Memoir as Fiction

Memoir as fiction

One of my favorite authors is Amy Tan. I have read everything she has ever published and I am in awe of her mastery over pace and tone. She also famously uses her own family history as inspiration for her novels. She has a lovely book out now called Where the Past Begins in which she discusses this very thing.

I am not Amy Tan. But, like her, I take inspiration in my own family history. It began as a love of genealogy. I even teach a class on how to get started with genealogy! But, as my grandmother slipped into Alzheimer’s, I became painfully aware of all the things I never asked. All the things I would never know about her. About her life. And I wanted to understand her for her not just as my grandmother.

So I began outlining the things I DID know about her past and thinking about how I could frame them into a narrative form. At first, I did not intend for the project to lead to fiction writing. But, one day, my grandmother was in the hospital passing in and out of consciousness and my heart cried even while I kept the tears from sliding down my face so as not to scare her. She kept asking for her mother. I told her she was coming. She was delayed. In reply my grandmother would say "I wonder where she is, that is so unlike her..." Then when we were alone, she turned to me and asked me if I was her mother. I said yes. The relief that washed over her face let me know I was right to lie.

That night I went home and wrote the first scene for the book-one I have since taken out-about my grandmother waking up and not knowing where she is or who the people around her are or even who she is. And I cried. I cried ugly tears. Yet even as I cried the story came to me. My grandmothers’s life story. And I determined that to understand her and to honor her I would write her story. But not a biography. It would be fiction. Because I thought fiction would get to the emotional truth even if it didn’t adhere to the factual truth.

Emotional truth tells more than the facts. It tells the inner life of someone. It tells you how they experienced an event rather than just the event itself. It tells you who that person is. What they were. And what they will become. Emotional truth reveals who the reader is as a person too.