. He's written some very engaging philosophical books, but this is about how he got into philosophy, the midlife crisis that he has. So it's sort of a metaphor philosophical. Yeah, I love that book. I just like that sense of really kind of connecting to him on a more personal level. So yeah, I'd point to that one at least. One of the, one of the ones that you mentioned that, uh, what was her name? Bechtel, a fun home. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Alison Bechtel. Yeah. Um, which is a great book, you know, but it's a, it's a, it's, it's marketed, I think, as a graphic novel, rather, at least that's, you know, the way it was, like, presented to me and, um, but it's, it does seem a bit more memoir than novel. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a graphic memoir. I guess, I mean, my understanding is that she didn't fact grow up in that funeral home, um, where, you know, her father, who later, um, turned out to be gay or me sort of closet gay at the time. She was, um, you know, growing up as a, as a lesbian. And so they had this sort of similar experience going on, but they didn't really understand each other. They connected on certain levels. Um, but yeah, it's done through, um, through, um, yeah, uh, her art as well as, the voice is an increasing amount of those coming out to graphic. Yeah. Which, which, which sort of raises the issue of how, how much can you get away with in a memoir without having words? Yeah, right. When does it stop? You know, when does it stop, um, right coming? Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of those cases where some vagus, you know, things kind of fuzzy at the, at the boundaries. Um, but yeah, it's a good question. Not sure. Um, okay. Well, um, uh, I think we're, we're getting close to time. Um, let me, let me just ask, you know, what are you, what are you working on now? Is there a, you know, follow up to this or is this kind of the culmination of a project that you're going to something else? What, what's, what's on your, I guess, philosophical slash literary, but mainly philosophical horizon at this point? Yeah. It is philosophical slash literary. So I'm writing two other books. Um, I mentioned, um, the memoir earlier. So it's a memoir about the nature and value of philosophy. You know, what, what is it? Why might you do it? Um, what might doing it do to you? Um, and it's through my own experience. So how those questions have played out from me, um, how I got into philosophy, um, and my various adventures and grads come as a junior professor. So it's trying to get a philosophy, but also these bigger questions about how to, how to balance intellect and emotion, I guess, in a, in a, um, fulfilling life. So, um, I have a, that, that's, I hope I hope kind of done now. It seems like that's made me done. And then I'm writing a, a collection of, uh, a link to essays on, on the philosophy of twins, I'm an identical twin. Um, so again, this is a kind of hybrid, it's using my own experience of identical twin hosts. Are you a twin? Yeah. Um, my twin is actually illustrating the book. So we can have pictures, of course done throughout it. Um, but yeah, with philosophical theories, I think there's an interesting philosophical questions about identity and about love, objectification that I'm thinking about twins can shed light on. Um, and it's also, you know, it's fun to write it their way, talk about my own experience of being a twin, being seen as a twin, um, and bringing in some theory too. Oh, interesting. Um, well, I mean, I don't think I have any more questions for you. Um, but I did want to say, I mean, I, I very much enjoyed the book. It was, you know, very, uh, very easy, you know, to read, but at the same time, you know, raised lots of interesting philosophical questions and, you know, discussed them in a very, very clear sort of way. So I, I really appreciate this insight into, into memoir. Thank you. Yeah, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Um, and it's been really nice talking to you about it too. It's been a fun conversation. So thank you for inviting me. to speak with me. Well, good luck with your current books and, um, uh, I look forward to seeing them as well. Thank you. Okay. Bye bye. Bye. You've been listening to my interview with Helena DeBress, Associate Professor Philosophy at Wellesley College. We've been talking about her new book, Artful Truths, the Philosophy of Memoir, which is just out from University of Chicago Press. I'm Carey Figdor. This is new books in philosophy. I hope you enjoyed the podcast and thank you for listening.