Applying her method of reading as a writer reads to Pam Houston’s Contents May Have Shifted, Judith Kitchen asks, “So is this memoir, masked as novel? Or novel, masked as memoir? That’s one of the first questions that a reader of this book asks. “What does it matter?” you might venture.   Here is our guest author’s explanation.

Reading as a Writer Reads: Judith Kitchen on Pam Houston’s Contents May Have Shifted, Part 2
(Presented in Port Townsend, WA , March 25, 2013 for the 2013 Town Community Read)

This is NOT a complaint or a criticism. Houston’s template delivers a character in flight, one who can fly all over the world and find the irony in any situation and take pleasure in the improbable and whose mind is flexible and curious so that it fills up an otherwise empty life with enough oomph to heat a house all winter. In fact, watch how the individual sentences build in a kind of muscular momentum: here, from page 64—“Time slows down the way it always does when death is lurking behind the next bad decision, and I watch Joe take what seems like forever to climb up on one of the now-in-motion car-sized rocks, and then jump from it to another, and another after that.” The “always” suggests that this person is familiar with life-threatening situations, then the “next bad decision” reveals a wry self-awareness, so the narrator can enter the present by simply stepping back to watch, painting the picture with car-sized rocks, and action following action. Thus, we grow to like the Pam who delivers the one-liners in Pam’s book.

Ah, right on time, this brings us to the big question—Is this book fiction or nonfiction? That question is not as trivial as it might seem, so we will have to return to it. First, I want to tell you that I’ve just returned from a big writers’ conference in Boston where I talked on a panel where the topic was “Why Genre Matters.” The big—I mean BIG—argument these days is how much you can make up in nonfiction. It’s somehow assumed that you CAN make things up. So now writers are haggling over the price, so to speak. Lance Armstrong lied for all those years, but the outrage is nothing compared to how writers—with their envies—can dig into each other’s working premises. Since I fall into the category of “if there is such a thing as fiction, you should call it fiction when you make something up,” I approve of Pam Houston’s decision to call this a novel. But is it a novel? I’ve been thinking about its similarities with and differences from my latest book. Half in Shade, like Contents May Have Shifted, is basically a series of short pieces, almost vignettes, and I had to decide on how to arrange them for best effect so they would add up to a “meaning” that someone would think they understood before I did. I think of it as a book of non-fiction. In it, I am looking at old photographs and also at my own illness and trying to fit both into an examination of how we—all of us—live in the moment before history—our history—is writ. The book itself is a nonfiction project. But . . . here’s the rub: I did not know most of the people in the photographs. I could hardly be writing a history, biography, even memoir. I was forced to speculate, project, imagine. In short, make things up. I wonder if maybe Pam Houston was not working in reverse—needing some nonfiction to make her fiction real. Well, writers have always done that, so we need to dig deeper. We have to try to pick this apart and see what does and does not work—and what works for you may not work for me, and vice versa.

So . . .

What kind of a person do you grow up to be when your mother takes you out of school once or twice each week to take you into New York City while she auditions and then you ride home with the top down, drinking Italian ices?  I guess the answer would be a writer who seems to fly airlines that I’ve never heard of to places that I’ve sometimes heard of and, when she gets there, does the kinds of things I haven’t dreamed of. But that would be assuming that the writer of these many short vignettes in what she calls a “novel” is drawing on her own life, not making everything up. And how can you know? I mean, the woman in the novel is named Pam. The writer on the cover is named Pam. The places she mentions exist, and many of the names are known, as in Mary Oliver or Bob Hass, the poets, or the unending list of songs by Bob Dylan that are meant to add what Pooh Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado calls, “merely corroborative detail intended to give verisimilitude in an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

And the voice! The voice is intimate, almost as though you were sitting through dinner, listening to someone think through the places and people she has known. In the course of the meal, you also hear confessions, self-doubt, and not a few odd ways of looking at the world. So . . . is this memoir, masked as novel? Or novel, masked as memoir? That’s one of the first questions that a reader of Contents May Have Shifted asks. “What does it matter?” you might venture. “I enjoyed the book, so leave it alone. Don’t pick it apart.”

Well, I enjoyed it too, but somehow it still matters to me, and I want to let you in on my thinking. I know what it is to struggle to get things right, and how much fun it is to make things up. Contents makes a terrific memoir. It makes a good novel. There’s a difference, and I want to explore that territory.

Let’s back up a moment, since it seems that the reading process is not going to be quite like reading most novels, where you begin at some beginning and end somewhere else, and in the interim things happen, usually in a kind of chronology, and you begin to know and understand the characters to whom many of the things happen and who make other things happen in return. Those novels—the ones we recognize as novels in that they seem to spin a story that is fairly clearly NOT the author’s private story—often build their meanings gradually. The title becomes significant sometime later in the trajectory.

Here, the title is the first important thing to notice—because you need a handle for reading and understanding what this book is trying to do. It’s a phrase we’ve all experienced—if we fly—and we all know nothing shifts very much in those tightly packed compartments that make up the usual full domestic flight from Seattle to some other reasonably large American city. But this Pam—the one who flies all over the world—goes up in tiny vomit comets in Wyoming and on rickety duct-taped planes in Tibet. There, the contents may really have shifted—and if not physically, then psychically. I think we’d all agree that the author (Pam) wants to suggest that the character (Pam) has made some shifts in attitude and in lifestyle as she incorporates Rick and Madison into her life.

But let’s get back to the novel/memoir conflict. There’s no conflict on the cover. “Novel,” it says. So we enter this book with certain expectations, one of them being that many of the scenes have been fabricated, Google notwithstanding. Another is that the narrator is a character. This narrator gives us a wry, witty account. She’s willing to poke fun at herself, and she’s open to everything. She wings off to exotic places and has conversations that feel like a temporary carnival. They don’t go very deeply into the Pam who is talking—and that’s just the way she wants it. She’s skittish. She seems to be protecting herself. We begin to sense that her relationship with men is close to her twin Pam’s relationship with the reader: a flirtation, a whole lot of desire, but in the end, she is avoiding us, trying not to be hurt, trying to put on a good face. That’s the fun of reading a novel—you get to interpret, and even psychoanalyze. But you don’t worry. This Pam, of the early part of the book, is revealing her soft underbelly even as she gives us some good laughs and cleverly exposes some of her weaknesses. We “read” toward an ending where, we imagine, she will discover some of her strengths.

But the book itself is framed as memoir. It has the feel of memoir—the scattershot of experience that hasn’t yet revealed its significance. Its narrator seems to be weaving her anecdotes into the warp of experience in order to find out something about herself. Her questions are those of a memoirist. And so we read it as memoir, and we do worry—for and about her.

When you read the Author’s Statement in the guide for reading groups—a feature I always abhor since it gives a reviewer little analytic wiggle-room and it removes whatever mystery might make anyone join a reading group in the first place—Houston admits that both her fiction and her nonfiction are about 82% true. This introduces what I’ll call the 18% problem. Where does any one event fall? The buck has to stop somewhere.

Contents is the perfect place to raise this issue. In real life, Houston has written a memoir—and its style is very similar to this book. In the memoir, well, the 18% is problematic. If you can’t tell fact from fiction, then you simply assume that she means she’s done the usual: changed names, altered timelines, conflated characters, embellished at times, omitted details at others, dramatized. Mostly these could be considered venial sins because why would someone writing a memoir make up a life she didn’t lead? She can do that in fiction. Memoir is for self-examination.

Houston has also written what she calls short stories. Her natural anecdotal bent is definitely successful in Cowboys Are My Weakness—a book of discrete incidents that do not demand a chronology, not even a fractured one. And if 82% of these stories is true, so what? There’s no rule in fiction that you have to make up everything.

This novel, though, does not translate quite so easily, and that’s because the writer casts it as memoir and we, as readers, begin to demand something of that 18%. We worry about it. We worry even though she tells us this is a novel, because memoir serves certain functions and we start to want this story to fulfill them. Suppose it were cast as a memoir by a person named, say, Janice? We’d buy in. But this is by Pam—a Pam who is a writer and teacher and knows some of the real people we also know and acts very much like the character Pam. So she is flirting again, giving just enough of the recognizable 82% that we sort of want to know what really did happen, and what didn’t. How are we going to figure out what it means if we can’t tell where any of the lines have been blurred?

In writing, the lines are always blurred. Trust me, we know that. In the reading group guide at the back of my own novel (yes, I capitulated), I am quoted as saying, “Am I Molly? No, but her inner life is available to me.” Which is a cagey way of admitting that I had definitely been drawing on autobiographical material. When I was creating my Molly Bloom, filling in her back story, I used a whole lot from my own life, even to the point of borrowing whole passages from my essays. But in doing that, I discovered something: what worked as interesting anecdote—as reality—in memoir, often became metaphor in fiction. For example, the real flood of my childhood (with all its corroborative details, like silt in the teacups and cows dead in their stanchions) became, in the novel, a metaphorical way of dealing with being overwhelmed by life.

I suspect that something similar happened in the case of Contents. The author Pam unsettles us with the character Pam. The 82%—those real journeys, those trips that served to serve her up the world and give her some adventure, begin to stand for the character Pam’s rootlessness. Those friends on whom she relies for relief and stimulation become emblematic of the way women support each other. That very real child can suddenly symbolize family. In other words, they function somewhat differently depending on what genre you think you’re reading.

I don’t know who wrote the study questions at the end of the paperback version, but I’m guessing Houston played some role. And the first question asked is one of genre. So . . . let’s pretend that every single thing in the book actually happened. 100%. Well, 97%. I’m betting Houston would still call it a “novel.” For one thing, life circumstances have forced her to call it fiction—it’s a way to avoid getting sued, and if we know a character like Pam’s Sofree, she’s the kind who might sue. So part of the decision lies with the nonfiction version of Sofree & Co. Or with Oprah & Co., for whom Houston writes. Because Oprah got burned with James Frey, and Oprah’s on the lookout for fake, and Houston knows that.

But there’s more—the structure of the book, the relatively random ordering of the vignettes and the way individual segments themselves are cut open, fractured by the intrusion of yet other incomplete stories from yet other times and in yet other tenses, suggests to me that Houston was struggling a bit with that 82%. That chronology has been altered, that the “timeline” itself has been shaped to the demands of fiction. But we enter a novel with the expectation that it will have a chronology, even if it is subliminal. So I think Houston made a brilliant choice to mix up time, to impose a deliberate randomness. It serves her well. It allows her to pull something out of one person’s mouth and put it in another’s. To supply Ethan as a companion when, in fact, he might have been a combination of Gerald and Brian and Terry. In short, it allows her to make a novel out of not-so-whole cloth.

So, if she has played around with timeframe, and maybe, just possibly, embellished in order to dramatize a story, she has probably invented some dialogue as well. My suspicion is that most of the contents of Contents have not shifted all that much—they haven’t been so much made up as altered just a bit. My guess is that many of the jaunty remarks were actually said in real life, but possibly not by the “character” in whose mouth she has put the words. And that some of what she lets a character say are her own thoughts, given more weight if someone else says them to her. I mean, how many of us have friends who can instantly provide a one-line clincher? Those are the things we think of the next day! Thus we come to understand that Houston has not been exploring her life so much as mining it.

The slight problem, as I see it, lies mostly in the ending. On page 259, to be exact. It’s there that the character Pam refers to the alternative title she had planned for this book—a title that the author Pam refers to in her innocently seditious study guide. I have the same feeling you sometimes get watching a play when an actor gets too close to the edge of the stage and you begin to wonder if he might fall, and then you’re no longer inside the play, but someone watching a play and aware of it. You worry.

On page 259, Pam Houston forgot she was making a novel and acted as though she was making a memoir. Although her character Pam is also a writer and teacher, the writer Pam forgot to have her be in the process of writing a book. So when she talks about what she had originally intended to call the book, it’s not the character (who, in her character life, would not be talking about this particular book as an entity because some of it would not have happened yet) but the author (as pseudo-memoirist) who is giving us this information. She’s intruding on her fictional realm, and from this point on, her character doesn’t quite recall that she’s supposed to be fictional. The reader—who has always been aware of two Pams—now sees only one Pam, and that’s the one on the cover of the book, not the one inside its pages. The illusion has been broken.

In fact, the genie stays stubbornly outside the bottle because the author refers to the book again. And then again. And then the author remembers, and tries to wrest the book back into fiction. But the final segments feel as though they have been conscripted—forced to make a meaningful ending to what has, in its very real 82% life, not yet come to a natural conclusion. There’s an unfinished quality to memoir, and this book, as a novel, strives a little too hard for closure. It wants out of its manufactured frame. Thus the illusion of nonfiction within the illusion of fiction has failed to find an adequate fictional nonfictional ending.

I know this sounds convoluted—and maybe far too picky—but I think it is fascinating how genre does demand something of us as writers, and how the mix of real and imaginary can cause us trouble in one spot even as it helps avoid it in others. I think it’s fascinating how genre generates expectations in readers. For example, if this book had been about Janice, I might not have gone to Google at all; I might have assumed that the Peace of Art Café—with its play on words—was the clever joke of a writer having fun creating this particularly new-agey world. And then I would have deprived myself of the fun of confirming just how real it was in our real new-agey world. That brings us to the issue of what kind of world the book is highlighting. You’ll notice I have not touched on the issue of “spirituality.” I’m not going to touch that topic with a hundred-foot pole!

Still, I think it’s legitimate to ask whether we believe in this character—the Pam who has been everywhere and done everything so that she can drive a dogsled (yet somehow mixes up a horse and a mule) and seems so expectantly open to what the new age has to offer. What kind of a character is being forged here? And her surrounding cast of characters (the Cinders et. al.): are all those women realistic, or do they seem manufactured, character as “mere corroborative detail”? What about Rick? Is he a fully fleshed character, or is he used as a foil to make the character Pam appear to be more grounded? If he’s even 82% real, has the author Pam been fair to him? We won’t go into Madison because, as child characters go, her 18% merges with her 82% and she is so much more believable than the awful Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, or, god forbid, Tiny Tim.

Still, don’t forget that qualifying “may” in the “may shift” of the title. Nothing is settled—yet. That title asks us to contemplate just what did shift, and how, and when, and where.

And that brings me to the now-pertinent question of the questionnaire. I found myself speculating about whether this book would appeal more to women than men, more to people who take risks in their own lives, more to people of a certain generation, etc. And, of course, I wanted to know how picky people are who come to a talk like this. So let me ask you—have the contents shifted? Has there been some mature transformation, or is the character Pam ripe for new flight?