David Shields

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David Shields. Photo: Laurel Angrist. © 2007 Laurel Angrist.


In his memoir, Enough About You, David Shields writes that he was fired from Brown University's student newspaper, The Brown Daily Herald, because he "made stuff up." But when he lectured at New York University recently and his student audience pressed for the details of the Herald incident, Shields quickly admitted: "Oh, I just said that. I didn't really get kicked off the student newspaper." In more ways than one, this anecdote exemplifies Shields's conception of fact and fiction as interchangeable entities.

Shields is unapologetic. He has trouble telling the truth, but doesn't consider himself a liar. "I think that memory itself is a fiction-making operation, that memory is a dream-machine," Shields said in his April 25, 2007 lecture at NYU's journalism department. It was on this fine line between fiction and nonfiction that Shields, the author of 10 books and numerous essays and short stories, focused his lecture. "James Frey was used as a paper tiger to mis-position memoir as journalism," Shields told students. "Memoir is literature. Its goal is truth, not to be literal."

Shields's fiction is autobiographical, his nonfiction heavily fictionalized. "Obviously, if the Sonics lost on February 12, I didn't say they won," Shields told Nextbook.org in a May 2004 interview. "But all the private stuff, maybe I tweaked it or collapsed a bit. I tighten things up to make them more dramatic, I exaggerate to the point of inventing."

"I wouldn't want to privilege the truth of research as some how superior to the truth of memory.”

Shields's books reveal that he's a stutterer who found liberation in writing, a high school athlete whose basketball career ended with a broken leg, and a secular Jew who defines himself by his Jewish-ness. These biographical motifs appear repeatedly in his work: In Shields's novel Dead Languages, the protagonist is a stuttering student striving to be a writer; in his memoir, Enough About You, the author attends speech therapy sessions between Iowa Writers' Workshop classes.

But even these autobiographical anecdotes are not necessarily factual. "What happens once you start to write is the composition process itself takes over, and you create the most dramatic story that you can," Shields told Nextbook.org. In Enough About You, for example, Rachel, the girl Shields loses his virginity to, is actually a composite of several women. "I write things one inch from life, but all the art lies in the inch," Shields said.

So why play fast and loose with truth and fact? Because, Shields said, expressing his point is more important than relaying reality. Indeed, his anecdotes often serve as vehicles for abstract musings and intellectual discourse: A stutter can become a metaphor for the struggle of self-expression, a broken leg can lead to a revelation about the fallibility of the human body. "Nonfiction is a framing device to foreground contemplation," Shields told students.

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David Shields. Photo: Laurel Angrist. © 2007 Laurel Angrist.

Shields doesn't feel that manipulating his anecdotes detracts from the legitimacy of his books. Instead, he said that the very act of recreating past events involves creating them — filling in the factual gaps in one's memories. "I mean, I'm fifty years old and I'm trying to remember how I acted when I was fourteen," Shields said. "Ok, I might have exaggerated somewhat, but that's meaningless because memory itself creates this really false distinction."

Despite the problems that arise when writing from memory, Shields said reporting should not supplant memory in memoir. "I wouldn't want to privilege the truth of research as somehow superior to the truth of memory," Shields told students. "In no way would I want to privilege public record as somehow being truer."

Shields openly admits that his is the minority opinion and that he is hoping the release of his next book will ruffle a few journalistic feathers. "I hope some of it really pisses you off, because I'm arguing against objective standards of journalism," Shields told his NYU audience. "I hope it will be greeted with fury. It really argues against conventional wisdom. I'm trying to provoke people to think about these categories in a much more gray way."

Brian Childs is a graduate student in the journalism department at NYU.

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