Fact or Fiction: Writing Memoir & Family History

April 20, 2019

I attended a lecture by historical novelist, Lucia St. Clair Robson this morning at Riverbend Park in Jupiter, Florida. She is a charismatic and down to earth woman, and had the crowd chuckling quite a few times. She is obviously passionate about her subjects (Florida history). She shared with us some of the off the wall topics she has researched to achieve accuracy in her stories. I think everyone’s favorite was her story about researching ‘how alligators make love.’

I asked her if she ever wrote non-fiction, but she has not ventured there as of yet. She did talk a bit about the difference between writing historical fiction and non-fiction. In historical fiction, the author can ‘fudge’ the facts a little bit. Non-fiction though requires an absolute adherence to the truth, the facts.

This got me thinking about my kind of ‘non-fiction.’ Creative non-fiction, we call it. Memoirs. Family histories. The non-fiction rules get wonky in this world.

When venturing into memoir or family history, we find ourselves with a menagerie of facts and family lore and subjective memories. We are forced to adhere to the facts, yet also step into the realm of ‘possibility,’ of generalization.

Based on the facts, this might have happened this way. Based on family lore, this could have happened this way.

English historian G. Kitson Clark once said that these generalizations are “necessarily founded on guesses, guesses informed by much general reading and relevant knowledge, guesses shaped by much brooding on the matter in hand, but on guesses nonetheless.”

Quite a few people urge me to venture into historical fiction. Perhaps I may go there someday, but for right now, I will stick to my ‘possibles.’