Is Everything Really Copy? Let’s Talk About Memoir and Reality TV

When I was in the thick of drafting my debut memoir, I wanted only one thing at the end of a long, emotionally draining writing day: to watch television that promised entertainment and no critical thinking whatsoever. This meant tuning in to The Bachelor franchise for the first time since Rachel Lindsay’s groundbreaking season as the first-ever Black lead to watch Matt James, and then Katie and Michelle, and then Bachelor in Paradise. So much Bachelor in Paradise.

As a memoirist in the midst of deciding how exactly to represent past events, I was intensely aware of how the people I was watching on reality television were being edited into specific character arcs. I was keenly aware of how we, the show’s viewers, were being primed to understand contestants’ journeys as more romantic or villainous or clownish; how popular male contestants who went far but were ultimately rejected by a Bachelorette were given what is called a “Bachelor edit,” setting them up with the fanbase to potentially be the next lead, the next one to find the love of their life through a national television empire. While I had already been thinking obsessively about my own ethics in memoir for years, The Bachelor franchise prompted me to do even more. Not quite the break from work I’d hoped for.

The mediums I worked in and watched raised the question Where is the line between art and life? This problem has concerned philosophers since Plato and Aristotle, and even that legendary duo couldn’t agree on an answer. The Greeks called the representation of the quote-unquote “real world” in art and literature mimesis—an old word for an ever-relevant conversation. Today, we have language, as readers and critics, in the global West that articulates successful artistic mimesis: fictive work that is “believable” or “immersive,” or characters that “feel real,” “like my friends,” where I care about what happens to them long after the last page or episode. The work is successful because I have had a real-world, bodily, emotional, or perhaps even spiritual experience in an imagined place.

But the relationship between art and life and how they do or do not imitate each other simmers beneath the surface of some artistic forms more than others. Such as memoir. Such as reality television. (Never mind that there are now Emmy Award categories for “scripted” versus “unscripted” reality TV; it is all sold to audiences under the same umbrella.) A purported commitment to mimesis is an aesthetic ethic that memoir and reality television allegedly share. But how is life being represented, and to what purpose?

Let’s start with the characters. People in a memoir are characters, snapshots of their “real” selves—and this includes the narrator, the memoirist herself. The version of me in my debut memoir, Heretic, is just that: a version, a slice, a fraction, a fragment, one that does not exist in real life, in part because so much of the “me” in the book is a me that has been reconstituted from my memory. As I write in the final chapter: “Do not look for her; she is not there.”

A book is a constructed narrative (more on that in a bit). I, the author Jeanna Kadlec, am both the narrator of and a character in my own memoir—a character who, according to the contract with the reader, must experience some kind of growth or transformation by the book’s end. Generally, in a memoir, readers expect to be told the story of one or two major transformations in the character-narrator’s life, ignoring the multitudinous other transformations that were and are still underway in the life of the author who wrote it. As a memoirist, I am still growing, off the page. I’m not “done.” Not settled. My life is not neat or contained. But for the sake of a narrative, something about it has to be. The ending doesn’t have to be tidy, but it does have to be satisfying.

And this demand for satisfaction is where the ethics of representing people on the page—other than myself—can get messy. To say that people are characters can sound cold because there is the obvious fact that my sister Jo, for example, is a person who lives and breathes in the world. She is one of my best friends whom I speak to every day, who has a spouse and pets and a full and rich inner life. But in Heretic, the reader doesn’t learn about any of this. Jo is, functionally, a character; she only arrives and exits in relationship to me. Because of the constraints of what I consider to be the ethics of this particular memoir I have written, I do not represent her independently of me, do not imagine scenes with her that have not occurred or that I was not present for, do not extrapolate on dialogue that I do not explicitly recall. Besides, I have a page limit.

In memoir, as in reality television, the real human beings involved are edited down to the parts that serve the narrative function. On The Bachelor, this can be famously extreme and unfair. This was exemplified by Rachel Lindsay’s season of The Bachelorette: The real love story with her now husband, Bryan Abasolo—to whom she became engaged at the end of the show and whom she has been with for five years, married for three—was sacrificed in order to get a more “dramatic” edit. The producers prioritized Lindsay’s screen time with a different contestant in order to highlight their messy breakup at the finale rather than the beautiful love story she had with Abasolo.

At the time, viewers (myself included) were confused about why Lindsay chose Abasolo at the end because we were fed a different narrative by the authors of the story in which the two of them were characters; now, they’re one of the most successful, long-term couples in Bachelor history. Why would producers choose drama over the blossoming of a real romance? (We can guess why.) In 2018, while recapping Becca Kufrin’s season for US Weekly, Lindsay wrote, of how the show edited her relationship with her husband in comparison with other Bachelorettes, “I was denied my own on-camera happy ending.” (In 2021, she parted ways with the franchise entirely due to the exhausting and systemic racism she experienced.)

This issue of people functioning as characters highlights a central difference—and also similarity—between memoir and reality television. While one is a solo endeavor (at least in its generative stage) and the other is a group project, neither is obligated to represent the interiority of its cast. With memoir, this is integral to the core ethic of the genre. Memoir, from the Latin memoria, or memory, promises only to be one person’s story. It does not presume, necessarily, to go so far as to represent or extrapolate on the inner lives of others—and giants of the genre like Mary Karr and Melissa Febos would argue that this is, in most cases, an ethical step too far. While it is vital that I excavate my own memories and positionality, biases and all, I would never presume, for example, to have the authority to imagine a scene detailing my sister Jo’s private thoughts and feelings.

In memoir, as in reality television, the real human beings involved are edited down to the parts that serve the narrative function.

However, reality television, with its very name making a claim to a representation of some kind of “real,” is far less clear in its ideological and ethical commitments to its cast and to mimesis more broadly as a formal artistic technique. In failing to consider and prioritize the humanity and interiority of the individual people involved, reality TV can and often does both replicate and reinforce behaviors embedded in real-life oppression and systemic harm. Part of The Bachelor’s endemic failure as a franchise, in this moment, is that their narrative goals and the way that producers edit story lines for heightened, often exploitative drama are entirely at odds with the show’s premise, which is ostensibly the lead falling in long-lasting love with one of their many suitors. Matt, Katie, Clayton, and, most recently, Gabby and Rachel’s seasons were primarily drama driven, with more attention given to cast infighting, breakups, and late-season revelations about problematic contestants than to any actual romance. Which raises the question Who, exactly, is making these narrative decisions?

The promise of mimesis in a genre is not that all of life will be shown, only some. But the ways in which such authorial decisions—what’s told and shown, what isn’t—are made off the page and off camera are ever present, not imperceptible to a reader or a viewer. The shadow of “The Producer” lurks in reality television, an invisible, malevolent figure plying the cast with alcohol to cajole confessions and sound bites, and later forcing editors to snip this and that to represent people in a manner that, some contestants insist, is entirely contrary to their character.

More broadly, this kind of figure, malicious or not, is essential to celebrity culture (America’s version of mythology). Producers help public figures curate a public persona, a character with which the public may interact while protecting aspects of the private self. A producer can be external, a literal person like a celebrity’s publicist or a manager, or internal, a shrewd voice in the back of one’s brain. I think of Allison P. Davis’s recent profile of Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, for New York Magazine, where Davis postulated that she could see the duchess’s mind spinning—“She has been media trained and then royal-media trained,” writes Davis, “and sometimes converses like she has a tiny Bachelor producer in her brain directing what she says”—something Markle seems conscientiously playful of in interviews.

The memoirist’s version of this is The Author Within, the part of us that is aware that, as Nora Ephron famously said, “Everything is copy.” (My gentle modification: “Some things can be copy.”) Some experiences just happen and end up becoming content—the aforementioned copy—later on. (Life is stranger than fiction and all that.) But then there are the events that are created and cultivated for consumption, often by The Producer, who is never not aware of the audience.

These are different kinds of mimesis. Characters in a memoir often do not anticipate becoming characters in a memoir; certainly, I wasn’t aware I was going to write a memoir until well after the crisis events of Heretic were over. Ethical care, then, must be taken with the stories that are and are not the author’s; to disguise those who need to be disguised; to reach out to and disclose to those who it is safe to reach out to prior to publication. I sent scenes in Heretic to Jo and other close friends so that they had the chance to edit any dialogue I had written for them, so that it would be more in their voice, or to change any details from scenes that I might have gotten wrong. Few edits came back, but it felt important to involve my loved ones in the process, as it was not one they had initially signed up for.

With reality television, contestants, family members, and other castmates audition, sign up for, and/or otherwise have to legally consent to their participation in the show. However, even this question of consent can get murky: Some memoirists note that folks in their life are often aware that they may end up on the page long before an event is written about, and the entire premise of some reality shows is a bait and switch—contestants on Too Hot to Handle are told they are going on something akin to a sexy spring break only to discover that hooking up while filming is forbidden.

But more or less, memoir and reality television often exist on two separate ends of the question, or expectation, of how life and art interact. With memoir, art purports to imitate, or represent, life, using literary techniques to make sense of an author’s lived experience. With reality television, or at least the Bachelor franchise, life imitates, or is made into, art, or a highly aestheticized, often whitewashed, heteronormative ideal. (Art, in the case of the Bachelor franchise, being a Hollywood romance.) It makes for addictive television but arguably poor mimesis, as is almost always pointed out by the final four contestants’ families during hometown visits, who inevitably ask the couple some variation of How well do you really know each other outside of this bubble? An obvious flaw in the show’s premise that might be solved by fewer dates involving international travel and literal fireworks and more regular outings to the grocery store to see how the person you are falling for actually lives. (Something that successive dating shows like Love Is Blind have tried to account for.)

This isn’t a perfect delineation. Sometimes there is a slippage from one end to the other. A few years ago, after I first told my mother that I was writing a memoir, she started abruptly asking me, in the middle of entirely mundane, forgettable conversations, if this phone call would be in the book. No, I said. Of course not. I hadn’t realized that my disclosure that I was writing about my childhood and adolescence would result in such an immediate internal check on her part, that any normal talk we had about our day was now under suspicion—that I was now a Bachelor-style producer who may be using any disclosure “against” her. Our conversations, for a time, became periodically inflected by my mother’s own self-editing as our relationship became refracted through an imagined audience. This did not last long, but it did make me realize how naive my assumption had been that everyone around me would inherently understand that I was writing about them in good faith.

The reality show is always aware of its audience. The decisions about narrative arcs, on The Bachelor, have been made to increase and retain audience numbers at the expense of meeting the goal of the show’s very premise for years now. The franchise is also, both humorously (Bachelor in Paradise) and far too seriously (The Bachelor and The Bachelorette), self-aware: art responding to art, spawning and creating endless imitations of itself—Walter Benjamin’s art in the age of mechanical reproduction made manifest.

Memoir, conversely, must not be aware of its audience, or, if it is, only sparingly, expertly so. I think of the last chapter of Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water: a benediction and blessing to the reader, written entirely in the much-avoided second person. Not that memoir must ignore the cultural and political context in which it is written—not that it shouldn’t challenge a reader to take action. But rather, the memoir must not cater, must not defer, must not sacrifice the author’s intellectual, emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual veracity on the altar of what the publisher insists “will sell.” (What, then, is the oxymoron that is the celebrity memoir? That is another essay.)

Memoir, I believe, is the story of what happened. It’s also rarely a chronicle of all that happened.

Memoir, I believe, is the story of what happened. It’s also rarely a chronicle of all that happened. This is the value of writing years after the fact: getting to consider the narrative high points and low points of my life from a distance in order to stitch them together, however circuitous or nonlinear. In my experience, transformation is harder to clock close up. After Heretic, I am more sensitive to the line between art and life but also more aware than ever of how fluid it can be. In some ways, I am far more protective of certain aspects of my privacy than I was when I started writing internet essays years ago, particularly in regards to ongoing events. But then the gift of hindsight means that my next book project has me likely writing about things I never thought would see the light of day.

What I know is that it is a gift to be able to evolve on the page, in real time, to write myself into existence over and over with each new book. Not a reality-show contestant, whose two or three or twelve weeks of life are preserved in amber, their character arc dictated by someone else, by how well they “fit” into the premise of a particular television show. But a person utilizing literary techniques to better understand the self; as Joan Didion once said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.” To witness the past self and, through an artistic reflection on life, to create oneself anew.

(So much for no critical thinking.)

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