(1) Based on the week 7 content, how do you define “truth” and do you think it’s achievable or even desirable in a memoir?
Use specific examples (cited quotations) from the memoir AND Slate content pages
Identify 1-3 differences/similarities in each member’s definition
(2) In the podcast “One Family, Three Memoirs, Many Competing Truths,” the interviewer quotes Lee Gutkind on truth and memoir: “It’s your story, that’s what
a memoir is. [. . .] It’s your own personal truth, and it is not necessarily factually accurate, and it’s not necessarily the truth that other people have possessed.”
How does Burroughs conceptualize truth in the first 2 chapters of his novel? How does his version of “truth” line up with those around him?
Include 1-2 quotations from Burroughs
How do the memoirs by Burroughs’ mother and brother address their truths?
(3) In February of 2020, we discovered that Oprah Winfrey had (again) been tricked by a memoirist who wasn’t telling the whole story. In fact, one article by
Rebecca Alter (2020) for the Vulture describes the controversy in these terms: “The book [American Dirt] has been called “stereotypical,” and “appropriative”
for “opportunistically, selfishly, and parasitically” telling the fictional story of a Mexican mother and son’s journey to the border after a cartel murders the rest
of their family. One of the more common knocks is that the book engages in “brownface,” incorporating a nominally Mexican perspective that was written by
a woman who — as recently as 2016 — identified as “white.””
Share with your group another example of “false” Life Writing (memoir, video, documentary) that has been called out by their readers
Include 1-2 examples from course content
In your opinion, do Life Writers have an obligation to tell the truth?