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Acknowledgement of Sources
In April 2004, Bryony Lavery’s play “Frozen” debuted on Broadway. It received rave reviews, garnering Tony nominations for the play, its two stars and the director. Lavery basked in the success—at least, until psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis read the play’s script and hired a lawyer. Lewis said many scenes in the play were based on her memoir, “Guilty by Reason of Insanity: A Psychiatrist Explores the Minds of Killers,” about her life spent working with serial killers.Issue 29
Writers’ Responsibilities to Subjects
In “The Journalist and the Murderer,” Janet Malcolm focuses on a libel suit between Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, and the celebrity biographer he hired to write his story, as a way of examining the relationship between writer and subject.Issue 29
Whose Story to Tell
In “Nonfiction in First Person, without Apology,” Natalia Rachel Singer describes one of her first forays into nonfiction writing. Singer was sent by her journalism professor to follow the trail of the madam of a local brothel.Issue 29
The Vagaries of Memory
from The Vagaries of Memory. Human recollection is, to a large extent, a mystery. Combing through the shifting layers of time, we discover half ideas, fragmented scenes and incomplete sentences. Details from significant life events are lost, while a kindergarten teacher’s name is inscribed permanently in the mind.Issue 29
Use of Family Members as Characters
In his popular memoir, “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim,” David Sedaris analogizes his work as a memoirist to that of a garbage man discarding the family trash. The job stinks.Issue 29
Truth
As philosophers have told us for centuries, passing the truth of immediate experience into some form that can be handed on to others is difficult. Troubled with levels and degrees, mixed with fact, memory and interpretation, truth in storytelling is rarely black and white. We have come to accept that in fiction, truth emerges at a level higher than fact.Issue 29
Tape Recording
The tape recorder would seem to be God’s gift to writers, allowing them to access complete conversations long after the fact and quote dialogue with confidence. During the writing process, having tape recordings or transcripts at hand can be invaluable.Issue 29
Subjectivity
In traditional journalism, reporters are supposed to be objective, to maintain the style of an omniscient, invisible presence. This objectivity is an essential component of journalistic integrity. But writers like Tom Wolfe or Joan Didion, proponents of New Journalism, rejected this notion; instead, they and other writers accepted as necessary the presence, personality and perceptions of the author.Issue 29
Reconstruction of Scene and Dialogue
Our memories function as though we have an internal, private documentary film about our entire lives—only it’s been formatted to the wrong video-software, and it scrambles across different files on several bad disks.Issue 29
Point of View
In creative nonfiction, especially in personal narratives, we can easily begin to feel imprisoned by the bars of “I, I, I” that tend to pepper our prose.Issue 29