Truth Be Told?: Autobiographical Stories

Marianne Janack 

I am listening to the audiobook version of Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography. It begins with this claim: “I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I. By twenty, no race-car-driving rebel, I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and already a member in good standing amongst those who ‘lie’ in service of the truth . . . artists, with a small ‘a.’ But I held four clean aces. I had youth, almost a decade of hard-core bar band experience, a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style and a story to tell.” Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography is a peek into the world of Freehold, NJ, his family, and how he went from being a major fuck-up to being a major superstar.

As I read, I was struck by the question of whether we ought to care that he created autobiographical characters in his songs that weren’t like him? I suppose some people do, but I don’t—after all, he tells great stories. But to begin an autobiography with the claim that one is a fraud—“a member in good standing amongst those who ‘lie’ in the service of truth” makes the reader wonder: is what I’m about to read a lie? Has Springsteen just invoked the liar’s paradox?

It’s not unusual for artists to claim that they “lie” in the service of a higher truth, that they mislead people about facts in order to lead them to a more important insight. It is also not unusual for writers to claim that autobiographies are impossible—that to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is impossible generally. We all select what to tell and how to tell it—our memories are unreliable, and most narratives require dramatizing memories to make them more vivid, to get the reader to enter into the memory. Moreover, people often don’t agree on past events, even if they were all present for those events. Telling a story to an audience is more like producing a movie than giving a true and unbiased account of what happened.

Some writers have tried to get around this challenge by writing “memoirs” rather than autobiography. A memoir is supposed to capture how the writer/narrator experienced events—so the issue of memory is sidelined. “It was true for me,” says the memoirist, “it doesn’t matter if it was true for anyone else.” 

But I wonder if the problem here is that the skeptics fail to distinguish between saying true things and being truthful, and between dramatizing through fiction and saying false things with the intention to misleading. Furthermore, the idea of ‘truth’ that artists and writers use seems like an oddly difficult one to achieve, and seems to run together ‘true’ with ‘unbiased’. Maybe only God has access to that viewpoint—if so, then all humans are bound to have false ideas. And, if that’s so, then why care about truth at all anyway?

In his history of memoir, Ben Yagoda traces the autobiography back to conversion stories, chronicles, and confessions. The narrative structure of the conversion story emphasizes the change in the narrator, who goes from evil—or unbeliever—to virtuous or faithful (think of Augustine’s Confessions here). The narrative structure of the chronicle emphasizes the trip or the remarkable experience (think of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries). The narrative structure of the confession is, quite literally, a confession (Rousseau’s Confessions, a classic example). In all cases, the person who wrote an autobiography had to have a good reason for writing about themselves—after all, there was something unseemly about a person who wanted to focus so much attention on themselves, and demanded of a reader that much time. Yagoda says that the autobiographer was like the dinner guest who spends too much talking about himself. Even if he’s led an interesting life, he shouldn’t be so narcissistic. 

And yet, as Yagoda remarks, there is a huge appetite among the reading public for memoir and autobiography—and not just when the narrators/authors are famous. The trauma narrative, the narrative of physical or mental illness, the narratives that focus on mistreatment by lovers or parents—all these sell well, even if the author or narrator is not well-known. Supposedly, these narratives are meant to be instructive, or to help readers, but one can’t quite shake the feeling that part of the explanation for this popularity is voyeuristic—that peak into someone else’s life is irresistible. 

What is it we want, then, when we read memoir or autobiography? A surreptitious look behind the curtains?

Yet, of course, the author has published this writing, these details, so how surreptitious can it be? Do they or we seek identification? That, of course, would be possible in any work of fiction. So, maybe when Bruce Springsteen tells us that he’s a fraud, but that his autobiography is a truthful account of his growing up, he reveals to us that we want both from our reading experiences: we want truthfulness and creativity—we want both that which is true and that which is false.