o the extent that literary genres have ups and downs, memoir’s stock has been high recently. Maybe the most striking thing about this bull market is the extent to which it has permeated both academic and popular culture: witness, recently, Colin Powell’s My American Journey and Carolyn Heilbrun’s When Men Were the Only Models We Had, to mention just two. And moviegoers have been flocking to “real lives” too, from A Beautiful Mind to I Walk the Line and Capote. I first took real note of the trend when a grad school friend, Lisa Roney, hit the Times Bestseller List in 2000 with her lyrical memoir of life with diabetes, Sweet Invisible Body. And since coming to Eastern I’ve had the good luck to read wonderfully evocative work, both finished and in progress, by our colleagues Martin Scott and Daiva Markelis.

Memoir’s often on my mind, not just because of its resurgent popularity, but because I teach so much of it in early American literature. There’s Franklin, of course, but if students are to understand Franklin’s Autobiography in context they need to read some other autobiographies in the many subgenres that flourished in colonial and Revolutionary America. So I almost always include in our reading Quaker Elizabeth Ashbridge’s narrative of her indentured servitude and quest for the inner light; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s account of her education and her struggle to govern her intellectual and spiritual lives; and narratives of freed slaves, most famously, for the eighteenth century, that of Olaudah Equiano.

Because English majors have so much more practice reading fiction, drama, and poetry, they often tend to approach these “nonfiction” narratives differently than they would other literary texts. Or at least that was how I used to explain to myself their tendency to react overwhelmingly in terms of whether or not they liked the person whose life was being narrated. My experience teaching memoir this semester has changed the way I think about the genre and its appeal.

It was the first time I’d taught the narrative of Olaudah Equiano since we’ve had pretty conclusive evidence of something that scholars suspected for a long time. Despite the claims Equiano makes in his narrative that he was born in Africa, stolen from his family by slavers, and then made the Middle Passage before being sold, the truth appears to be that he was born a slave in the colonies.

Our textbook and its brief biography of Equiano didn’t reflect this new information, and I debated briefly whether to tell my students this before they read the narrative. I decided to wait because I was curious to see whether their reactions would mirror the indignation that burst forth on Early Americanist listservs a few years ago.

I wasn’t disappointed, but I was surprised. After we’d spent two pretty typical class sessions discussing Equiano, I told my students about the recent discoveries. The reaction was even more vehement than I’d expected. One student banged a fist on a desk; another asked if I would please repeat what I’d just said. Comments burst out simultaneously around the room: “Did I hear you right?” “I feel really cheated.” “That’s just not right.”

We had the conversation I’d planned, except it didn’t go as I’d planned. I asked them what they thought Equiano’s motivations for fictionalizing his narrative might have been, and they had no difficulty contextualizing this authorial choice in terms of abolitionist argument and making the case that a personal narrative was far more effective rhetoric than hearsay accounts would have been. They even conceded that they knew the lines between fiction and nonfiction were pretty blurry in the eighteenth century. But with one or two exceptions, they were still angry.

Equiano simply should not, they told me, have represented other people’s experience as his own. “Even with people’s lives on the line?” I asked. At that they mostly conceded that it was a matter of weighing two evils—but, as papers that several of them later wrote showed me, they still felt that the liberties Equiano had taken were, truly, evils.

In conversation with one of my unpersuaded students, I repeated my “lives on the line” question. “But that’s what you don’t seem to get,” she said. “There is someone’s life on the line—Equiano’s.” She was right—I hadn’t gotten it, hadn’t understood how much the individual lives we read, and the truth they claimed to represent, mattered to these readers. So I pressed her a little to help me understand it. Why was this somewhat fictionalized narrative so different from the (presumably) more fictionalized lives we read about in novels?

“When you read a novel, if something bad happens to a character, you might feel bad for a while, but you can forget about it. When I read about Equiano and his sister being stolen from his parents, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” I don’t know whether this student spoke for the others, but her argument made a kind of sense to me. It certainly helped me understand the deep sense of betrayal I had heard in the comments colleagues made on listservs a few years ago: “Do we keep teaching Equiano? How can we, in good faith?”

That’s not to say my students have persuaded me. I’m still on Equiano’s side. What he wrote was, in the words of Kesey’s Chief Bromden “all true, even if it didn’t happen.” And of course, it all did happen, if not every event happened to Equiano.

And what, after all, are we to say about the “truth” of memoir, even memoirs in which none of the basic facts are in dispute? Shortly after the Equiano episode in my class this semester, John Martone mentioned to me the difficulty he’d had teaching a memoir by Bonnie Bremser of her marriage to the poet Ray Bremser (For Love of Ray, a book I understand John is working with a reprint house to make newly available). Bremser’s book is filled with events of almost unspeakable sadness: the Bremsers giving up their child for adoption because Ray Bremser was likely to be jailed if they didn’t flee the country; Bonnie Bremser feeling forced into prostitution to support herself and her husband while in Mexico; her ultimate decision that she had to leave that life despite her tortured love for her husband. If this is the truth of a life, perhaps even the saddest fiction is preferable.

Too, I remember asking Marty Scott once about some discrepancies between the way he told me his story about his period of book kleptomania and the way he wrote about it in “On Stealing Books.” He hadn’t, he said, intentionally fictionalized the essay. “I guess that was the way I remembered it when I wrote it. This is the way I remember it now.”

Is there any point in distinguishing between memoir and novel in the first place? I keep coming back to my students’ outrage over Equiano. The assumption of truth makes memoir compelling; the genre promises the reader a life stripped to the bone, freed of the flesh in which the novelist might dress it. In that promise, even in the most uncompromising of lives, lies memoir’s key fiction—the fiction we most need.