Artifice in Writing the Truth in a Memoir of Early Childhood

Abstract

When we write about our past and try to weave the experiences into a coherent narrative, there is inevitably an element of artifice involved. When I started writing down the ‘story’ of my early childhood, I found it difficult to locate a particular landmark from where and when the act of remembering began. There are memories that I can’t verify and some are so vivid that I cannot but think that I have imagined them. This uncertainty about the veracity of the memories presented a stumbling block. Finally, I decided that my work would be part fiction. I had to create a canvas on which I could weave bits of memories and portraits of people that are, from this vantage point of the remembering present, close to being figments of my imagination. Collating these ‘creatively’ and giving them linearity as truthfully as my mind and heart could muster, are the forces guiding me in the journey. And yet in spite of the ‘artifice’ involved, the narrative I had accomplished so far could not be truer than what ‘probably’ had really happened. The creative and sympathetic artifice becomes, in fact, a vehicle in finding back my childhood.
In writing my presentation, I will draw on the memoirs of Virginia Woolf, Annie Dillard, Clive James and Michael Ondatje; to analyze the ‘artifice’ involved in recounting the story of their early childhood. Could a kaleidoscope of distant memories/facts be woven on a ‘creative/fictive’ canvas, or is there no other way?