Samantha Edmonds, "I Create as I Speak: Myth-Making in Creative Nonfiction" (Assay 13.1)

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
13.1

Samantha Edmonds

I Create as I Speak: Myth-Making in Creative Nonfiction

Abracadabra, the magical incantation, has murky etymological origins. The most supported scholarship, according to the OED, attributes it to Latin or Greek and compares it to nearly identical words in French and German meaning nonsense, gibberish. There are other folk etymologies which associate the term with Hebrew and Aramaic phrases meaning I create like the word; I create as I speak. [1] There is poetry in this: a word we say when performing magic that might mean nonsense or create with no way to tell the difference.

This idea—speaking as an act of creation—is a common example of mythopoeia, literally the making of myth, a form of fantasy writing often associated with J.R.R. Tolkien, who viewed mythopoeic writing as more than merely referential to an ancient or classical story; instead, he advocates that myth-making is something anyone can do. [2] His poem “Mythopoeia: Philomythus to Misomythus” (myth-lover to myth-hater, 1931) chastises C.S. Lewis for assuming myths were only “lies and therefore worthless,” arguing that people are all sub-creators, through whom the world is made by story.

In this way, he determines mythopoeia is more than the making of supernatural falsehood—rather, mythopoeia is the making of truth that can only be reached through myth. He does not believe in a “world immutable,” wherein “the little maker” has no power or part to play (stanza 12). Instead, he suggests the elves, goblins, and gods of legend are “mirrored truth” from which “the likeness of True” might be illuminated, sharpening one’s understanding of reality; for though myths “make anew, they make no lie” (13). I intend to take this concept a step further by suggesting that mythopoeia—though most associated with speculative and fantasy genres—is not in itself a genre at all; it is a technique, and thus can be applied to any category of writing, including creative nonfiction.

The notion that myth offers insights into the real world is not limited to Tolkien. Northrop Frye (1982) focused a great deal on myth in his work, pushing the literary definition of myth beyond its broader Aristotelian meaning of mythos or plot. Myths, according to Frye, have a “peculiar significance,” and exist to tell “a society what is important for it to know, whether about its gods, its history, its laws, or its class,” and therefore “the real interest of a myth is to draw a circumference around a human community and look inward to that community” (The Great Code, 50, 55). In this essay, when I refer to myth-making, I will therefore be referring to Frye’s definition of myth, which he explains this way: “There are and remain two aspects of myth: One is its story-structure, which attaches it to literature; the other is its social function as concerned knowledge… In both aspects [myth] relates not to the actual but to the possible” (65). This distinction between the actual and the possible will be crucial to the role that myths play in other forms of writing later in this essay.

The titles I analyze have much to teach the interested mythic memoirist on how to use mythopoeia in their own craft. I propose that myth in nonfiction manifests in several variations: The first is by taking an actual lived experience and turning into it a myth by making it grander or more fantastical in the retelling (truth becomes myth), as in Audre Lorde’s Zami or Matt Young’s Eat the Apple. The second is by taking a myth—something that begins in the imagination—and manifesting it, literally or metaphorically, into a true experience (myth becomes truth), such as Lauren Slater’s Lying. The third, and most extreme, variation of mythic nonfiction occurs when the writer uses outright supernatural elements in nonmetaphorical ways in their memoiristic writing, like space-time travel in Shannon Gibney’s The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be. Inspired later by Donna Harroway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” the exploration of these three variations of mythic writing will culminate in a better understanding of what a reconciliation between mythopoeia and memoir might look like, highlighting the fact that myth-making is a writing technique and not a genre.

What’s the Use of Stories that Aren’t Even True?

The idea that mythmaking has a place in nonfiction might seem incongruous with a genre that by its very definition is meant to be the opposite of falsehood. [3] And isn’t myth just a bunch of made-up stuff, polluting the genre with untrue or unreal information? A fair question, but one that misconstrues the significance of imagination and myth in constructing identity and memory. For many people, “myth has come to mean ‘not really true,’” which Frye calls a “vulgarism for many reasons,” explaining that myth—in the secondary sense of cultural significance—means “the opposite of ‘not really true’: it means being charged with a special seriousness and importance” (TGC 50, 51). In other words, “a myth is designed not to describe a specific situation but to contain it in a way that does not restrict its significance to that one situation. Its truth is inside its structure, not outside” (TGC 64). The mythic memoir therefore is absolutely true, if you acknowledge the ways myth can become a kind of reality, a truth in the telling of itself, which is not at all a betrayal of the genre, even by the most rigid definitions. Even Lee Gutkind, who argues that “all fabrication is fiction” (25), acknowledges that “truth is elusive and undeniably personal” (33).

In Borderlands (1987), Gloria Anzaldúa was among the first to make the case for using mythopoeic techniques in nonfiction, arguing against “an ‘official’ reality of the rational, reasoning mode which is connected with external reality,” a largely “white rationality” which allows no room for other modes of being that facilitate “images from the soul and unconscious through dreams and the imagination” (58). These ‘official’ viewpoints don’t accept “the world of the imagination—the world of the soul,” nor do they believe “the spirit is just as real as physical reality” (59). In trying to become “objective,” Anzaldúa explains, rationality split reality, labeling all work that strays from the official reality as “‘fiction,’ make-believe, wish-fulfillment” (58). She argues that to suggest nonfiction writing must rely on a singular knowable truth inherently implies there exists only one worldview through which to determine reality. Insisting anything outside that worldview is false maintains the status quo and allows for “truth” to remain controlled largely by a predominately white heterosexual male narrative.

This is not to say that myth is the same as a lie, or deliberate fabrication. For example, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003), easily one of the most famous cases of lying in nonfiction within the last twenty-five years, is not an example of mythopoeia in memoir. The book is allegedly about his alcohol and drug abuse and his time in a rehab facility, which was later revealed to be largely fabricated. He later admitted in an interview with The Smoking Gun that he embellished central details “for obvious dramatic reasons.” This explanation lacks the peculiar cultural significance that Northrop Frye was referring to, something all myths must have. J. Frey’s writing is more akin to what N. Frye deems folk tales: “stories told for entertainment or other less central purposes” (TGC 50). N. Frye goes on to explain that myths and folk tales have no consistent structural differences or content; the difference, therefore, is purely cultural, deriving from each’s distinct “social function and authority” (TGC 52). Folk tales might look and sound similar to myths as far as content and expression, but they lack that extra social and cultural significance inherent to myth. If one applies this distinction to nonfiction, too, it begins to make sense how one nonfiction title might contain fabrication and be seen as a “folk tale” (such as J. Frey’s A Million Little Pieces) while another might have similar fabricated elements but be considered a mythic memoir (like Slater’s Lying, which I’ll discuss later).

For the mythic memoirist, the question of using fabrication in the genre is less about how much fabrication is acceptable and more about the motivation of the writer to manipulate ‘reality’ in the first place. For some writers, especially those with nonwhite, nonmale, and non-hetero identities, myth-making and it’s associated “fabrications” is a genuine writing technique meant to reflect their experiences more holistically and truthfully. For example, Anzaldúa, a queer Chicana woman, writes often from a place of being in-between, explaining the role of mythopoeia this way: “I write the myths in me, the myths I am, the myths I want to become.” For Anzaldúa, “the word, the image, and the feeling have a palpable energy, a kind of power” (93). In other words, she isn’t ‘making things up’ in her writing for dramatic or narrative reasons, or even making things up at all; using myth, in this instance, is simply the most authentic way for her to tell the story of her true lived experience. In this way, myth-making’s role is more like what Sven Birkerts outlines in The Art of Time in Memoir (2007); he takes a slightly softer stance on truth than Lee Gutkind but a less careless one than John D’Agata, believing that “distortion is inevitable, permissible, so long as it is in the service of the truth” (142). Significantly, he draws a hard line for writers who invent or distort “for effect” or “to up the intensity or confer a more pleasing outline,” because that no longer captures the vital honesty necessary in creative nonfiction, and instead makes the work read with false emotion and a hollow tone (143). This approach is the antithesis of myth-making in memoir. For myths must always be built on belief—or what Birkerts calls “the truth of feeling” (141).

Variation One (Truth Becomes Myth): Biomythography

That truth is subjective, at least, is something nearly all scholars of creative nonfiction can agree on. Throughout this essay, I will quote several writers who use related but different phrases to discuss subjective truth, such as D’Agata’s “emotional truth,” Frye’s “poetic truth,” and Birkerts’s “truth of feeling.” I intend to treat each unique phrasing as the same idea without attempting to come up with distinct definitions for each new term, since I believe the meaning behind these terms are all overlapping. The varied terminology to me doesn’t suggest separate meanings or ideas but rather indicates a lack of unified terminology among nonfiction writers on this subject. I attempt to unite them here by placing all variations under the umbrella of mythopoeic truth. Therefore, it is not perhaps as much a leap from “subjective truth” to “mythic truth” as one might expect.

To begin, I once again dismiss the idea that mythopoeia is a genre and instead recognize it as a writing technique. Though an approach most often employed in speculative fiction genres—thus encouraging the association—mythopoeic writing is not confined to the speculative genre alone. By embracing it as an employable technique apart from specific genres, the opportunities mythic writing provides are transferable to work far beyond speculative fiction writing. The first variation of what myth in nonfiction can look like, therefore, is in the relating of a true experience that becomes grander—more mythic—in the retelling. Such is the case with Audre Lorde’s Zami and Matt Young’s Eat the Apple, both of which contain nothing of the fantastical element generally associated with supernatural myth, but which nevertheless manage to make the true experiences of the narrators feel mythic.

For example, Audre Lorde calls her memoir Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) a biomythography—a union of biography and mythology. [4] I begin with Lorde because, despite being separated from the more contemporary titles of this analysis by several decades, the word biomythography is immensely useful in understanding how mythology and biography can coexist. Lorde was primed to make these mythical leaps in her writing by her mother, who often masked the family’s poverty by telling her children stories about why things were a certain way (i.e., creating a myth) instead of explaining the truth; for example, rather than admit the family couldn’t afford them, Lorde’s mother insisted she simply didn’t like wearing gloves, even in winter, to explain why her hands cracked in the cold; she said she preferred the light of kerosene lamps rather than confess they couldn’t pay their electric bill; and she told her Black children when people spit on them in the street it was random because people “had no better sense nor manners than to spit into the wind” instead of exposing them to the facts of racism (17). Lorde was much older before she started seeing through her mother’s myths: “It was so typical of my mother when I was young that if she couldn’t stop white people from spitting on her children because they were Black, she would insist it was something else,” she says. “It was so often her approach to the world; to change reality. If you can’t change reality, change your perceptions of it” (18). From these stories, readers can begin to see the mythical tradition that Lorde’s mother is actively engaging in: creating myth out of actual lived experiences as a way of taking control over those experiences. [5]

Lorde’s own examples of mythical moments are not only about changing her perception of reality to avoid something painful or traumatic; sometimes her myth-making is as small as simply attributing mythic significance to the smallest memories and encounters. Against a backdrop of trauma brought on by racism, homophobia, and WWII, Lorde spends a lot of her adolescence in her imagination; Lorde is often lonely for a companion her age, so she invents a little person to talk to the size of her palm, whom she tries to bring to life by making a figure of flour and clay. Despite her best efforts, the “little person” never manifests (34-6). After her failed attempts to create a doll-sister, she then recounts meeting another young girl about her age on the steps of her building when she was very young, describing the awe she felt in the other child’s presence: “My lifelong dream of a doll-baby come to life had in fact come true,” she says, noting the “unbelievable” color of the girl’s coat, her “dainty little stocking legs,” and shoes that “glinted merrily in the drab noon light” (37). By using words and images that invoke reverence, Lorde transforms this girl beyond a mundane reality (a child in the cold) into a mythic figure more closely aligned to how Lorde perceived her. This is how Lorde employs myth-making in her memoir: by taking a lived experience and making it mythical in the retelling, infusing these instances with the special seriousness and importance Frye feels is inherent to myth.

The use of the word biomythography largely begins and ends with Lorde, as very few other writers have employed the term to describe their own work; however, even without naming them as such, there are several other nonfiction titles that merge biography with mythology. A more contemporary example is Eat the Apple (2018) by Matt Young, a memoir of Young’s service in the U.S. Marines and his three tours in Iraq during the early 2000s. Other examples include Fun Home (Alison Bechdel), How to Sit (Tyrese Coleman), Choose Your Own Autobiography (Neil Patrick Harris), The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Maxine Hong Kingston), and Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) (Jenny Lawson).

Several of Young’s chapters are written in the second or third person about “the recruit,” a distancing technique which has a pivotal effect on how Young—and the reader—sees the character I’ve dubbed “Matt the Marine.” Through his experimentation with point of view and the subsequent creation of “the recruit,” Young creates a mythology of the self; Matt the Marine transcends the boundaries of Young’s “real life” and becomes instead a greater mythic figure.

The opening chapter is a “Choose Your Own Adventure” wherein the reader is invited to join the Marines. To enlist, the reader proceeds to the next page; to decide not to enlist, the book encourages you to “stop reading and go about your day” (2), a direct address with heavy implications: That it is “you,” the reader, who will be assuming the role of “the recruit,” sparing Young himself the need to claim the actions of Matt the Marine as his own. Young is moved out of the role of actor and into the role of myth-maker—narrator, not player. [6] In “Soapbox,” post-Marines Young—simply called “Me”—has an entire conversation with a pre-enlisted version of himself, a character he names “Past-me,” about the disillusionment waiting for him: “You’ll lie for a long time,” Me says, “and you’ll lie so much that you’ll start to believe the lies” (238). The lies Young is referencing here are stories he tells his family upon his return from deployment. He talks about “a made-up village and a fantasy house within the village and imagined insurgents within the fantasy house and fictional grenades and bullets used to kill those invented insurgents defending the fantasy house,” which he justifies not as a lie but as “an explanation of individual experience” and “a story where he gets to feel, for once, like a hero,” furthering the myth of Matt the Marine through repeated storytelling (115). Such an act reminds me of Frye, who writes, “What a man essentially is is revealed in in two ways: by the record of what he has done, and by what he is trying to make himself at any given moment” (TGC 67). By distinguishing different versions of himself and giving them literal separate embodiments in the book, Young is creating a myth; the repeated use of second and third person reinforces that myth.

While Young explores the possibilities that open when one mythologizes the self, he also tests the limitations of such mythologizing. How much can a myth really change? For example, in a chapter called “Revision,” he tries several times to “save” his dead platoon mate by rewriting what happened (this chapter is in first person plural): “We write, Benito ‘Cheeks’ Ramirez was manning the turret when his Humvee rolled over a pressure plate attached to a surface-laid one-five-five round and he died. We draw a line through he died, replace it with he lived—strike his death from the ledger, move him into the black. Nothing happens” (106). The role of myth-making in this instance is not meant to fabricate entirely; Cheeks stays dead in all versions of the story. Myth-making can’t bring him back; what it does do, however, is return to Young a sense of control over the story so Cheeks can live again, however briefly, in each telling. Myth-making in memoir here again offers Young a vital sense of agency, as it has done for so many others.

Despite acknowledging the limitations of myth-making, Young is aware some things can be rewritten. This is why he creates Matt the Marine and tells his stories through him, over and over, chapter by chapter; Young knows, “like anything in the Marine Corps, if this recruit does it and thinks it and performs it enough, it will become automatic, ingrained in the muscle forever. It will become truth” (22). In other words, Young recognizes the relationship between repetition and truth. Tell a story often enough and it can sometimes replace fact.

Though the memoirs by Lorde and Young involve mythologizing, these titles, like their fictional cousins “the mythic realist novel,” don’t play with speculative tropes in the sense of having magic, fantasy creatures, or other “nonrealist” possibilities. They don’t even really contain that much fabrication. Nevertheless, they are utilizing myth-making in a vital and necessary way by making their (sometimes mundane) experiences feel grander and even fantastical to better capture the “truth of feeling” about the experience. However, this is not the only way that mythic writing can be used in nonfiction. The next question in thinking about myth in memoir is this: Instead of taking a lived experience and making it mythical, can a nonfiction writer ever describe an encounter that begins not in reality but in myth and have it become, nonetheless, a true experience?

Blessed are the Legend-Makers

Before I look at nonfiction titles that use myth to make a non-lived experience become truth, I want to first consider the ways that imagination already is its own kind of reality. Using myth-making in nonfiction in this way requires the acknowledgement that sometimes the life of the mind can feel (be) as real as anything physical. [7] Believing in something is powerful—one could even go so far as to say that having enough belief in something could give the believer the capacity to make that belief a reality (or at least truth). Fiction is overflowing with examples. [8]

This stance coincides with what Tolkien wrote about belief, fact, and fantasy in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” (1947), in which he draws a distinction between the traditional suspension of disbelief and “Secondary Belief,” explaining that “suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe”; meanwhile, Secondary Belief is the real thing, “an enchanted state,” because if the writer—and, later, the reader—were really pulled into the story, “they would not have to suspend disbelief; they would believe” (61). Furthermore, he explains that myth-making, though “freedom from the domination of observed ‘fact’” (69), nevertheless “does not destroy or even insult Reason” (74). Though Tolkien was writing specifically about the fantasy genre, the concept of Secondary Belief and the argument that myth-making is not oppositional but supplementary to fact is transferable to other genres. In other words, using myth in memoir works when the storyteller is writing from a place of belief—true belief, Secondary Belief, not merely a suspension of it—in their own story; if they’re going to introduce myth in their nonfiction, it should be because the writer believes the myth to be the most essential way to capture a great truth, giving it the “special seriousness” of Frye’s myth. Belief is what separates the myth-maker from the fabricator. [9]

To bring this conversation into a more contemporary sphere, I turn to Peter Turchi; his book Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (2004) similarly takes up this question of truth and belief in his analysis of mapmaking and, by extension, storytelling. He talks about a map which has a frolicking green water dragon drawn into a pasture: “To be able to imagine the dragon is not the only way to see the pasture,” he says, nor is there reason to assume that seeing the dragon is “the best way to see the pasture,” but each time he—in the physical world—drives by the pasture depicted on the map, “the Frolicking Green Water Dragon was always there—or, a nonbeliever might say, it was never there, and still isn’t. But now it is there for me” (97). I am reminded here again of Anzaldúa, champion of the in-between, who feels that she “inhabit[s] both realities”—the reality of the imagination and that of the material—and is frequently “forced to live in the interface between the two” (58). Similarly, for Turchi, “believability is more important than realism” (209) and he maintains that while it is the reader’s job to suspend belief, “as writers our job is to sustain belief in a world of the imagination” (235, emphasis mine). [10] Turchi’s point—that the dragon is always there for the believer and never there for the nonbeliever—comes back to the role that myth-making can play in nonfiction: Yes, and, like the first rule of improv. All too often “telling the truth” calls for a fundamentalism built into a binary: this or that; true or untrue; real or not real; there or not there. There is no room for imagination and belief. But mythopoeia turns or into and. The Frolicking Green Water Dragon is both there and not there. Quixote is and is not a knight. Belief is therefore what makes the yes, and of myth-making possible. It is the space at the end of the knowable real and the unknowable truth. Turchi puts it like this: “The most profound questions of our existence cannot be answered through a mere collection of concrete evidence; at some point…each of us reaches a border of the verifiable world, and every one of us leaps” (91-2). In other words, in such instances where the real, whatever that is, cannot be known, the story—the myth—is all that remains. And it is in the space below “the leap” where myth makes truth.

Which is the Better Story?

I create as I speak: The idea that myth can supersede—even become—a kind of truth is well documented, in fiction if not in nonfiction. Life of Pi (2001) is a particularly strong fictional example exploring the relationship between story and truth. Upon surviving a shipwreck, Pi is interviewed by the men who owned the boat, hoping to learn why it sank. Pi tells them the story of his time as the sole human survivor on a lifeboat with Richard Parker, the tiger; an orangutan; a hyena; and a wounded zebra. They don’t believe him, so Pi responds, “So you want another story?” and they insist they don’t want a story; they want “to know what really happened.” Pi responds: “Doesn’t the telling of something always become a story?” and thus begins a debate about the nature of storytelling, or what might otherwise be called myth-making (301-2). He tells them another story about his time on the lifeboat, in which there are no animals. Pi concludes:

I told you two stories... Neither explains the sinking of the Tsumtsum… Neither makes a factual difference to you… You can’t prove which story is true and which is not. You must take my word for it… In both stories, the ship sinks, my entire family dies, and I suffer… So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story? (317)

What Pi (and/or Martel) is suggesting here is that stories make meaning, not the other way around. In telling a story, the storyteller is creating a mythology around themselves and the events therein, and it is that story/myth that becomes the (new) truth. There is no way to know “what really happened.” Instead, we only have the stories. In asking “Which is the better story?” after offering more than one explanation, Pi is ostensibly acknowledging that sometimes a story is all the explanation or fact available; storytelling can therefore create a reality in itself which, if told often enough and believed in hard enough, can be considered as true as the truth it may have replaced.

In nonfiction, the role of the storyteller making truth often aligns with Pi’s question of “the better story,” or the way stories can become the authorized record the more often they are told. [11] This returns to Turchi’s point that “there is no ‘real’ one [story] or, rather…all the stories are equally real” (95). This is a good philosophy for the nonfiction writer—especially one with a desire to incorporate myth and other speculative elements—to keep in mind, as even nonmythical writers in memoir must acknowledge that a myth has the power to become the authoritative record in many instances. [12]

Variations Two & Three (Myth Becomes Truth):
Why is What We Feel Less True than What Is?

In the second variation of how mythic writing can be used in nonfiction, where myths can become as true as a lived experience, I turn now to a nonfiction example of how having enough belief in a mythic (used here to mean “nonreal” or illusory) experience can transform that experience—imagined or not—into a new truth or reality: Lying by Lauren Slater (2000). Slater has epilepsy. Or, as she puts it, she feels she has epilepsy. Or she wishes she has epilepsy. Slater calls her work a “metaphorical memoir,” which she explains is a reaction to the ways that “the metaphorical world and the material world blend and blur [and] become each other” (213). In a foreword to the book written by a fictional professor, Hayward Krieger, the book’s reasonings for such deceit is made clear: “Using metaphor as a literary technique is not a new concept in fiction; however, using, or suggesting the use of, metaphor as a valid vehicle to convey autobiographical truths…is a new and unsettling idea” (ix). Slater disagrees with people who believe that “a book qualifies as nonfiction only if the literal facts are for the most part accurate” because “even those things that are not literally true about me are metaphorically true about me,” begging the question, “Why is what we feel less true than what is?” (162). Slater’s ponderings are not unlike those found in Life of Pi and similar novels—she is simply among the first to ask them in nonfiction.

Through all her myths and metaphors and fabrications, Slater is saying something significant in her work about the power of belief and its relationship to truth, especially as it pertains to the role of mythopoeia in memoir. Though she is walking a fine line between real and not-real—and while she acknowledges that she is “a slippery sort”—she maintains that this is the only way to be honest about her life: “To come clean in this memoir would be dishonest; it would go against my nature, which would be just the sort of inauthenticity any good nonfiction memoirist, whose purpose is to capture the essence of the narrator, could not accommodate. I truly believe that if I came completely clean, I would be telling the biggest lie of all” (160-161). In other words, Slater is not embellishing facts or spinning tales to tell an interesting story or for dramatic effect; she simply sees no other way to truly capture the reality of who she is, which means that the myths she creates in her work are her best attempts at telling the truth.

Sven Birkerts likewise makes a distinction between truth and accuracy. He names several other titles that contain similar metaphorical fabrications—or myths that become truth—such as Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1985) and Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments (1987), and claims that such titles use their conflation between fact and fiction “to better, more truthfully (if not more accurately) communicate the essential nature of what [the writer] is after” (141), arguing that “the truth is in the specific psychic residue, not in the faithful mapping of episodes to external evidence” (142). Both Slater and Birkerts, as well as the writers the latter studies, are interested in pushing against the boundaries of fact and fiction, truth and accuracy. Frye maintains that in myth, “what is true is what the writer thinks ought to be true; and the sense of urgency in the writing comes out much more freely by not being hampered by the clutter of what may actually have occurred” (TGC 58) and “by avoiding actual history and its criteria, [myth] sets the historian free to do his own job in his own way. A more traditional language would say that myth redeems history: assigns it to its real place in the human panorama” (68, original emphasis). Essentially, these writers conclude that something does not need to be accurate to be true. The next question the aspiring mythic memoirist must ask themselves, then, is this: What are the limits of non-accurate truth? How literal can someone push metaphor and myth in memoir without compromising the genre?

This is the question taken up in a more contemporary sense by Sofia Samatar, whose scholarly and creative work champions a rising subgenre she calls “speculative memoir.” Speculative memoir is the third variation of how to use myth in memoir, distinct from biomythography and the metaphorical memoir, because it allows space for indisputable, nonmetaphorical fantasy and science fiction tropes to exist in a nonfiction work (as opposed to merely including elements that, although fabricated in some instances, are entirely realist and possible, such as having epilepsy). Samatar describes herself as a fantasy and science fiction writer whose work has been becoming more autobiographical: “Of course, all writing draws from experience,” she allows, “but there’s a particularly weird energy to writing memoir, in a deliberate way, in a fantastic or uncanny mode” (“Why Adding Monsters and Fairies to Memoir Can Make It Even More Real,” par. 2). Among the writers she lists as speculative memoirists are Matthew Cheney, Carmen Maria Machado, and Rosalind Palermo Stevenson, all of whom she interviews in a 2018 article for Electric Literature about their work in this budding subgenre.

The writers’ definitions around their own work vary widely. Samatar calls her book Monster Portraits (2018) an “uncanny biography” (par. 8); Machado considers In the Dream House (2019) a “speculative memoir” (par. 1); Stevenson’s work-in-progress about a female Adam is referred to as a “faux autobiography” (par. 6). But each writer agrees what they’re doing is in the same vein: adding elements of fantasy, science fiction, and other speculative genre tropes to their nonfiction in pursuit of “emotional truth” (Stevenson par. 4), “emotional reality” (Cheney par. 3), and manifestations of “real, lived experience that exist beyond empirical evidence and tangible events” (Machado par. 10). I attribute these various terms to not having as yet a shared vocabulary for the mythopoeic writing technique.

Despite the varied terminology, for these writers the act of conjoining fantasy elements within nonfiction is an intentional act, which, when done with deliberation, can have an unsettling effect on memory and experience: “The pleasure of using these [supernatural] devices is that we take a thing that, by definition, must be real [memoir], and include things that, by definition, cannot be [speculative or supernatural elements], and the resulting text is sweet and sour,” Machado writes (par. 17). She acknowledges that “some people would argue that once you include the unreal element, the genre automatically switches away from nonfiction, but I definitely think there needs to be room for work that occupies that gap” (par. 17). Here, Machado calls for creative nonfiction to make room for a “gap” in the genre, but what I keep saying about mythopoeia as a writing technique is applicable here, too. Considering “speculative memoir” as a separate and distinct (sub)genre necessarily distinguishes it from creative nonfiction, but if one were to rearrange their understanding of myth-making as a technique employable in any genre, including this one, there would be no need to “make room” for this work in nonfiction; it would simply be part of the genre already, just written in a different style, the way other writers use the fragmented form or nontraditional narrative structures.

A prime example of this kind of writing technique is in Cheney’s 2015 piece “Killing Fairies,” which he published as fiction before he came to understand the role that magical or mythical elements could play in nonfiction. The story is about a young man, ostensibly Cheney himself, who falls in love with a man in college who is indebted to a fairy. The fairy is depicted as a living, breathing being that the love interest keeps in a box beneath his bed. Of this work, Cheney says, “The fantasy element is subdued and ambiguous, but it’s there,” explaining that the result is “a memoir-like thing that most readers will know by the end can’t really be a memoir because such stuff is impossible. But I hope that the impossible conveys an emotional reality, one that couldn’t be crystallized by memoir alone” (par. 2). This feeling that the “memoir alone” can’t convey the truth of one’s story, or life, or experience, is shared by the other writers of the roundtable, and many more beyond that, including Lauren Slater, Gloria Anzaldúa, Richard Bowes (Dust Devil on a Quiet Street), Akwaeke Emezi (Freshwater), Ruth Ozeki (Tale for the Time Being), and Tanya Tagaq (Split Tooth). Like Cheney’s fairy story, the work by these other writers also include elements of the supernatural and “the impossible,” such as mythical monsters; ghosts, gods, and spirits; time travel; spellcasting, and other forms of magic.

An excellent contemporary example of this kind of writing is Shannon Gibney’s The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be (2023), which is labeled “a speculative memoir” right there on the cover page. [13] The book is about her life as a transracial adoptee, born to a white woman and a Black man, and adopted by white parents in infancy. The prologue begins with a summary of these facts, where and when she was born, that she met her birth mother when she was nineteen (when she learned her birth mother wanted to name her Erin), and so on. She concludes this prologue by explaining, “This is one way to tell the story, in this time, in this place. What follows are other ways to tell the stories of Shannon and Erin, the known and the unknown, truth and speculation” (2). From there, the book alternates between chapters about Shannon Gibney’s childhood in her adopted family and Erin Powers, the girl who Shannon Gibney might have been if she had been raised by her birth mother.

There are some similarities in their narrative, of course; neither Shannon nor Erin knows her birth father, a Black man named Boisey who died years earlier, before they ever had a chance to meet; in each instance, Erin/Shannon is raised in a predominately white family and feels lost, disconnected. In one early chapter from Erin’s POV, Gibney writes, “Erin thinks of the girl then, Other-Erin-Who-Is-Not-Erin, and wonders if…she [is] also looking for her Absent Black Father (and by extension, her Blackness)…and instead coming up against wall after wall?” (7). What little information Erin/Shannon does have about her father is caked in contradiction: Shannon learns from her birth father’s stepbrother that he was bipolar (182) only to hear from her aunt, her birth father’s sister, that this was decidedly untrue: “I don’t know what he [the stepbrother] is talking about,” the aunt says. “I never heard anything about that… How would he know, anyway?” Gibney reflects, “There is so much contained within that sentence. So much history I know I will never unpack” (201-202). Both Erin and Shannon are searching for answers in stories with so many missing components there are almost no known facts: which is basically the point, Gibney argues. “The only way for people like me—adoptees—to express the truth of our lives and experiences is to embrace that there are no singular truths,” she explains. “There is no one reality. There are no stories without holes. There are only spaces to be breathed into. Sometimes, rewritten” (11). This memoir is Gibney’s way of (re)writing her story—as both Shannon and Erin—in the most complete way she can.

Within the book, what Gibney uses to fill in these “holes” are literary devices so far removed from reality they are rarely seen outside science fiction: her memoir features time machines, allowing the girl(s) to travel to the past and interact with Boisey before his death; there are alternate universes and swirling wormholes, fissures in time and space which open periodically in Erin’s mirror and Shannon’s backyard, offering glimpses into the other’s life. “For me, these are not manufactured literary devices. They are not lies,” Gibney writes in an early reflective chapter, “and yet, they are absolutely manufactured literary devices. They are lies. But only insofar as our manufactured birth certificates are lies. And the stories we were told as children by our loving parents about being given up because we were ‘special’ are lies” (26). She explains that this is acceptable in her nonfiction because of her own mythic identity:

I may have imbibed a steady stream of Flash Gordon, Star Wars, and Star Trek growing up, and like so many children, incorporated those fantastical elements of travel through space and time, portals to multiple dimensions and universes, time loops, and whatnot into my sense of the world. I may have played imaginary games…out in the woods behind our house in Ann Arbor, and worried that I spotted a rip in the fabric of space-time on the ground. I may have wondered if there were other me’s in these adjacent universes, and thought about what I would say to them…if they could see me. (12)

This returns to my earlier argument that the primary difference between the mythic memoir and the outright lie is belief: a transparent earnestness that does not betray the reader’s trust. The reader might know that Shannon Gibney did not travel back in time to speak to her father on the side of a California highway—a place she admits she has never been (44)—and yet because she imagined she might have and believed she could have, there is space for such a scene in her memoir without making it fictional. “In this space, in the space between stories…in the space between what really happened, what could have happened, what almost happened, what did happen to another girl,” Gibney writes, “in this space is where we exist, where we have always existed. Where truth is born and exiled” (59). In this way, Gibney is following a long-established tradition of speculation in nonfiction; she is merely taking it one step further by broadening this technique to include wormholes as well as what if.

This kind of myth-making goes beyond what even the most lenient of creative nonfiction scholars have thus far allowed for in the genre, but many of these writers, such as Gibney and Samatar, insist that, despite the fantastical and speculative elements their work contains, the writing is nevertheless as true as any memoir. In response to the question of why they don’t just call their work fiction, Gibney writes, “Some aspect of adoptees’ birth stories gnaws at us because it just doesn’t make sense… In many ways, this is why the speculative realm of wormholes and timelines intersecting exists for many of us near or beside our ‘real lives’… The speculative is not conjecture for adoptees. The speculative is our ‘real lives’” (11, 12). Samatar says something similar, explaining that combining the imagined and impossible with the (f)actual and remembered—what she describes as “taking a memory that’s already decayed and then tearing it up, or sewing a bunch of feathers onto it”—is the only way to make the story “finally recognizable as yours” (par. 12). Rosalind Palermo Stevenson puts it like this: “The idea of speculative memoir…suggests to me the idea of setting out with a basis in personal fact/actual experience” and, despite whatever fantastical elements also appear, in the end the writer is still “saying I and meaning me” (par. 17). [14] This idea of “saying I and meaning me” is paramount to understanding how myth-making can work in memoir; in fiction, however autobiographical, ‘I’ means ‘someone else’ as a matter of course. The opposite is true in nonfiction: “I am Shannon, I say in my head,” Gibney writes in her memoir, and, “I am Erin, Shannon says in my head…Erin is Shannon, I say in her head,” over and over again, always the same person, no matter how speculative or contradictory (12). This caveat—that I is me—could be considered the defining element of nonfiction. And when one defines nonfiction this way—and not by its relationship to a shaky, undefinable truth (or worse, accuracy)—then mythopoeia has an undeniable place in the genre, as long as the writer still means me when making their myth.

The Myths in Me: Redefining CNF (The C is for Cyborg)

Many of the writers here named are women or gender nonconforming, queer, and/or nonwhite, and even those writers in non-minority communities are still using myth-making to explore subjects which have nonetheless been fractured by other forms of trauma. This feels significant, largely because of the connections that other writers and theorists like Anzaldúa have made between minority communities and identities, trauma, and myth-making. There is substantial evidence for how myth-making can be a (re)construction of experience. I’d now like to take that conversation further as a way of concluding my thoughts on mythopoeia and memoir. [15]

Let’s begin with Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985). The cyborg, Haraway explains, is an image “of both imagination and material reality,” one that calls for “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries” (7). For Haraway, the implications of this conflation—the human and machine, the imagined and the material—remain largely focused on theorizing a more structural approach to feminism, pushing affinity over identity, and critiquing expressivist identity politics. I acknowledge certain parts of the conversation thus far around myth-making and personal reconstruction of experience might feel more akin to the expressivist “goddess” in Haraway’s manifesto than the posthuman cyborg. Haraway herself is more interested in structural systems than the individual. By arguing that myth-making has a place in nonfiction, I am by default bringing that which is large and societal/cultural—myth (even Frye defined it so)—into that which is often personalized and individualized—memoir. By suggesting that myth-making allows for the myth-maker (an individual) to reconstruct themselves through story, I am making a case for identity being a question of essence, an expressive impulse wherein the writer is free to choose a fanciful form as a reaction to a counter-culture, which is more goddess than cyborg. How, then, might I push this conversation away from an expression of self and such identity politics and into a larger cultural conversation about structure and systems?

Perhaps I could say that such a push is inherent when dealing with myths, since myths are, by definition, larger than the individual or event being mythologized. Myths, even when personalized in the manner I’m suggesting is possible, can do much more than consider how an individual is formed. Toward that end, what Haraway has to say about “cyborg writing” seems particularly relevant:

Cyborg writing is about the power to survive…on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them [cyborg writers] as other. The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the central myths of origin… We have all been colonized by those origin myths… Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control. (55-6)

Ultimately, Haraway concludes that “writing is preeminently the technology of the cyborgs…the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly” (57). One could argue that non-mythopoeic nonfiction is the struggle for accuracy—the perfect communication, “the one code”—and, as such, nonfiction runs the risk of “colonizing” experience by limiting it to the (f)actual.

In understanding this, it becomes clear that myth-making, what Haraway describes as cyborg writing in the 1980s but what we in the 2020s might understand as speculative nonfiction, is a necessary technique reacting against that colonization, a way for writers who have long felt bound by someone else’s definition of truth to (re)define reality—not just on an individual level but on a cultural one. Of course, just how “redefinable” an identity can be is certainly up for debate. Though I am largely arguing against a unified and knowable reality, which extends to the individual reality of the self, there are certain aspects of “identity” that are harder to dismantle. Even if the point is that reality can be constructed through narrative, who is to say that the one constructing it, even for themselves, is the final authority? Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who presented as Black for years, and Lauren Slater, who some might rightly feel concerned appropriated a disability to write her memoir Lying, come to mind as examples where one might wonder if the argument for self-mythologizing has gone too far. Just where exactly lies the line would require a separate discussion entirely, and one I don’t have room here to fully take up, but such questions should be at the forefront of things to consider for anyone interested in myth-making in memoir.

Mythopoeic work creates an opportunity for the narrator/writer to explain their world in the truest way possible, without having to worry if their truth aligns with someone else’s definition of real. Embracing myth as an act of resistance, both individually and culturally, solidifies the idea that for those on the margins, attempting to tell their story, myth-making is not only a viable technique in nonfiction but a necessary one; the works created through this mythologizing should therefore be welcomed into the creative nonfiction genre. Lorde calls biomythography “a new spelling of her name.” In other words: a way of rewriting the familiar. It’s an acknowledgement that someone has been as shaped (or possibly even more shaped) by the imaginings of their life than the histories. It’s Secondary Belief. A Frolicking Green Water Dragon. Saying I and meaning me, even when such a thing feels impossible. To create as you speak: Abracadabra.

End Notes

[1] The associated Hebrew cited by the OED is bĕrāḵāh (blessing) and dāḇar (to speak ) or (dāḇār speech, word). Elsewhere, phrases like ebrah k'dabri (Hebrew) and avra kehdabra (Aramaic) are put forth as possible translations, though the accuracy is hotly debated.

[2] Myth has several meanings, but the most relevant definitions from the OED include 1) a traditional story, typically including supernatural, otherworldly, or fantasy beings, which usually attempts to explain why something is the way it is or how it came to be; 2) a figure or event which is held in great awe, generally based on multiple or repeated stories, real or fictitious. Such widely popular stories usually grow until the stories about the figure or event become more widely known or accepted than the original subject of inspiration.

[3] The question of how much ‘creative liberty’ is acceptable in nonfiction is a conversation older than the genre itself. The most famous argument on this topic is chronicled in The Lifespan of a Fact (2012), where the fact-checker Jim Fingal continuously points out intentional errors—some small, some large—in John D’Agata’s article on a teen’s death.

[4] Another quick note on terminology: There are many names tossed around in this essay to describe these various works: biomythography, metaphorical memoir, uncanny biography, speculative memoir, faux biography, nonfiction novel, autofiction, autobiographical novel. What are the distinctions between these terms? Do they each have separate and distinguishable characteristics? Are they merely different words for the same thing, based only on the author’s (and the publishing industry’s) preferences? For my purposes, they are all examples of writing that uses the mythopoeic technique in nonfiction and therefore fall under the same umbrella regardless of name.

[5] “We, too, can make a myth of our own meager circumstances” (David Shields, Reality Hunger, 34): This kind of myth-making—creating a story out of a traumatic or tragic experience in which the narrator had very little control over the circumstances or events—is already a commonly used writing technique in realistic fiction writings. Such work as The Truth About Celia (Kevin Brockmeier), The Virgin Suicides (Jeffrey Eugenides), and Life of Pi (Yann Martel) are all examples of (mostly) realist novels that employ mythic techniques to better understand the reality and experiences of their characters. I wrote about this use of mythology in realistic fiction more extensively in my article “Enchanted Prose: Lyrical Language as Strength in the Mythic Novel,” published in Ploughshares in 2018. By using myth-making in the same way in her memoir, Lorde is showcasing the idea that myth-making is a technique as viable in nonfiction as it is in fiction.

[6] Neil Patrick Harris takes this a step further in his memoir, Choose Your Own Autobiography. That entire book is in the CYOA style and allows you to make choices as NPH; some of the choices offered take you to actual scenes from his life—such as performing in Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog or starring in How I Met Your Mother—while others lead you down entirely fabricated, increasingly absurd scenarios that feature pits of quicksand, murder, and the (oft-returned to) possibility of selling sandwiches after failing to make it as a big star. This approach suggests that the story is being crafted by “you,” the reader, and that you have the power to decide what happens to this (once real, now mythic) person.

[7] “A serious human life…can hardly begin until we see an element of illusion in what is really there, and something real in fantasies about what might be there instead” (Frye, TGC 68).

[8] There is a longstanding tradition in fictional genres where one has only to say something (tell the story of it) to make that story come true: Examples include Inkheart (Cornelia Funke) and The Neverending Story (Michael Ende). Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes) is a great historical literary example of how belief plays a part in mythologizing (creating) the self. In Quixote’s imagination, windmills become giants, humble roadside inns seem the grandest of castles, simple water basins are fine golden helmets. Despite the “reality” of the world threatening to invade at every corner, Quixote can sustain his myths through the power of belief. For many critics, Cervantes’s synthesis of realism and Romance, even fantasy, is the beginning of the contemporary novel, so it makes sense to use it here as an example of when myth first made the move away from classical stories about gods and creation toward a more personalized, individual mythology. What I propose here, by referencing Cervantes, is that if myth made the jump to the novel then, it might similarly make the leap to nonfiction now. As Frye writes, “This wistful sense of [ideas and places] lost but still possible…is something that makes Quixotes of us all” (TEI 434). I reference these fictional titles in part because including fictional works alongside their creative nonfiction counterparts is a way of dissolving the boundary between genres, showing the similarities in the way mythic writing works in either, and underscoring the claim that mythopoeia is a technique available to any genre.

[9] It’s worth mentioning that Tolkien is writing about belief from his perspective as a Christian, and though the mythic memoirist might not share that same kind of faith, there is no denying that the role of belief plays a large part in myth-making, particularly as it applies to nonfiction. Though it’s outside the scope of this paper to say more on this subject, I want to note how other forms of religion and spirituality similarly play a role in belief and nonfiction, especially when it pertains to indigenous and Latinx cultures, such as in the work of Joy Harjo and Isabel Allende. For writers such as these, their personal and cultural practices are so situated in belief that those spiritual experiences can be nothing other than nonfiction. Anzaldúa writes about la facultad, the capacity “to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities”; she goes on to explain that “those who do not feel psychologically or physically safe in the world are more apt to develop this sense. Those who are pounced on the most have it the strongest—the females, the homosexuals of all races, the darkskinned, the outcast, the persecuted, the foreign” (60), which harkens back to earlier comments about the role that myth-making plays in the stories of minority communities.

[10] “Unlike a fiction reader, whose only task is to imagine, a nonfiction reader is asked to behave more deeply: to imagine, and also to believe” (David Shields, RH 60).

[11] Such is the case for Christopher Milne, A.A. Milne’s son on whom Christopher Robin from Winnie the Pooh is based. C. Milne writes about having a hard time distinguishing his memories of an absent father with the myth of the doting father in the books and claims that his was a life that “both inspired and was subsequently inspired by the books” (4), highlighting the fact that sometimes stories really can reshape reality.

[12] It’s like Pooh tells Piglet, when the latter asks the bear if what he wrote about Piglet in his poem was true: “Well, you did it, Piglet, because the poetry said you did. And that’s how people know” (Milne, “In Which Eeyore Finds a Wolery and Owl Moves into It”).

[13] It pleases me to note that Cheney published “Killing Fairies” in 2015 as fiction because there was not then a place for him to publish such a story as nonfiction; less than ten years later, Gibney calls her book a memoir using similar speculative elements, highlighting the rising appeal—and acceptance—that speculative writing has in nonfiction. Perhaps others are now beginning to see the necessity in how “we make our way through and within our stories by creating a language of recognition… We no longer look for resolved narratives, our language of fact and possibility weaving endlessly back and forth” (Gibney 237).

[14] On this subject, Richard Bowes, author of the speculative memoir Dust Devil on a Quiet Street, said something similar in a 2016 interview with Erika Holt: “I’ve made less distinction than some writers do between my reality and my imagination.”

[15] “Realness is not reality, something that can be defined or identified. Reality is what is imposed on you; realness is what you impose back” (David Shields, RH 99).

Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.

Samantha Edmonds is the author of the story collection A Preponderance of Starry Beings as well as the chapbooks Pretty to Think So and The Space Poet. Her work appears in The New York Times, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, Creative Nonfiction, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, among others. She's an Assistant Professor in the creative writing program at Berry College and lives in Rome, Georgia.

August Owens Grimm
"Haunted Memoir"
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