Writer Andre Aciman says a good memoir can capture emotional truth even when certain historical details are fictionalized. He describes the art of the memoir, and how writers draw on their memories to conjure up literary worlds.
Interviewer: Steve Paulson
Guest: Andre Aciman
Producer: Steve Paulson
Andre Aciman: I was born in Alexandria, Egypt but I’m not Egyptian. I was born into a Turkish family but I’m not Turkish. I was sent to British Schools in Egypt but I’m not British. My family became Italian citizens and I learn to speak Italian but my mother tongue is French. For years as a child I was under the misguided notion that I was a French boy who - like everyone else I knew in Egypt - would soon be moving back to France. “Back to France” was already a paradox, since virtually no one in my immediate family was French or had ever set foot in France. But France and Paris were my soul home, my imaginary home, and would remain so in my life even if after three days in France I cannot wait to get out. Not a single ounce of me is French.
Fleming: Andre Aciman now lives in New York City but he still considers himself an exile without a country that’s really his own. In his new collection of essays called Alibis, Aciman reflects on his memories of various places his loved. He recently stopped by our studio to talk with Steve Paulson.
Steve Paulson: One theme that comes up over and over in your essays is memory, but it’s a very complicated notion of memory. Not just remembering what happened but it might be the memory of longing or a disappointment or - as you put it - of imagined happiness. Why is memory so central to your writing?
Andre Aciman: I think there are many answers one could give to that. One of them is because when you’ve lost something that you believe is important you always revisit that loss. You tend to look back more than you look forward because you are always trying to recreate the narrative that brought you here, you’re trying to understand, you know, “What is this trajectory? What is the itinerary that brought you to where you are today?” Not to have that is to feel completely lost.
Paulson: Is there always an element of longing then in the memories?
Andre Aciman: Yes, yes. Again, it’s a complicated question. You long for something that was in the past, that was very important, and then you spend your whole life trying to recover it. Most people have that when it comes to their childhood, even if it was a bad childhood, they long to recover lost footsteps. In my case I long to recover something that I never loved. So, that puts to me totally paradoxical position. In my case the big mysterious place is Alexandria.
Paulson: Alexandria, Egypt?
Andre Aciman: Right. That’s where I came from, that’s where I was born, and that’s where I was kicked off as [sic] who had to leave Egypt. But I never like Alexandria. Who am I kidding? I’ve never kidded myself, I wanted to get out of Alexandria but nevertheless this is the place that I go back to when I try to understand what happened to me. Who I am? Where am I going? How can you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve come from?
Paulson: So, this is not nostalgia; this is something different?
Andre Aciman: Oh, yes it is, and many people confuse it with nostalgia because that’s an easy name for it. You cannot be nostalgic for something that you couldn’t wait to get out of. There is also another component; it’s the idea that most of our memories are made up of things we wished we had and never got, and so those become memories too by the way.
Paulson: In another words, a memory’s always an inaccurate re-creation of what actually happened? It might be quite fictional?
Andre Aciman: Totally. In other words, if you’re in a place… let’s say you’re in jail and you don’t like the jail and every day in jail you kept thinking of places outside the jail that you’ve never even visited but you imagine them… well guess what… you’ll have memories of those places that you never visited and wished [sic]. So, wishes have a long history and most people cannot tell a wish from an actual event in the past, because they get conflated.
Paulson: Well, this raises all kinds of interesting questions for a memoir writer because ostensibly you’re telling the truth, you’re rendering on the page what actually happened. But off course we know that anyone who is looking back decades to try to recall those details embroiders… perhaps lies? I don’t know…
Andre Aciman: Or you could do it… I call it, “to put a nicer spin on it,” [chuckle] which is to say that I switch the furniture around. The furniture is all there but you need to create a narrative and sometimes very faithful narratives are extremely boring. You need to skip details or you need to make adjustments so that detail A and detail G follow each other right away, as if they were A and B. So, you skip steps but the furniture is all there. So, my life in Egypt, it happened exactly as I tell it. And my family, including those people that lived 50 years before I was born and whose dialogs that I couldn’t have heard because I wasn’t even in my mom’s tummy… Nevertheless I think that I capture their voices and their feelings as accurately as gossip reported to me. And gossip is, for me, a font of information superior to history.
Paulson: Do you have any concerns about recreating conversations and actually putting those conversations within quotes, anything that happens decades ago?
Andre Aciman: No. Not a single one and I will tell you ultimately why. Because the people who were there and who said those things said, “You captured X and Y’s voice perfectly. You captured their personality. This is exactly what I said.”“No you couldn’t have said that because I invented it, but I got you well enough so that you, yourself are persuaded I was writing about you.” And for a writer is the ultimate sort of accolade.
Paulson: Well it raises fascinating questions about what truth is. You’re suggesting that there can be greater truth, to certain degree, in fiction.
Andre Aciman: Well, that goes back to Eric Stotle who said “You know, history tell it as it is you know, literature as it could, might, should have been”and I’ve found that “could might should” far more accurate when it comes to people.
Paulson: If there is one writer who seems to hover over own writing, it would be Proust, I would think… sort of this whole question of memory and, you know, how you create a narrative arc out of memory? How formative an influence was he?
Andre Aciman: Well, Proust is someone I knew when I was a kid. When I was 14 years old, my father spoke to me about Proust, it was my father who introduced me to Proust and he said “You would like Proust.”And, of course, by the way, as soon as he said that the first impulse was “I’m going to hate Proust.” [laughter] “I’m not sure I like you. So, how can I like Proust?” But he told me a couple of things about Proust. About memory, smell, and long sentences. And guess what? All three I knew I was fascinated by before reading Proust. So, I deferred reading Proust as long as I could… but once I got into it, it was the most eye opening experience that I’ve had intellectually in my whole life. Because you’re finding on paper somebody who is you. And I think that the ultimate trick of literature is to tell you a story that you never heard but is your story.
Jim Fleming: Andre Aciman is a novelist and memoir writer. He talk to Steve Paulson about his essay collection, Alibis.
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