When does it stop being memoir and start being fiction?

[Kevin Allman]

(This isn't strictly about crime fiction, so feel free to skip....)

Today Augusten Burroughs and St. Martin's announced that they'd settled out of court with the Turcotte family, whom Burroughs had written about (hilariously and scandalously) in his memoir Running With Scissors.

We all know memoirs aren't 100% true...besides the subjective narrator, there are a million little pieces (heh) in a memoir that get changed for various reasons. Pseudonyms, time compression, character melding (where two or more individuals are melded into one for narrative's sake)...all these are commonly employed, and yet even then no one seems to question a book's status as memoir.

I know Burroughs isn't a crime writer, and neither are other entertaining memoirists (Caroline Knapp, Jeanette Walls, Mary Karr) -- but I've read true-crime books that are also sold as memoir, and most of them come with editor's notes about details that have been changed, compressed, or otherwise fictionalized.

In particular, I'm thinking of a memoir by an Oregon P.I. who helped solve a grisly case of two missing teenage girls...the writer was not only a detective, but also a distant relation-by-marriage of the teens. It seemed...well...fudged. A lot.

My question is: When does a memoir stop being a memoir and become fiction based on actual events?

[norby]

I have mixed feelings about the settlement concerning Burroughs book. I'm a huge fan of his, but knowing that he settled kind of makes me wonder was any of it true? Of course the Turcotte's are going to say, 'Yeah, that's what life in our house was really like.', but it would be nice to know what was true, what wasn't, etc.

That said, if even just a small percentage of what he wrote about them is true, they're still nuts. But the rest would be fiction based on true events.

[Dana King]

In memoir, you can compress, recreate conversations and fill in gaps, but you shouldn't make anything up. It should be written as best you can remember, and whatever you have to do to fill that in should be presented as your impression and/or memory, not attributed as fact.

It doesn't seem like it's that hard. Of course, the lives of 99.999% of people aren't that interesting. The only thing more confusing to me than why people keep writing them, is why people keep reading them.

[Keith Dixon]

An interesting question that also perhaps brings in the whole faction/fiction debate. The recent film about Truman Capote suggested that Capote was influenced in his writing of In Cold Blood by his relationship to Perry Smith - so while it's always been known that the book was a documentary that used fictional devices, maybe there was more of the 'memoir' in there than Capote acknowledged? After all, it took 6 years of his life to produce, so it would have been hard for him to have left out his own feelings and experiences altogether. And of course this is bound to be true for those practitioners who move from law enforcement (or legal representation) to writing crime - Grisham, Turow, Wambaugh etc. A lot of what they write must surely be memoir, even if unacknowledged?

[Margot Renne Payne]

The reason I raised the question is like the memoir of today, which I don't think is a fad or going away, Capote's In Cold Blood was the first of its kind, the nonfiction novel, highly suspect and critized by other writers. There is a great article from January 16, 1966, New York Times, "The Story Behind the Nonfiction Novel" of a George Plimpton interview with Truman Capote. Here is the link: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/28/home/capote-interview.html?_r...

You may have to set up an account with the NYT on-line--but it is worth it!