There's something known as "memory conformity," also known as "social contagion of memory," which refers to a situation where one person's telling of a memory influences another person's account of that same experience.
The least trusted testimony in a court of law is eyewitness testimony. We are simply not good reporters of facts that happen to us, or in front of us. But that's not the same as knowingly lying.
I think every narrator is an unreliable narrator. In its classic definition - an unreliable narrator is one who reveals something they don't know themselves to be revealing. We all do that.
A lot of my students have been quite notable. Notable in both the personal sense - people who have changed my life - and notable in that many have gone on to enormous success in their writing careers. Whether or not I had a lot to do with those success stories, I'm very proud and happy for my former students getting on the map.
I think the act of lying can be separated from the genre of memoir. Though often times, people are unaware of their own subjectivity.
I like the fact that second person puts the reader in the story. It makes them, whether they like it or not, complicit in the action.
The biggest thing was that second person allowed me to trick myself into revealing more about myself. It gave me an authorial distance to get closer to the action and emotions, if that makes sense.
I don't teach narrative theory by itself anymore, but I kind of use it when critiquing student manuscripts. So, it works its way in there, whether I like it or not.
One of the things I love most about second person is that it reminds the reader that they are reading a text. It doesn't allow them to drift into the story and not notice that they are reading a book - a book that has an author.
I like a text that reminds the reader its a text sometimes.
I'd say the music influences the writing - the music and rhythm of the prose - much more than the writing influences the music.
Some of the biggest challenges were, page after page, standing naked in front of the reader.
You can't hide behind the guise of fiction. No matter how autobiographical a fictional scene is, you can always tell the reader - in protecting yourself - that you made it up.
My teaching career started with me teaching comp at a very small school in Buffalo. And I was terrible at that point. They never should have hired me.
I have an MFA in writing. It is debatable if they are right for everyone, but I had a mentor who really changed my life, so it worked for me.
It took me seven years of writing before I published my first story. And then, the publications trickled in over the next five years.
I wasn't doing much work when I was using and drinking. I have friends who did it (work), but I wasn't one of those people.
For me, addiction never really included telling myself that everything was okay. By the time I was deep in my addictions, I knew things were pretty bad and I had no control over them.
