I have recently gotten curious about the, sometimes, fine line between memoir and fiction. What makes memoir memoir, and at what point does it become a fictional telling of the story? Also, if you are debating between the two, how do you decide on the best way to write your narrative?
I had the unique opportunity to explore these questions with esteemed author and teacher Daniel M. Jaffe, who is a profound source of wisdom. He refers to his newest novel, Yeled Tov, as an autobiographical novel. It follows a Jewish teenager struggling to reconcile his devotion to Torah with his growing attraction to other young men. In fact, Dan initially wrote it as a memoir, so he knows intimately the experience of writing the same story in both forms. Scroll down to read our full interview.
Daniel M. Jaffe is a former corporate/securities attorney turned writer. Several of his short stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and dozens of his stories, essays, and articles have appeared in anthologies, literary journals and newspapers in many countries and languages. His work has been taught in college and university courses. He holds degrees from Princeton University (A.B.), Harvard Law School (J.D.), and Vermont College (M.F.A.).
His newest novel, YELED TOV (2018, Lethe Press), follows a Jewish teenager struggling to reconcile his devotion to Torah with his growing attraction to other young men. Can he be both Jewish and gay? Does he risk losing God's love?
KARIN GUTMAN: We first met when I took your class at UCLA, “The Art of the Lie,” which used personal experience as a springboard for fiction. What inspired you to create such a course?
DANIEL M. JAFFE: Actually, I can’t take credit for having created that course. The now-retired Director of UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Dr. Linda Venis, was an endless source of course ideas. After I’d been teaching in the Program for a couple years, Linda approached me with this particular course idea and asked if I’d like to teach it. Given that I’d had experience writing both fiction and memoir (as personal essay), the course was a natural fit. So, Linda provided me the course description and then let me develop a syllabus so as to take the course in my own direction. A really wonderful opportunity.
KARIN: I understand that your most recent novel, Yeled Tov, was originally written as a memoir, but then you adapted it as a novel. What was the reason behind this decision?
DANIEL: The notion of writing Yeled Tov evolved over time, as did its ultimate form. Yeled Tov (“Good Boy”) is a novel about a Jewish teenager, Jake, struggling to reconcile his observant and traditional religious beliefs with the growing awareness of his gayness. As his experiences and guilt intensify, Jake holds imaginary conversations with God, who is basically a manifestation of Jake’s own conscience. When Jake reaches a point where he feels completely wicked and beyond redemption, as a biblical abomination, he imagines God turning His back on him, and Jake attempts suicide.
This is all autobiographical, my most central and agonizing personal story. Thirty years ago, when I first committed myself to writing, I made a conscious decision to concentrate on fiction rather than memoir because I felt that fiction could mask real experiences that felt too private to acknowledge publicly—such as my coming out struggle and suicide attempt—yet still offer the opportunity to write about them with emotional honesty. Also, I could minimize the potential for embarrassment of my parents and any others whose lives intersected with mine. Among other things, I indeed wrote a number of short stories about teenage characters struggling with a religious-sexual identity conflict, including one where the teenager contemplated suicide.
Over time, however, I found myself increasingly wishing to be known beyond the fictional façade, so I started writing memoiristic personal essays, some addressing my teenage coming out struggle. Eventually, after Dad passed away and Mom lost awareness due to dementia, I no longer needed to worry about embarrassing them by exposing a painful, intensely painful period in their lives. Also, I wanted to publish a book addressing a tragic reality: even today, LGBTQ youth sometimes kill themselves out of a misplaced sense of shame. One source of that shame is religious teachings, a phenomenon I was in a good position to address.
Sometimes I write just for fun and to entertain, but at other times I write in order to promote social change, hopefully to help people. This was one of those times. We all know that fiction or memoir about personal trauma can help readers in similar circumstances feel less alone. Our writing can offer hope and, if we’re lucky, save lives.
So, I spent a couple of years writing a full-length memoir about my teenage struggle. One day when meeting with my publisher over lunch (he’d already published three of my books by then), I proudly announced what I’d written. Without so much as looking at the manuscript, he said, “Dan, gay memoir doesn’t really sell anymore. But if you re-write it as a novel—that I can sell.”
Hah! So now I’d come full circle: a process that had started as fiction, then shifted into memoir, now needed to return to fiction. So, I spent a year re-conceptualizing and re-writing, and the result is Yeled Tov, very much a novel rather than a memoir. What’s so interesting is that when interviewing me about this fictional work, the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, was most interested in its autobiographical aspects. They even published photographs of me with my parents so as to make the social-political point that an observant Jewish family can welcome a gay child. Fiction and memoir are completely blurred in this project.
KARIN: Do you think that’s true, that a gay memoir is not saleable?
DANIEL: As much as I feel a modest authority in discussing the writing of fiction and memoir, I feel absolutely no authority whatsoever in discussing the marketplace. I haven’t a clue as to what will sell and what won’t. All I know how to do is write.
That said, I think my publisher’s reluctance was specific to the topic of gay-themed memoir, rather than memoir in general. Even more specifically—memoirs about coming out. There are an awful lot of them out there, which is wonderful. I suppose those that sell best are those written by famous people. I can understand that—celebrity sells. And I ain’t no celebrity.
But this phenomenon is not limited to memoir. In my early years as writer, in the 1990’s, I wrote a couple of coming-out-themed novels loosely based on my experience, but not nearly as autobiographical as Yeled Tov. The late 1980’s-early 1990’s was a boom time for lesbian and gay fiction—our work was being taken seriously by the New York publishing establishment for the first time. One editor who was in charge of a major publisher’s lesbian-gay line of fiction kindly read one of my novels, but rejected it saying something about being tired of coming-out novels. He, as editor, was probably inundated with every single coming out novel being written at the time. But the general public? I, as one reader back then, couldn’t get enough of them. Every person’s coming-out experience is unique, and I found it incredibly soothing to read each and every such story I could get my hands on, as a sort of validation of my own struggles, a sense of camaraderie. But… it wasn’t up to me, it was up to this editor who had all the power. He was tired of the subject, so he assumed his readership was, as well. Maybe he was right. We’ll never know.
KARIN: Do you miss anything from its original iteration as a memoir?
DANIEL: Certainly, I had to cut out a lot from the memoir. The approach I took in the memoir was that of a middle-aged man looking back on his youth and re-visiting, interpreting. I could have taken a similar stance with the novel, but my publisher felt that a simpler, more direct approach would be better, particularly since he wanted to promote it to a late teen readership. So, a good deal of the memoir is gone, the self-conscious analysis that often marks what I think of as strong memoir.
Initially, while re-writing the material as fiction, I felt pain at cutting much material. I think it’s Annie Dillard in her incredibly insightful book, The Writing Life, who points out that, before we can truly cut material out of a draft and just move on to write what’s best for the work, we need to forget the pain of having written our treasured lines. Gradually, as I developed new material and re-shaped, I forgot the pain and time and effort spent on writing what I now had to cut out. The novel became its own entity, and I stopped focusing on what it wasn’t.
KARIN: Do you think writing the memoir help make the fictional version better?
DANIEL: I think I could have written Yeled Tov directly as novel. Whether the memoir form as “first draft” ultimately made the fiction stronger or not, I can’t tell. To be perfectly honest, I no longer remember details of the memoir version. It’s as if the novel over-wrote and erased it.
KARIN: What new things did you discover in the fictional story? What liberties did you take, that hopefully, made it a better story?
DANIEL: Whether the novel or memoir is a “better” story or not, I can’t say. But they’re certainly “different” from one another.
As I mentioned a little earlier, the structure changed in that the memoir was reminiscent—an adult looking back at his life, whereas the novel simply follows the teenager forward from late high school through early college.
In terms of liberties, the novel version freed me up to write a different outcome for the character. In real life, I didn’t quickly heal after my college suicide attempt. I continued to suffer and struggle for years. In the memoir, I made clear that eventually, I did find an inner peace, I found a wonderful man—Leo and I have been together now for over 26 years, legally married for over 6—and found profound acceptance by family and community. Given that the memoir’s focus was on my teen years, I didn’t need to go into detail about my adult life in order to make the story complete. The reader could accept the story as limited to a difficult time, and could also accept that the difficulty eased later on even if I didn’t write about that; after all, I was alive and writing, so the reader knew I hadn’t ultimately killed myself.
Certainly, I could have ended the novel with some sort of leap forward in time to show Jake, the main character, finding happiness years later. But that would have violated the way I handled time in the novel, which was moment-by-moment during two years of Jake’s life. And such an ending would have felt rather forced.
Another option would have been to have Jake succumb to his depression. But that was exactly opposite the message I wanted to offer readers, particularly younger ones. Up until the late 20th-century, so many LGBTQ-themed novels ended in suicide or death. Enough! The whole point of writing this novel was to suggest that LGBTQ people could find ways to thrive even after experiencing difficult personal struggles.
So, I needed to come up with an ending that fit with the novel’s handling of time, yet didn’t have some false, sudden turn-around where years of suffering magically transformed into happiness. Such an ending would have trivialized the very suffering Jake had experienced. What I came up with was a series of post-suicide-attempt conversations for Jake with family, friends, a therapist, and God, all of whom are saddened by the suicide attempt. Up until the suicide attempt, he torments himself within himself, never reaching out to another person. After the attempt, when others are now reaching out to him, he can’t avoid such conversations. They get him out of his own head, and help him realize that there might be different ways of looking at his situation, at Jewish religious teachings, and his future. That’s how the novel ends, with Jake finally beginning to connect authentically with the people around him and beginning to accept the possibility—just the possibility—that he’s not such an awful person, that he might fit within Jewish tradition, and that his future might not be as bleak as he’s imagined. By the end of the novel, he has earned something he had not possessed until then—hope.
KARIN: I believe that there is a healing component to writing. Did you experience that with this book, a kind of personal transformation in the writing of it?
DANIEL: Oh my gosh, this is so true for me. I experience healing in my writing all the time. No matter what we’re writing, it’s coming from our psyches, so it’s us on the page. Whether we have happy dreams when we sleep or nightmares, we’re working out some issue or other, right? It’s the same with writing. We’re processing. We don’t always reach clarities, but we’re wrestling with our angels and demons both.
In Yeled Tov, after Jake’s suicide attempt, he finally confides in another Jewish character that he attempted to end his life as a reaction to the Torah’s prohibition against homosexuality. The other character responds, “My dear friend… We’re supposed to live by the Torah, not die by it.” Here I’d been writing for years about my own life, yet I’d never articulated and distilled that thought until the very moment my fictional character said it.
I never had such a conversation with a Jewish friend in real life. Nobody ever said line that to me. I never even voiced it to myself. Yet at the very moment I wrote it, I experienced an epiphany… 40 years after my own suicide attempt. It came out of my writing through a fictional character’s voice. And I don’t mean it came from the character based on myself; it came out of a character loosely based on an actual friend from my past, an observant Jewish woman of great compassion. After I wrote that sentence, I lifted my hands from the keyboard, covered my face, and wept. Finally I was able to say, in one sentence, the healing phrase I’d been needing to hear all these decades. Decades. It’s become my mantra. This is the personal power of writing fiction.
KARIN: What do you like to read? What are you reading these days?
I read all kinds of things. Novels, short story collections, memoirs, histories, plays. Sometimes, I do background reading related to projects I have in mind. I’ve been reading some memoirs by former Soviet dissidents because I’m considering writing a memoir about my experiences in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when I studied for a short time in the Soviet Union and met various dissidents. Once I began studying in law school, I undertook to translate documents for them—political trial transcripts and so forth—so as to advocate for their causes in the West. An old friend of mine, Alla Podrabinek, recently completed a memoir of her life in Siberian exile with her dissident husband, Aleksandr. I loved reading that one, both for elaborations on what I remembered of their lives and for episodes that were new to me. And I’m now reading a classic dissident memoir, My Testimony by Anatoly Marchenko, one of the first memoirs of life in the Soviet gulag. I read/am reading these in Russian so as to brush up on my language skills. Reading a foreign language helps with my English prose because it keeps me sensitive to word choice, sentence structure rhythm, and tone.
I’m also reading a collection of Philip Roth’s prose writings—essays, interviews with him, and interviews he conducted with other writers. Several reviewers have compared my writing with his, so I enjoy reading his take on his own work.
I recently finished a collection of short stories by Louis Auchincloss, a remarkable fiction writer known for his spot-on renderings of New York high society. I’d long heard of him, but had never read him before. I bought a book of his stories in a used book shop in Merced, so that I’d have something to read during a trip to Yosemite. Now I’m a fan!
KARIN: What advice would you give to a writer who is not sure whether to write the story as fiction or memoir?
I think of autobiographical fiction and memoir as being on a continuum. Some autobiographical fiction is loosely based on real life. Some memoir takes liberties with facts in order to render psychological truth more clearly. They’re definitely related forms and they blur. It’s often difficult to find a bright line between them. I think it’s a question of emphasis, and of how we want to hold the work out to the world. As I mentioned a little earlier, if we label something “memoir,” the reader makes certain assumptions about the writer’s life after the period covered in the work because the reader knows facts not covered in the actual memoir—the author survived Soviet labor camps, for example. After reading a novel, the reader might speculate about the main characters’ futures, but can’t really know for sure.
Maybe the wisest way to start writing a story based on real life experience is to dive in and write it however it comes out on the page. As you’re drafting, ask yourself if you’re altering what really happened, and why. Are you censoring yourself, avoiding writing down some painful things? Are you trying to “protect” real people in your life? (Keep in mind that there’s a difference between writing memoir and publishing it—you can always write and explore something yet wait until some later date to seek publication, if ever.) Can you bring yourself to write what you’re avoiding, or do you need to mask or avoid it for some reason? Answering these questions might help you figure out whether your work is more made-up than not, where on the memoir-fiction continuum it fits.
KARIN: When you say that "some memoir takes liberties with facts," what do you mean exactly?
DANIEL: What I meant is something like recording a conversation that happened years ago. We can imagine a scenario where, in real life, there were 10 people in a room during an important conversation, and each chimed in, and the narrator gleaned an epiphany from that input. In real life, when we know a large number of people very well, we can react instantly to each comment because we have so much context for each person's reaction. We intuitively weigh Cousin X's comments more than Cousin Y's because Cousin X is a therapist and Cousin Y is generally obtuse, but maybe this time Cousin Y makes an unusually good point, and Aunt A amplifies that point and the narrator weighs Aunt A's reaction heavily because she's always been so insightful, in contrast to Uncle D who's chiming in but he's always been an idiot, etc.
To include all this and more, all these comments and the narrator's reactions might be confusing for a reader because, in a memoir, we likely wouldn't have the space to fully develop each of those 10 people well enough so that the reader could grasp the narrator's intuitive reactions. So, in writing the memoir, in order to keep focus on the psychological truth and what's important--a group of relatives got together and influenced the narrator's thinking--the memoir might describe that conversation with only 3 relatives having been in that room. Taking liberties with the facts to render with greater clarity what's really important.
But here's where taking liberties would violate the psychological truth: if we're writing a memoir episode of a 7-year-old boy who stole a Babe Ruth candy bar, but we write, instead, that he stole a Cadillac... well, yes, both versions are about a little boy stealing, but they represent very different psychological dynamics. It's a question of proportion and degree.
KARIN: Are you still teaching? Where can people take a class from you?
I teach less now than in the past. This February 29, I’ll be offering a one-day workshop through UCLA Extension Writers’ Program called, “Inspiring Our Muse: Nurturing the Writer Within.” It’s a course about the writing process, about sparking our imagination and tapping into our creativity. There are still spots available, should any of your readers care to sign up!
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To learn more about Daniel M. Jaffe, visit his website.
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