There’s something that I never hear anyone discuss, and I have no clue why because it seems kind of important. This is the accuracy of quotes used in books. As many of my followers know, I read hundreds of non-fiction books each year. I’m not really a fan of biographies, memoirs or history books. I mainly stick to science, and sometimes I’ll grab a book from a good journalist. One reason I don’t venture out is because I don’t trust when people quote others from memory.
I need you all to do me a favor and let me know if I’m insane because maybe I’m missing something, but it just seems unethical to present quotes as fact when they’re so easy to screw up from memory.
A quick disclaimer for any people reading this in bad faith:
I’m using the new Jennette McCurdy book I’m Glad My Mom Died as an example, and it’s nothing more than an example. What I’m going to write about goes for every book ever written that quotes from memory.
I am not calling Jenette a liar or implying that she’s done anything nefarious with this book. For those who don’t know, Jenette McCurdy was a child actor who left the business. This book discusses her abusive, manipulative mother and Jenette’s traumatic childhood living with her mother. She also discusses terrible things that happened to her in the industry.
I’m not invalidating any of these stories. Personally, I believe her. I’m just discussing the topic of quotes. I personally believe it’d be hard to find any child actor who didn’t have some kind of traumatic childhood, but that’s a story for another day.
I’m not attacking Jenette or her experience in any way. The reason I don’t think she’s done anything I’m going to discuss intentionally is because it’s such a widespread issue that we’ve all just kind of accepted.
So, let’s get started.
She was 6 years old
I just started Jenette’s book this morning, and I’m barely even in the beginning. I’m on chapter 3 of a 91-chapter book. But this memoir starts when she’s extremely young, and as a skeptic, I noticed the use of quotes early on, and I just couldn’t help feeling some type of way about it.
So far, Jenette’s laid the foundation that she seeks her mother’s approval and will do just about anything for it. Her mom said she’d be a great child actor, so we’re at the part of her first audition.
Here’s the part where I stopped to write this for all of you wonderful readers. It’s right after the audition, and they’re given some paperwork:
[Jenette:] “What are we signing for?”
[Mom:] “The contract just says that the agent gets twenty percent and we get eighty percent. Fifteen percent of that eighty percent will go into an account called a Coogan account, which you can access once you’re eighteen. That’s all the money that most parents let their kids have. But you’re lucky. Mommy’s not gonna take any of your money except for my salary, plus essentials.”
[Jenette:] “What are essentials?”
[Mom:] “Why are you giving me the third degree all of the sudden? Don’t you trust me?”
I quickly sign.
At the time of this audition, Jenette was six years old. My instant thought is, “How much do any of us remember from when we’re six?”, but more importantly, “How well could we quote a conversation verbatim from the age of six?”
Obviously, we’ll remember big events from that age. That’s not in question, but how accurately can we remember exact conversations where we’re confident enough to quote them?
Jenette is 30 years old, and as you probably gathered from the title, her mom’s dead. How would her mom describe this conversation? Would she even remember?
When I got to this part in the book, I walked into the bedroom where my girlfriend’s doing her makeup for work, and I said, “Tell me a story from when you were six. Any story at all.”
And if you think she looked at me like I’m crazy, she didn’t. Why? Because I’m a weirdo and do strange stuff like this regularly.
Anyway, she tells me a story, and I ask her what the people in that story said when it happened. She said she didn’t know. I asked her to tell me a story where people said something, and she gave me a general idea. I then asked her, “How confident are you that you could quote the people from that story verbatim?” She told me she wouldn’t be confident at all.
Now, dear reader, I have the same question for you. Sit back and remember a story from when you were six and ask yourself how confident you’d be that you’d be able to quote it exactly.
To raise the stakes a little, let’s pretend you’re under oath or in some high-pressure situation where if you’re wrong, you’re in big trouble.
I think most of us would second-guess ourselves a little bit.
This is actually one reason I love Annie Duke’s book Thinking in Bets because that’s her main thesis. We run around doing things and making decisions that have little to no consequences if we’re wrong.
For example, there’s no cost to spreading misinformation online 99% of the time. There’s also no cost for bullshit. You can run around saying things with a complete disregard for the truth and typically have no issues.
Annie Duke taught me to start thinking in probabilities and gauge my confidence in what I’m thinking, saying and doing. Maybe it’s because I enjoy poker, but it made perfect sense to me, and my life has been better because of it.
So, if I had a time machine, and we could go back and check your accuracy of a conversation from 24 years ago, how confident would you be if your life savings were on the line?
The ethics of quoting
I’m a writer, and I don’t know what teacher it was, but it was drilled into my head that quotes are like dealing with plutonium; you need to be extremely careful with them.
I rarely use quotes just because I’m deathly afraid of them. The last thing I want to do is misquote somebody. So, when I need to quote people, I get a little bit of anxiety and am so careful it’s mind-blowing.
As some of you know, I do some freelance writing, and Business Insider contracted me to do three interviews with people for their site. It paid well, but it made me so damn nervous. I interviewed neuroscientist Matt Johnson, author Anne Janzer and creative entrepreneur Roberto Blake.
Do you have any idea how terrible I’d feel if I misquoted them or accidentally made them look bad?
Here are a couple of basic rules of quoting that I learned, so I don’t accidentally misquote or take someone out of context.
Put brackets around something not said: The way we talk is different than how we write. Sometimes, things said verbally don’t translate well when writing them. Oftentimes, it’s because we skip words or say things weird, but when you hear them, it sounds fine. Written, not so much.
Or sometimes a person uses a pronoun, which may confuse the reader, so you add a word. To not put words in the person’s mouth, you use brackets. For example, when I interviewed Roberto, he said, “I fell into it from the Amazon affiliate program…”
As a reader, you may not know what the hell “it” is because for the article, I didn’t include all of the surrounding dialogue. So, here’s how I wrote it:
“I fell into [affiliate marketing] from the Amazon affiliate program…”
People can get sued for misquoting people, and there are sometimes massive controversies. So, I cover my ass by not writing something Roberto didn’t say. I use brackets, so the reader knows that Roberto said something else, and I put that in.
Basically, we use brackets to enclose inserted words intended to clarify meaning within a quotation.
Use ellipsis: When you see … in a quote, it’s an ellipsis. This is used to indicate the omission of words or suggest an incomplete thought.
Let’s use a quote a few sentences long as an example. The only written interview I can think of off the top of my head was with Kristin Collier, the speaker students walked out on in protest not long ago:
“As years went on, I started wrestling with making sense of the immense suffering I was seeing on the wards on which I was taking care of patients. In doing so began the process of wrestling with God. During this time, my husband, who I’ve known since high school, started attending a Christian church and became a committed Christian.”
Let’s say I conducted this interview and while writing up, I don’t think it’s necessary that the reader knows how long she’s known her husband. I’d write it like this:
“As years went on, I started wrestling with making sense of the immense suffering I was seeing on the wards on which I was taking care of patients. In doing so began the process of wrestling with God. During this time, my husband…started attending a Christian church and became a committed Christian.”
This is the ethical way to do it. While the interviewee may disagree with my decision, I didn’t just omit it and imply she never said it. This covers my ass, and the reader knows something was there that’s now gone.
These are just two simple rules of using quotes, but the golden rule is to not misquote people. For me, it has to be as accurate as possible, which is why I feel on some level, it’s unethical to present quotes as quotes if you’re not 1000% sure.
You hate being misquoted
I don’t even know you, but I know for a fact that you hate when someone says you said something that you never said. How many times have you been in an argument with a friend or significant other, and they say, “You said…”, and you get pissed because it’s not even close to what you said.
This happens all the time, and none of us like it when it happens. None of us say, “Well, you completely misquoted me in this argument, and I’m cool with it.”
It’s completely normal to get upset about this, and I think it has to do with the attribution bias. This bias is our tendency to explain a person’s behavior by discussing their character rather than any possible situational nuances.
We hate when it happens to us, but we do it to others all the time. We go around implying that we know exactly what a person was thinking and what their intentions were, so we often have no problem misquoting them because we think we’re getting the point across fine based on what we believe their character to be.
So, that’s often what’s happening to us when someone says we said something that we never said.
The point being that if we hate when people misquote us so much, I just can’t understand why we’re fine with how often quotes are used from memory in books.
Yesterday, I was having a conversation with someone where they asked if we really have an ethical responsibility to research and/or listen to the other side. For example, even though I dislike Ben Shapiro, do I need to listen to what he has to say? Do I have an ethical responsibility?
Personally, I think so. If nothing else, I need to due to this problem with quoting. Oftentimes, we hear things second hand, and people on “our side” mischaracterize what the “other side” said. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, “Wait. Really? They actually said that? I need to go check for myself,” only to find that the person said something completely different.
During these insane polarized times of the culture wars, people misquote others all the time to label them as a racist, transphobe, pedophile, nazi, socialist or anything else that strips away all nuance.
I wouldn’t want someone taking snippets of what I say and to call me a nazi, so why are we simply okay with people writing quotes in books that aren’t verifiable?
Again, I don’t think Jenette has any bad intentions, and I believe her. But I just think this is a major problem that we’ve normalized way too much.
If we want to get honest, this is a form of misinformation. There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you don’t like misinformation. How is misquoting someone not misinformation? Yet we allow this to happen without any pushback thousands of times a year when books are published.
I don’t know how many copies Jenette has sold so far, but the book has only been out for a week and it’s already selling out in book stores. The amount of reviews are also a decent indicator for copies sold. I’m not sure the exact amount, but I’d estimate 5-10x copies are sold than there are reviews. Here’s how many reviews it has on various platforms:
Amazon: 3,090
Audible: 9,756
Goodreads (some crossover here with Amazon/Audible): 16,706
That’s a lot of copies. Think about that in the context of any other form of misinformation. I’m only in chapter 3 of 91 chapters, and there are already multiple quotes. How many more do you think are throughout the book?
Our memories are terrible
Lastly, I just wanted to briefly touch on the scientifically proven fact that our memories are terrible. We hate to believe this, but it’s true, and I wish everyone understood this.
Our memories are not like hard drives. We don’t have a little filing cabinet in our brains that just pulls out a memory, and we then see it accurately. That’s just not how it works, and there have been so many studies on this.
One of the more famous studies on memory was after the Challenger space shuttle explosion. Here’s an excerpt from a piece describing the study:
Stress has been found to sharpen memory functions in both rodents and humans, and intense, negative shocks seem to leave behind vivid, detailed recollections. But an emerging body of evidence suggests that highly emotional memories do not tend to be particularly accurate.
"When I first heard about the explosion I was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV," wrote an Emory University student who participated in a memory study a year and a half after the Challenger disaster. "It came on as a news flash and we were both totally shocked."
But that same student had given a surprisingly different answer, just 24 hours after the tragedy. "I was in my religion class and some people walked in and started talking about [it]," she wrote. "I didn't know any details except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher's students had all been watching which I thought was so sad."
If a student can’t remember such a disastrous event that happened within the last 24 hours, how can we expect an author to remember a conversation exactly from 24 years ago?
“Well, maybe that student just has a bad memory.” No. That’s not the case.
The researchers who had hustled to gather these reports found that by 1988 and 1989, not one of their 44 subjects remembered the Challenger's explosion the same way they had in its immediate aftermath.
What some researchers say is that when we remember something, we’re not even remembering the event. What we remember is actually the last time we remembered it. It’s almost like a game of telephone in our own mind where each time we recall something, it changes slightly.
How many times in the last 24 years has Jenette remembered that conversation I mentioned at the beginning? How many times has it changed slightly?
Don’t get me wrong, this is a major mind fuck, and I try not to think about it unless I have to. If we can’t trust our memories, then what the hell can we trust? It’s scary stuff.
The reality is that this is extremely important for us to know about despite how much it screws with our head.
Personally, I think it’s so important because of wrongful convictions. I’m a true crime fan, but I’m most interested in wrongful convictions and all of the mistakes made in our legal system. We’re made to believe that eye-witness testimony is the best form of evidence, but it’s not. Do you have any idea how many people have been wrongfully locked away for years based on someone’s flawed memory?
One of the most tragic stories is the one about Thomas Haynesworth who served 27 years in prison for a rape he didn’t commit. It wasn’t a bystander who identified Thomas wrongfully, it was the victim herself.
I highly recommend you watch the episode on Netflix about his story in the show The Innocence Files. The victim is in the episode as well, and she describes how when it was happening to her, she forced herself to look at the rapist’s face so she could identify him. Unfortunately, her memory failed her, and she identified Thomas.
She said she was 100% certain Thomas was the rapist, and he was in prison from 1984 to 2011 for a crime he didn’t commit.
Not only is this the perfect example of how flawed our memory can be, but Thomas is an amazing human. He forgave his accuser, but they actually speak together now as a way to spread awareness
If you’re interested in learning more about how terrible our memory is, I recommend checking out The Memory Illusion by Dr. Julia Shaw.
What’s the solution?
So, what’re we supposed to do? Just not write memoirs and never quote anyone? I don’t think that’s the solution.
As you can tell by now, I think about this a lot, which is why I needed to write about it. The only solution I can think of is to make it explicitly clear that quotes are from memory and should not be taken as fact.
We have trigger warnings on every movie and TV show under the son, and we also have disclaimers. If a show is based on a true story, they have to say that events may not be completely accurate. They say that it’s based on real characters, but some things have been changed.
Why can’t we do that with books?
If nothing else, I think it’s just a quick reminder to the reader like, “Hey, although I’m quoting people, my memory is flawed just like yours, and this is how I remember it.”
Instead, what we have right now is an endless amount of authors and publishers just putting books out there presenting quotes as facts.
Part of me even thinks it should go as far as the author saying things like “I believe they said…” or “To my recollection, the conversation went like this…” throughout the book.
Maybe I make too big of a deal out of quotes, but I really don’t think so. As we discussed earlier, none of us like being misquoted, so I think we should do everything in our power to not misquote others.
If you think I’m insane, let me know in the comments. Or, if you have some other solutions, I’d love to hear them.
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Omg I thought of this EXACT innocence files story while reading this. A very, very important article.