A fellow memoirist and reviewer writes: "I'm reading a memoir now where the author has written four chapters full of dialogue for events that occurred when she was four years old. Over half the book occurs before she is ten and it's all about what people said and felt. I don't see how much of this could be possibly true."
My friend's got this right: Nothing makes a reader question memoir more indignantly than the things set aside by quotation marks.
Unless you walked around your entire life with a tape recorder in your pocket, dialogue will become one of the greatest moral and storytelling conundrums you will face when writing a memoir. You may feel that you need some of it, a smattering at least, to round-out characters, change the pace, dissect the rub between what was thought and what was actually said. You may need dialogue because in life people talk to one another and readers want to know what they said. They want to know the sound of the relationships.
Dialogue isn't, strictly speaking, absolutely necessary in a memoir. But when it's done right, it feels essential. It seems to bring one closer to the story's heart.
Beth Kephart, Handling the Truth, 2013
My friend's got this right: Nothing makes a reader question memoir more indignantly than the things set aside by quotation marks.
Unless you walked around your entire life with a tape recorder in your pocket, dialogue will become one of the greatest moral and storytelling conundrums you will face when writing a memoir. You may feel that you need some of it, a smattering at least, to round-out characters, change the pace, dissect the rub between what was thought and what was actually said. You may need dialogue because in life people talk to one another and readers want to know what they said. They want to know the sound of the relationships.
Dialogue isn't, strictly speaking, absolutely necessary in a memoir. But when it's done right, it feels essential. It seems to bring one closer to the story's heart.
Beth Kephart, Handling the Truth, 2013
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