Travel writing has long been considered to be one of the least reliable forms of nonfiction narrative. Scholars often point to the fourteenth-century Travels of Sir John Mandeville as the iconic example of a classic travel book that bore little relation to truth, but skepticism about the tales of voyagers runs from Lucian’s second-century True History all the way up through the alleged fabrications of Greg Mortenson’s twenty-first-century Three Cups of Tea.
Indeed, travel books have always had an unreliable relationship to facts – in part because, in journeying far from home, the traveler is both prone to misunderstand what he sees in distant places, and also tempted to invent or exaggerate details that are unlikely to be fact-checked by the home audience. As the protagonist the eighteenth-century comic adventure novel Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia declares, “a traveler has a right to relate and embellish his adventures as he pleases.”
So did Pilgrims in a Sliding World, my never-published first attempt at a travel book, veer from the actual truth of what happened to me as I traveled across North America by van?
At times, yes, it absolutely morphed into passing moments of fiction – and that’s what I’ll explore here.
Inserting half-truths into your book’s inciting incident book is a bad idea
The line between fiction and nonfiction is a common concern in travel- and memoir-writing circles, since “creative nonfiction” narratives don’t typically hew to the same rigid rules as news journalism. As writer and actor Andrew McCarthy shared with my Paris writing students last year, memoirists often bend timelines and conflate events in the interest of a more satisfying and coherent narrative – but depicting incidents that never happened means that your narrative has veered into fiction.
The incidents and details of Pilgrims in a Sliding World feel largely true (if at times slightly impressionistic), though it appears as if I let myself veer into fiction at certain moments when I was unsure if my real story was worth articulating.
In the book’s opening chapter (“Face the Muzak”), for example, I describe a dream I’d had in the summer of my twentieth year, when I worked at a summer job stocking shelves at a Dillon’s supermarket in Wichita. In a faintly overwritten section where I describe working ten-hour “graveyard” shifts five nights a week (calling myself “a Sisyphean stagehand for the nightly Muzak opera of blandly choreographed shopping carts”), remember things this way:
In the dream, I was standing in a large, open indoor space that was full of chairs and people. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been there, but I somehow knew that it was The First Day of the Rest of My Life. None of the people had faces, and no one was doing anything; everyone was just standing around while a tinny Muzak version of “Pomp and Circumstance” played cheerily and endlessly over a loudspeaker. Although I recall feeling mildly panicked that The First Day of the Rest of My Life was so drab and listless, I didn’t do anything worthy of a film-rights bidding-war, like blow up the loudspeaker and blast my way out of the room with a machine-gun. Instead, I just stood there as the Muzak played relentlessly.
As far as omens go, the dream certainly wasn’t of the angel-with-a-flaming-sword-telling-me-to-take-my-first-born-and-flee-to-Egypt variety. Nonetheless, I awoke with a feeling of dread that has never quite left me. The dream suggested that my future—my American Dream—had been boiled down to a loop of Muzak: a plastic rehashing of the old, written for people to ignore. My accomplishments-to-be, which had always comforted me in their bright and blurry hope, were to amount to monotonous pre-recorded filler.
Three decades after writing this, the “dream” in question strikes me as deeply suspicious – in part because I’ve always had difficulty remembering my dreams, and in part because the details of the dream feel too specific and detailed.
In retrospect, it’s clear that my book’s central thesis – a young man resolving to travel North America for eight months, out of vague ambivalence about his future in the face of the American Dream – was never articulated in a way that reflected my real life. (And while Muzak was indeed piped in to that Dillon’s store each night, I suspect I shoehorned this detail into my hypothetical dream because “Face the Muzak” made for a catchy chapter title.)
Indeed, instead of honestly examining my own ambitions and anxieties in the face of adulthood, I appear to have invented a nocturnal dream that (somewhat improbably) symbolized those anxieties.
Conflate real incidents if you must, but don’t make them up entirely
Comedian Ari Shaffir has talked about how we invariably dream up the best comebacks to perceived insults when we’re walking home from the incident in question – and it feels like some scenes from the early chapters of Pilgrims in a Sliding World belonged more to after-the-fact imagination than to what actually happened in real life.
Take for example this exchange from Chapter Two (“Looking for Mat-Makers”) of the book, which supposedly depicts an encounter with a young woman who accused me of being a “narc” while I was waiting in line outside of 924 Gilman Street, Berkeley’s legendary all-ages punk-rock venue:
“Name ten Bay Area bands,” she demanded.
I looked her in the eye. “Deathmuffin, Asphalt Pudding, Thunderjelly, Bubblehammer, Glory Rub, Greasepack, Somebody’s Liver, Stencil, Flesh Melon, and Platonic Fellatio,” I said, making up the names as I went along. I’ve always found obscurity to be a virtue among punk elitists.
“I haven’t heard of any of those bands!” the girl screeched.
“Somebody shut that bitch up!” yelled a guy further up in line.
“Yeah, man,” somebody else said. “She’s probably the one that’s the fucking narc.”
Clever as those hypothetical band names were, I don’t think I made them up in real-time. Moreover, I have no real-life recollection of anyone accusing me of being a narc that night in Berkeley.
That said, I do recall feeling faintly unwelcome amid the cliquish, performatively hip alt-culture denizens of Berkeley – and my experience there reminded me of similar experiences I’d had at indie music venues one year before in Portland and Seattle.
In retrospect, my earnest Midwestern demeanor and outdoorsy-jock fashion-sense didn’t play well in the hipster scenes of the West Coast – no doubt because the alternative music world of the early-mid-1990s was rapidly becoming mainstream, sending scores of musical tourists (who no doubt looked a lot like me) into formerly obscure corners of that subcultural universe.
Instead of taking the time to honestly unpack this dynamic, however – instead of entertaining the idea that the punk-rock hipsters I met there had their own insecurities (or, just as likely, social nuances I’d never considered) – I ginned up a symbolic confrontation for the pages of my book.
Tip #5: The truth tends to work better than whatever you might make up
The essays collected in my second published book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, all contain endnotes that explore how each essay was created. Some of these endnotes touch on notions of narrative verisimilitude to the lived events in question. At times I point out how and why I had rearranged timelines, condensed conversations, and left certain people unmentioned from a scene in the interest of telling a better, more coherent story.
What is not permitted in the interest of telling a better story, of course, is describing incidents that never happened – and it is for this reason that I’m grateful that Pilgrims in a Sliding World never became my first published book. Granted, the untruths that found their way into its narrative weren’t all that egregious, but they also didn’t make the narrative any more effective than the truthful events I’d described elsewhere.
For this reason, I’m glad I got this insecure tendency to make up events out of my narrative system, since doing the hard work of staying true to facts (and plumbing the subtleties) of what actually happened is not just more ethical – it also makes for more effective, relatable, and satisfying storytelling.
Share This
