Can You Merge Creative Writing and Memoir?

Memoir: Must writers retreat from creative writing?
Memoir is always creative writing, but memoir is never fiction.

Good memoir reflects the attributes of creative writing, but should not be fiction.

Memoir is a slice of the author's life, one centered on specific events. Memoir has the same characteristics of a fictional story: memorable characters, conflict or an obstacle to overcome, and movement of the protagonist to overcome the obstacle. Memoir is differentiated from autobiography which is a recounting of the events of the author's life. Usually we are pulled through an autobiography less by conflict and its resolution and more by our interest in the author because she/he is famous or familiar.

Memoir must be true to life as the author experienced them. If we want to re-invent our lives, then we call it fiction and can add "based on a true story" if we wish. We cannot, as one author did, say we spent three months in jail when it was three days. It may have felt like three months, but then the author says "the three days I spent in jail felt like three months." Literary license does not allow him /her to treat how it felt as if it were fact.

In memoir, we consciously omit things and people that do not relate to the particular slice of life on which we are focused. We can add-not events-but sensory details that enhance the scene. We can also create dialogue as long as it is true to the event and the persons speaking. Care should be taken, however, not to create someone else's thoughts or motivations. All we know of another's behavior is our own interpretation. While we can report on what we think or thought of their thoughts and motivations; we cannot report them as their thoughts and motivations.

Fictionalizing our lives provides a good alternative to memoir. Reasons to fictionalize our stories abound. We can protect identities. We can gain distance on people, so that we can truly see them as characters caught in their own dilemmas rather than people we assume we know. This distance allows us to see ourselves and our role in the drama in new and deeper ways. 

Two class participants are writing historical novels based on their grandmother's lives. One kept the names of all the family members (all now deceased) but created fictional characters to create more conflict.  The other feels the need to change the names of the characters because family members still live who could be hurt by the revelations. One suggestion for doing this is simply to run a find/replace on character names after the book is finished. Another suggestion is to choose alternative names in the beginning to avoid getting "stuck" in the "real" identity of the person--there's that distance thing again.
 

As a writing coach, I encourage people to write memoir for their families, but if they want to publish the story, I suggest fictionalizing the story. That is, unless they have a very unusual and compelling true story to tell.