Fictional Memoirs or Memoir as Personal Mythology by Christopher Mahon copyright 2003 All Rights Reserved

Must memoirs always be factually true?

There’s tremendous value in searching for the factual truth, to being faithful to the "objective" events of our lives.

But there have been fictional memoirs written.

I’m thinking now of "A Fan’s Notes: A Fictional Memoir," by Frederick Exley.

In these memoirs, I think, the soul’s yearning for truth must transform the facts of life by the imagination in order to properly convey how we feel about life.

I’d like to acknowledge that kind of memoir now, that memoir which may be more personal mythology than factual truth.

And I’d like to say at the outset that I believe we should always be square with our readers. I believe we must always abide by a kind of literary ethics that informs the reader of where we are coming from ’ whether we are coming from a place of complete fiction (the novel); whether we are coming from a place of complete fact, or, at least, the genuine attempt to narrate the facts (a factual memoir); or whether we are coming from a place where the power of our imagination informs the facts to create a story that is a personal mythology, a memoir of the soul more than the body.

All ways, I think, are legitimate avenues to the truth of human experience.

I think a personal mythology may be a valuable form of expression because sometimes the facts may not always express whom we feel we most deeply are.

Take one of the facts about me for instance.

I was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

This fact sometimes bothers me.

It’s not that I have anything against Scranton, Pennsylvania. In fact, I hold it dear to my heart. It is the place where my father was born and grew up in.

It’s just that I didn’t live there long. Soon after I was born my family set off for other places ’ Allentown; San Rafael, CA; Western Springs, IL; Grosse Pointe, MI.

Whenever we went back to Pennsylvania, which we often did for two-week summer vacations, we invariably stayed in the big white house of my maternal grandmother’s, in the small town of Gouldsboro, which was up in the Pocono Mountains, some 19.2 miles and 34 minutes ’ via Pennsylvania State Highway 307, Interstate Highway 380, and Pennsylvania State Highway 507 ’ from Scranton.

It’s the town where my mother grew up. To contemplate my mother as a girl, to contemplate her girlhood, and to imagine her face then and her dark hair and to imagine the dresses she wore in the 1930s and 1940s, to imagine her attending Mass in the tiny stone church that stood next to her mother’s ’ to her own ’ home (the home I slept in as a boy on our summer visits) brings tears to my eyes.

It’s not much of a distance, really, from Scranton to Gouldsboro, but for me Gouldsboro was a completely different world. The forests and the lakes and the rivers within and around Gouldsboro have always been for me an enchanted land.

Sometimes I wish I had been born there. I feel that in many ways that is where my soul came from.

In my own personal mythology I would like to claim Gouldsboro, PA, as the land of my birth.

Isn’t there some truth in that?

Doesn’t that say more about who I really am?

And isn’t that the real question a memoir must answer?

Who are we, anyway?

But it goes beyond even this.

I’m Irish ’ or, at least, Irish-American. On both sides.

I’ve got Irish blood running through my heart and coursing through the rest of my body.

We Irish ’ we are mythologizers. For us, the imagination is a powerful part of our being. All those windy hills in the west of Ireland where Yeats’s faeries and druids lived ’ they, too, are part of me. Yeats himself, I would like to believe, is part of me. His mythologies somehow inhabit my soul. His Vision. His poetic sensibility.

Guinness, Van Morrison, the Chieftans, Yeats, the mysterious elements of the Irish oak trees ’ mix all those up inside my soul as I sit down to write a memoir and then see what happens.

I am writing a memoir. Thus far it is very truthful ’ at least, as far as I can see the truth.

But there may be others. There may be more memoirs in me. I may write my own personal mythology one day before all is said and done. (As I sit here now, I think of how much I am looking forward to the publication of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s memoirs. What will they be like?)

It would, in part, be a testament to my Irish imagination and my mystical feelings for life.

As for truth?

Well, as Keats said, beauty is truth and truth is beauty.

We artists and writers are mercurial animals.

The truth has always been elusive and life has always been a voyage in which we are trying to discover the truths.

"Man From Gouldsboro: A Fictional Memoir," or "From the Heart of the Poconos: A Personal Mythology."

I suppose I could write a book like that.

And I know I would like to read it.

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