The latest fake-memoir scandal raised a question: Why not simply convert the purported autobiographical material into fiction?

The glib answer is that publishers want memoirs because they sell and novels don’t. But switching genres isn’t easy. Kathryn Harrison has written both fictional and nonfiction accounts of her youth. Below are passages, describing the same events, from her novel “Thicker Than Water” and her memoir “The Kiss.” After that, I ask Harrison about the similarities and differences.

From “Thicker Than Water”:

Thicker Than Water

My mother was always excessive in her material generosity and gave an embarrassing flood of presents for every birthday or Christmas. For a few years before she died, and certainly long before I ever suspected that my mother was dying, I saved one or two gifts. I would rewrap them in their pretty paper which I had been careful not to tear and save them as if they could provide some protection — like canned goods — against famine, a future dry season. I have all those presents, some still wrapped. I am unsure of the contents of the boxes; the paper is faded, ribbons are missing or frayed. Some I opened, on a birthday, perhaps, invoking her presence. Two cashmere sweaters, one blue, one gray — never worn, but in the drawer now with the others — a nightie, a porcelain dog, a bottle of my favorite perfume sealed with a pressed medallion of wax and a gold cord.

From “The Kiss”:

The Kiss

Christmas presents. Birthday presents. Presents for Easter, for Valentine’s Day, for Halloween. All rewrapped in the pretty paper I am careful not to tear, ribbons I untie but do not cut. I retrieve the bright papers and bows from trash cans after the celebrants of whatever occasion it is have gone to bed. Smooth them, replace them around the boxes. I have to preserve them just so, this evidence of my mother’s love, or what passes for it, what she calls love. Her gifts are valuable in that they always provide clues as to how I might ingratiate myself. If she gives me a dress in a size six, then I know to alter my size ten self to fit it. … It will be years before I can acknowledge that in preserving such evidence I document another, different emotional transaction: not one of love but of rage, my rage over always receiving directives disguised as gifts and my refusal, ultimately, to accept them. Under the Christmas tree I make the appropriate noises of delight, but then later, alone, after the house is dark, I reverse my response, I reject the gifts by wrapping them back up as if I’ve never opened them.

So what’s “true” and what’s “made-up”? What’s fiction and what’s nonfiction? Is the distinction black and white, or is it complicated, slippery, subtle? Here’s what Harrison says:

I made up scenes for the novel that expressed what I understood about my family better than any real events I could remember, and mixed those with actual memories, most of which I tried to avoid repeating in the memoir. But I felt I had to keep a handful of scenes in “The Kiss” because they were essential to the story. They are though written with a different intent: the novel shows a me I wish I’d been; the memoir has a necessarily colder eye, and intends to be a vivisection.
Isabel, the narrator of “Thicker Than Water,” is a younger, sweeter version of me, a girl who represents my sorrow not my rage. When she tries to speak of her anger, there’s no heat in it; she sounds philosophical, melancholy, as if she were addressing a situation that has nothing to do with her. I wrote “Thicker Than Water” only a few years after the death of my mother. I wanted to tell the story of my family — it was the only one I could tell at the time, the one that consumed me — but I hadn’t given myself permission to own my history publicly. Nor had I come to terms with the truth of my relationship with my mother, feelings that were far more complicated than those I held for my father. Without the self-scrutiny that a memoir demands, without the intent to know and expose the truth about oneself, no matter how ugly, I found myself writing a wishful — wistful — version of the past. So Isabel, always longing, rewraps gifts from her mother and hoards them; they are a form of her mother’s love, of which there is never enough.

By the time I began writing the memoir — 10 years after the novel — I was ready to face what Isabel could not. My mother had abandoned me to her mother and our relationship had been characterized by my longing and her rejection, which ranged from neglect and indifference to outright cruelty. It had been easy to accept my grief over this, but I’d been trained to believe that anger was the property of men and unsexed a woman. Even more, my rage was so intense, so destructive, that I was afraid of it, with reason. So the greatest challenge of the memoir was admitting my anger with my mother. Unlike Isabel, the child in “The Kiss” who rewraps gifts her mother gave her doesn’t do this out of a need to preserve her mother’s love; that child — I— recognized my mother’s gifts as taunts and criticism, and I refused them.