The search for meaning, through memoir

Tristine Rainer, director of the Center for Autobiographical Studies, has been holding memoir retreats for four years. She uses them to help nurture the writer within her students and help them discover the meaning of their lives

By Stephanie Bowen
Special to CNN.com

In this story: Healing process Concern and controversy Credibility gap? RELATED STORIES, SITES

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- To paraphrase Socrates, Tristine Rainer believes that the examined life is a life worth living.

Rainer, director of the Center for Autobiographical Studies (www.storyhelp.com), has been holding memoir retreats for four years. A teacher at the University of Southern California and UCLA, she uses the retreats to help nurture the writer within her students and help them discover the meaning of their lives.

Recently, eight women from around the country, ranging in age from their mid-30s to late 60s, came to the peaceful, frills-free La Casa de Maria retreat center in the hills of Santa Barbara to discover a little more about their life stories. Rainer, author of "Your Life as Story: Discovering the 'New Autobiography' and Writing Memoir as Literature," was their guide.

EXERCISE Writing a reverie     MESSAGE BOARD I oughta be in fiction     QUICKVOTE These days, it seems like everybody's writing a memoir -- whether they're famous or not. What do you think of this trend? It's refreshing; everybody has a story to tell I enjoy them, but you should do something significant with your life first Only the very well known should write memoirs -- and even at that, there are too many View Results

For three days the group with participants from New Jersey, Alabama, Sacramento and Southern California, discussed their work, both together and separately with Rainer. Each said she left with a stronger understanding of her writing and life.

"Everybody has a story. I feel compelled to put this on paper, for me, because I need to see it in black and white," said participant Judy Zucker, who hopes to be published one day but now wants to learn more about her life and pass it on to her family. "I needed to see what happened to me and why it happened to me."

The retreat setting helped, agreed participant Francine Oller. "Hearing everybody's stories and seeing how they express themselves helps me express what I want to express," she said.

For these women, and many people, penning a memoir is considered part of a healing process -- both for the writer and the reader. As psychologist James Hillman writes, "We are less damaged by the traumas of childhood than by the traumatic way we remember childhood. ... We have stopped imagining them with any sort of romance, any fictional flair."

Writing memoirs can help restore that romance, says Rainer.

Memoir often mixes actual truth with emotional, remembered truth, crossing a line formerly only allowed in fiction. Rainer credits psychology with allowing such a style to flourish. "That openness has allowed people who are ordinary people to write about their life, where the real drama is," she says.

Teaching students the difference between fact and emotional truth helps them write a better story, she says. "Fact of detail is completely important for journalists -- it's the journalist's obligation," says Rainer. "It is not the memoirist's obligation."

Tristine Rainer has been holding memoir retreats for four years, where participants examine their lives. Her techniques aand theories are part of her book, "Your Life As Story"

She does acknowledge that it is crucial to be accurate about events that occurred, the things people did and their behaviors. The point of the memoir, both for writer and reader, is to find the "underlying myth or the emotional truth of a life," she says.

But that truth, says Rainer, is not affected by what the character had for lunch -- salad or sandwich. As long as the emotional truth stays intact, she says, it's OK to make it up.

As writers continue to walk the line between fact and fiction, the debate over the rules governing non-fiction remains prominent in literary circles. Several books -- from Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm" to Edmund Morris' Ronald Reagan biography "Dutch" -- have stirred discussion with their mix of non-fiction and almost-fiction.

"I think that professionals and readers do not hold memoirists as responsible to fact as biographers and historians, who must double check facts and details," says Noel Riley Fitch, author of the recent "Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child" and other biographies. "Morris's book on Reagan reaffirmed the value of professional biographies. It did not change them."

Darin Strauss, author of "Chang and Eng," a new historical novel about the 19th-century conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, says his version comes closer to the truth than some biographies of the famous Siamese twins. But, he acknowledges, fictional techniques shouldn't always be used.

"Memoir is different than history, because you're not documenting an important person, like (President) Lincoln," says Strauss.

Strauss notes that he recently re-read "Armies of the Night," Norman Mailer's 1968 book about a protest against the Vietnam War. Subtitled "History as a Novel, the Novel as History," the book featured a fictionalized persona -- Mailer himself.

"I think he walked a fine line between writing an interesting sort of new journalism non-fiction and keeping fidelity to the truth," Strauss says.

But Thomas Keneally, author of "Schindler's List" and "The Great Shame" -- both volumes based on historical events -- says it is sometimes easier to tell the truth through fiction.

"I wrote 'Schindler's List' as non-fiction," he said in a recent Sydney Morning Herald article, "but I wrote it in a way that it looked like fiction, to help me write closer to the truth, to help me avoid writing a lie."

Rainer is quick to point out that the memoirist must not lose credibility when using fiction. For example, Katherine Harrison's "The Kiss," a memoir about an adult affair with her father, came under a firestorm of criticism because many found it too fictional.

In years past, she adds, memoirs were reserved for the powerful and famous; the novel was reserved for average people to write about their lives. The relatively recent success of Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" and "'Tis" has created more interest in the memoir form, though publishers have always released great numbers of autobiographies -- approximately 2,000 each year between 1984 and 1994.

Memoirs are not the only way people glimpse others' lives, Rainer says. "We see it in reality shows, diary shows and on the Internet with people putting their lives online," she says.

The difference? Memoir requires craft, reflection and the use of dramatic structure, Rainer says.

Rainer thinks memoirs will evolve in the future, further incorporating fiction and nonfiction, with new writers pushing the envelope. She believes our culture is in the process of developing what she calls "new autobiography" to bring the spirituality of myth into our stress-filled lives.

The "new" form will encourage human connections, she thinks. "It may be a way to recall that although each of us gets a different life story -- a different piece of the puzzle -- our tribe needs the wisdom of us all for truth to emerge."

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Center for Autobiographic Studies

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