Fiction vs Non-Fiction
What counts as non-fiction when no one remembers the same story?
You might think the most common question I get asked about book club is when and where it is, but no, the more important question and sometimes contentious question is…
“Is fiction or non-fiction?”
When I first set it up, I thought it would be a fiction club and loosely advertised it as such. It’s not that I don’t read non-fiction, I do, but since becoming a freelancer, everyone bangs on about the latest business/self development book and I want something to escape into, not to learn from. Well at least not in a formal sense where I have to make notes to remind myself of all the things I was doing wrong and how easily I could fix it.
Even after our first meeting I thought we would lean more into fiction, but we quite soon started seeing suggestions of non-fiction. At first there was a bit of chatting on the subject as apparently I said it would definitely be fiction only, not sure I did, but in any case, I’m covered by the one rule of book club.
No-one talks about book club.
Ok, that’s a lie. I talk about it all the time. If I meet someone new or find a newcomer to the island I am immediately trying to recruit them to the club.
Anyway, I digress.
Our actual one rule is that the designated ‘book chooser’ brings along two books, gives us a sales pitch of sorts and we take a vote on the one we want to read. I can’t be held responsible for the votes and of the 11 books so far (that’s almost a year folks), 4 have been non-fiction. There is clearly an interest in the real-life stories.
And this question isn’t unique to my latest book club.
When I started my first book club way back in 2008, it was the same question, but back then I was fully committed to never reading non-fiction. I’m not sure why, maybe I still carry the trauma of uni textbooks. Non-fiction has always felt worthy and intellectual and I’m rarely in the mood to try to be either worthy or intellectual.
Still, I’ve always felt slightly sheepish (ashamed) to admit that I prefer fiction.
As if the stories I escape into are a lesser form of reading.
As if I should always be improving myself rather than wallowing in the joy of the story.
As if a fictional book is less worthy than non-fiction.
As if fiction doesn’t teach me anything. It does, it really does.
I apologise to all authors of fiction, most of my idols are fiction writers…Margaret Atwood, Maeve Binchy, Khaled Hosseini, Phillip Pullman, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Bram Stoker, Elizabeth Strout and Alice Walker. I could go on, but I won’t.
And then just because the book is non-fiction it doesn’t mean it’s objective.
How much of it is actually true?
When we look at memoirs and autobiographies (will someone please explain the difference), what we’re really getting is one person’s version of events. Their truth. Their story. It’s shaped by their memory, emotion, interpretation. It’s what they felt and understood at the time and also what they now believe about it.
It gets wonky. Ask someone else who was in the room, at the same time, seeing the same thing what happened, and they’ll probably you a slightly different version of events. Memory isn’t a perfect record, it’s a reconstruction and gets edited every time we go back to it.
Bear with me while I get a little bit nerdy.
Psychologists have found this in witness interviews and police investigations. Two people describing the same incident will often disagree on basic facts, such as who said what, what order things happened in, or whether the car was red or blue. But if those two people talk about it afterwards, their stories can start to blur together and one person’s version might become the dominant one. The result? A shared truth.
Ultimately, nothing is truly objective, it can’t be. It’s all based on the stories we tell ourselves and our version of the truth.
A classic example is our childhood.
If, like me, you have siblings, you’ll know we have slightly different memories of our upbringing. Of course that’s to do with age differences, how our parents treated us individually and our understanding of certain situations. For example, my recollection of my parent’s divorce and subsequent fall out is very different to either of my brothers. I was the youngest, so I was supposedly “protected” from the worst of it.
But is that true? I don’t know, that’s what I’ve been told and my real truth is that I don’t remember it. I don’t remember them being together, which is odd considering I was almost eight when the shit hit the fan. I guess for me, the best way to deal with it, was to block it out and I’m ok with that. Long may it remain in the shadows and with no parents to talk to anymore, what would be the point in trying to unearth it?
Here’s a quick round-up of the books we’ve read so far and my thoughts on them in one-line reviews, more or less.
The First Phone Call from Heaven by Mitch Albom (F): Awful
Big Little Lies by Lilian Moriarty (F): Just as good the second time round and better than the telly box series which I also enjoyed.
Shackleton by Ranulph Fiennes (NF): Good, if not a little boring. Explorers are basically people (men) with massive egos and little to no consideration of anything but the mission. He was an AWFUL husband.
Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson (F): Really loved this and the fact it was set in my old tramping ground of York.
An Infamous Army by Georgette Heyer (F): Ooft. Expertly researched but too detailed for my taste and overall the story was a bit meh. I will try another of hers though.
All the Light We Cannot See by Andrew Doerr (F): Enjoyable (is that the right word?) read. I loved the style, short snappy chapters and movement between times, places and narratives is right up my street.
The Five by Hallie Rebunhold (NF): OMG. A must read for EVERYONE. Fantastic.
All My Wild Mother by Victoria Bennett (NF): Loved the interweaving of the garden apothecary with this heartfelt memoir.
Wintering by Katherine May (NF): Gorgeous. Really gorgeous. It made me wonder if I am in a permanent state of wintering. I have snippets of joy and happiness, but it never endures. That’s not to say I’m unhappy, I just don’t understand happiness as a permanent state of being.
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (F): Once the story started I really got into it but I was very disappointed by the end. Not because it wasn’t all joy and light but because it was too quick and, in my view, unrealistic. The whole story is unrealistic, but the final acts didn’t work for me in terms of human behaviour.
The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods (F): Currently reading and enjoying. After a few heavier reads, it’s a lovely escape.
Can we join book club if we don’t live on Orkney? Could a Hebridean island count?
How funny that you say that you've felt slightly ashamed to say that you prefer fiction - I feel the same saying that I prefer non-fiction these days. After taking novels apart for my PhD (memory and imagination in Proust and Flaubert), I felt absolutely done with fiction and turned to non-fiction as if hungry to make up my lack of education in areas such as history, social history, geography, geology, exploration (and yes, lots of massive male egos). Never self-help books tho! Now, many years later, I still read more non-fiction, especially history and social history, but I make honourable exceptions for eg Ursula Le Guin, the Persephone Books offerings (but please not The Deepening Stream by Dorothy Canfield. It's the first book I've ever literally thrown I was so annoyed by it, tho I did leave Great Expectations behind on a beach in Californa), and the great writers of the Golden Age of British children's writing, including Rosemary Sutcliff, Peter Dickinson and Alan Garner.
As for the different memories of witnesses, I received my PhD at the same ceremony as Julian Boon, of the Mills and Boon family, who had also written a PhD on memory, but from the psychology discipline. Unsurprisingly, he now advises police investigations.