Genre-Bending: Imagined Memories and Your Fantastical Past
Several years ago, when I was studying oral storytelling, a teacher of mine wrote something down that has stuck with me ever since. She wrote: “Storytelling is the soul’s speech and it is free to move between realities of imagination and literal events.”
This struck me as being remarkably freeing. I liked the idea that both imagination and literal events were realities. I liked giving myself permission to get wildly creative and fantastical with my own life, my own experiences. Something about the way it hit me at that time seemed to offer up new and different ways that fact and fantasy could intermingle.
In some ways, this was nothing new. Literature has a long history of experimenting with the boundaries between truth and fiction; we’re probably all familiar with the phrase “based on a true story.” There are several riffs on this in the literary world.
Historical fiction is one—authors such as Hilary Mantel, Yaa Gyasi, and Sarah Waters weave the lives of fictional characters in and around historical backdrops and events. The thinly veiled autobiography told as a novel is another—such as Nora Ephron’s hilarious (if dated) novel Heartburn, or Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant (translated as The Lover). Books like these are sometimes called autofiction, a term coined in 1977 by French author Serge Doubrovsky to describe his book Fils. And then we have metafiction, in which the story references itself as it is being written.
While wonderfully imaginative, these genres also have rules that they follow. Historical fiction is allowed to invent characters through which to tell its historically accurate stories—but not to rewrite history itself. Once it does that, it gets booted over into a different genre altogether: speculative fiction, or alternate history. Autobiographical novels are allowed to take certain liberties, but readers understand that its function is to get closer to the heart of the author’s experiences, even if the path there is somewhat altered.
So what would it look like to genre-bend between truth and fiction, memoir and fantasy, in a way that breaks those rules?
Not too long after taking that storytelling course, I happened to read a book called Your Life As Story, by Tristine Rainer (once a mentee of the diarist and eroticist Anaïs Nin). In it, Rainer describes an autobiographical technique that she calls “Imagining a Missing Past,” which I immediately took to—it struck the same kind of chord with me.
The idea here is to recreate your past (or a part of your past), in full and vivid detail, in any way that pleases you. As my storytelling teacher would say, you are free to move between realities of imagination and literal events. You are free to wildly invent, to remember relationships you never had, to recall that time you learned to fly. And then write about it. Write it about as if it were your autobiography, your memoir, your living memory. Write about it, as Rainer says, “with the painstaking detail of a novelist.”
Rainer references Maxine Hong Kingston, who famously created imaginary ancestors as a component of her three-part non-fiction memoir, The Woman Warrior. These fierce women whose blood Kingston shares are, ultimately, her key to finding her own personal strength and power—never you mind that she made them up. She is, as Rainer says, a “writer reinventing her own personal mythology.”
And while there may be therapeutic benefits to such a practice—it has been suggested that a fantasy about the past may actually function in the brain in the same way as a memory, and a recent study showed the positive effects of “imagery rescripting”— it’s also just plain enjoyable, and a terrific writing exercise.
Take for instance Fleur Talbot, the young writer in Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent, who gets a job as a secretary for the so-called “Autobiographical Society” in which several wealthy egomaniacs work on their humdrum and insipid memoirs. Fleur, who is writing her first novel and is in the throes of creative passion, takes great pleasure in “spicing up” their work, by adding in a lot of exciting events that are quite, quite false. Everyone eats it up, and Fleur’s job is a lot less boring.
Writing imagined memories is an interesting way to wander about in the wilderness between genres. Not quite memoir, not quite fiction, imagined memories occupy that in-between space that can be so fecund. It’s a reminder that the boundaries of genre are real, but optional. For some, it might be a way to invent a past that allows them to transform their present. For others, it’s a way to fill in blanks, to imagine your lineage, or to “spice up” your own past, just for the hell of it.
As Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” There can be as many versions of your past, of your self, as you like.
About Lindsay Hobbs
Lindsay is a freelance editor, writer, and podcaster living in the Haliburton Highlands of Ontario, Canada. In between reading books (and writing about them), she works as a library branch assistant and program developer. Currently, Lindsay is an editor at Cloud Lake Literary and the co-host of Story Girls: A Fortnightly Podcast About Books, with a Dash of Absurdity. You can find her personal bookish musings at her blog, Topaz Literary.
