TRUTH

AND

MEMOIR

• Definition: “a narrative (story) composed from personal experience”

MEMOIR

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION (10 MINUTES)• Is it important to you as a reader that things that are

presented as true actually are? Why or why not?

• Can something be true but not factual?

• What's the difference between factual truth and emotional truth?

• Is it possible to have two conflicting versions of a single event that are both factually-based?

• What does crafting a memoir involve?

• Is it acceptable for a writer to mislead or even manipulate the reader to convey a story?

• In what situations might writers bend the facts?

• Is it okay to do this? Why or why not?

THREE CUPS OF TEA BY GREG MORTENSON

From The New York Times book review:

In September 1993, cold, hungry and lost after a failed ascent of K2, Greg Mortenson stumbled into the village of Korphe, Pakistan. His misstep forever changed the lives of thousands of Pakistani and Afghan children.

In gratitude to the people of the village who helped him, Mortenson vowed to build a school for their children, who were studying in the open air, scratching in the mud with sticks. Keeping that vow turned Mortenson — a laid-back drifter, emergency nurse by profession and climber by avocation — into a driven fund-raiser who helped found, and now directs, the Central Asia Institute. Mortenson didn’t stop with one school: realizing how desperately children in the region needed education, he traveled to the remotest outposts of Pakistan and Afghanistan to create more. His foundation has built 78 schools, which have educated 28,000 children, including more than 18,000 girls, who had rarely received an education before.

This story is familiar by now to the 1.2 million adults who have kept Mortenson’s book “Three Cups of Tea” on the best-seller list for more than two years.

60 MINUTES

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhAb37yZ0o0

gregmortenson.blogspot.com http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/jon-krakauer-publishes-greg-mortenson-expose_b28087

• What if a story is so compelling that it leads the reader to something bigger, as Three Cups of Tea does for so many readers?

• What if the fabrications themselves helped lead you to something that you might not have been as open to had the work stuck strictly to the facts?

DISCUSSION: TRUTH – IMPORTANT IN MEMOIR?