Barrie Jean Borich
The walls of the house in Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home (2006) are covered with mirrors. The mirrors are decorative objects, part of the museum of surfaces her father collects in the Victorian mansion he is perpetually renovating while refusing to delve into his own interior, claim his homosexuality, and love the family he seems to care about only because they embellish the facade of his Old World American family décor. Young Alison, who does not know yet she is a lesbian, but who senses that she and her father are both same‐and‐opposite, only knows she does not see herself in her father’s embellished surfaces. In image after image of this sequential narrative (i.e. book‐length comic), when dusting or cleaning, we see her partly reflected in her father’s mirrors, but she does not look. In the two frames where we do see them both see themselves, the father and daughter are arguing. Young Alison does not want to wear girl clothes to the party. Her father insists she must. They both fight what they see in themselves, as they fight with each other. “Not only were we inverts. We were inversions of each other […] It was a war of cross purposes and so doomed to perpetual escalation” (Bechdel 2006: 98). They can’t see themselves clearly, but the book they look out from captures all they can’t yet discern. The mirrors around them are dark but the daughter’s craft – this multi‐form art of actuality, creative nonfiction – is a reflection that sees them both brightly.
Unlike the work of any other literary genre, understanding the meaning of the nonfiction category requires a kind of doubling, an awareness of both the thing and the reflection of the thing, actuality both captured and skewed by the act of looking. So then, what does a half‐imagined tale of an aunt who died in a village well in early twentieth‐century China have to do with a day’s‐long bus ride with an estranged father to a shared Mexican homeland? What do the personal and public legacies of a murdered boy have to do with an arduous hike during which the hiker reckons with the loss of her mother, or a fan’s long‐game observation of one of the best‐known popular music stars of his time, an interview subject who refuses to be interviewed? How does the reinvention of a late nineteenth‐century Russian immigrant girl connect to a mid‐nineteenth‐century fugitive slave’s remembrance of hiding in a space only slightly larger than her body?
All of these summaries describe works of creative nonfiction, but none resemble each other in form or content. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) is a collection of narrative essays about her Chinese American family in which she uses the word “perhaps” to allow her to imagine the story of an aunt she never met, her speculation at once distorting and clarifying. Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Butterfly Boy (2006) tells of his growing up gay in a migrant family, but is interspersed with italicized prose poems he’d like to whisper to an abusive lover he too often mistakes for a father‐figure, variations in diction that ripple through his tale. Both books engage with imagining, wishful musing, memory, family, and formal experiment, and in the process articulate both identity and place – Kingston as a Chinese American woman whose feminism puts her at odds with her family, and Gonzalez as a gay Mexican American man striving to be fully seen at home and in love.
But with memories come questions, not just about our complex and intersecting individual lives but also about the shared human experience of social crisis, personal grief, and popular culture. John Edgar Wideman’s segmented essay “Looking at Emmett Till” (2005) – about racism, family, dreams, and righteous anger – embraces both story, lyric, and manifesto, a funhouse mirror of beauty, horror, family, and malevolence. Cheryl Strayed’s book‐length narrative Wild (2012), about her solo hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, is at once an adventure narrative, a sexuality chronicle, and a meditation on the gradations of mourning. Gay Talese’s Esquire Magazine profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (1966) links participatory journalism to cultural critique, turning an obsession with a crooner into a broad view of American pop myth‐making. These three forms are on the surface nothing alike – one a fragmented and multi‐voiced essay, one a straight‐ahead memoir, one a magazine celebrity profile – yet they all employ acute forms of personal and public witness, each reaching to come to terms with insurmountable influence, and each in its way turning reflections back onto themselves, in order to mourn the loss of a dream.
Some American stories are personal histories as observed through the eyewitness of our least powerful citizens. Mary Antin’s memoir The Promised Land (1912) records more of the mundane than the extreme of her difficult, optimistic journey from pogroms of anti‐Semitic Russia to a small apartment, and an education, in Boston, a narrative of immigrant hope that today we can’t help but read skeptically. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) tells of gruesome captivity within which there is little hope for the American Dream, and yet here the narrator’s core is made of a belief in progress that leads her to pen her story using a voice and style understandable to readers accustomed to both abolitionist texts and women’s romantic novels. Each of these very different books inhabits a moment before the falling away of their known words, in Antin’s case the village life of old Europe, and in Jacobs’s case the southern American tradition of slavery.
So what, then, is this creative nonfiction genre, so unspecific that it can contain all this?
This extreme diversity in form, content, and subjective reckoning is one of the reasons why any introduction to creative nonfiction must always be followed by a definition. Despite the fact that creative nonfiction writing workshops have been commonly offered by universities since the 1980s, a typical response to the mention of the category is still – what is that? Do we mean narratives built on documentable truth, like newspaper story? Or some kind of tall tale? Or historical writing with “creative” flair? Or is creative nonfiction just a needlessly long phrase to describe just memoir, or just first‐person reportage, or just prose poetry? What language will convey what these subgenre categories have in common, while leaving open the hybrid possibilities of what the genre may become? First attempts to describe creative nonfiction most commonly convey too little.
The term “creative nonfiction,” or CNF, is a category defined differently depending on the definer, but most agree to call it an umbrella genre. Also often referred to as literary nonfiction, or narrative nonfiction, or even occasionally imaginative nonfiction, the most inclusive definition of the CNF umbrella includes the subgenres memoir, essay, lyric, report, and hybrid. Though these forms break into myriad other subforms – and often overlap each other to the point of incomprehensibility – these are the general form categories that together make up the genre called creative nofiction.
There’s dispute over the actual beginning of the term. Dinty Moore, editor of the digital nonfiction journal Brevity, writes: “I’ve probably spent roughly half my waking hours over the past twenty years trying, variously, to justify, replace, or explain the unsatisfying label. That may be a slight exaggeration, but if you’ve ever been to a writers’ conference, you know how often the question comes up” (Moore 2015: 6–9). Some working writers today struggle with the term because of the way even the word “nonfiction” seems to focus on what this kind of writing is not, rather than what it is. And does attaching the adjective “creative” suggests the genre protests too much? Is “creative” a modifier better left to the eye of the beholder?
Important too are the elements of the genre category that distinguish this kind of work from either fiction or poetry, which is in itself an odd exercise, because creative nonfiction is so often defined by parameters that differ from the borders of the other genres. Fiction, for instance, can be described as stories made of fully or partly imagined events, but the fact that the stories are imagined does not make fabrication itself a form of art. Every garden‐variety lie, no matter how well expressed, is not literature. What makes a 300‐page act of imagination a novel is the crafted movement of character, setting, conflict, surprise, and change that creates meaning. Whether or not the characters or events existed whole or in part might be of passing interest, but this aspect has little bearing on whether or not the work can be categorized as literary fiction. By similar measures, poetry is the arrangement of language‐based sound, rhythm, breath, image, and idea that may or may not speak directly from the author’s life experience. In both poetry and fiction, form rather than content defines literary category.
Nonfiction may, and often does, contain all of these genre‐defining craft elements and may even combine the lyricism of poetry with the conflict of story, and so what makes creative nonfiction not‐fiction and not‐poetry? The difference is not just that the work is about lived human experience; it also has to do with the manner in which the work relies on its relationship to actuality in the service of creating meaning. The actual is more than merely content, and the language we use to render the actual can’t help but combine both presence and perspective. The intention of creative nonfiction is linked to both the presence of actual persons, places, actions, and things, as well as to the author’s interpretation – the way reflections in a mirror are our recognizable selves but flipped, every essay and memoir at once a skewing and sharpening.
Nonfiction’s embrace of the resonant, and yet fallible, relationship with the worlds we inhabit, and our always imperfect applications of language to experience, combines with this presence of actuality, which then becomes a markedly different project than merely writing “the truth.” Most literary artists, working in any discrete or hybrid genre, seek to write some version of “the truth,” but nonfiction is the only genre bound, by definition, to an actual referent. Some real person, place, or thing may well be rendered in any art form, but in nonfiction the link to actuality forms some of the meaning of the work – so much so that actuality is almost a character on the page. This presence of the actual in and beside the work does not necessarily forbid authorial invention, as art can never be merely transcription, but the mirror of our translation distorts interpretation and thus contributes to a work’s larger meaning.
The author’s relationship to that actuality is key. In their book Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, Bich Minh Nguyen and Porter Shreve emphasize the linked concepts of “Eye & I.” This continuum between observation and introspection emphasizes both the social context of individual identity and the subjectivity of personal witness.
The categories of “I” and “Eye” are not meant to be mutually exclusive. A work of personal nonfiction, after all, must engage in ideas both about and beyond the self. […] As writers and readers we should be able to see a connection between our own and another person’s story. […] When it comes to memory and perception, then, the idea of truth is murky. There is no one viewpoint, no one way to describe how something felt, or occurred.
(Nguyen and Shreve 2005: 1, 4)
In the Summer 2015 issue of the journal Creative Nonfiction – the first literary magazine, founded in 1993 by Lee Gutkind, devoted solely to work in this genre – Dinty Moore tracks the term “creative nonfiction” back to 1969. In a review of Frank Conroy’s game‐changing coming of age memoir Stop Time (1967), according to Moore, scholar David Madden seems to have coined the term “creative nonfiction” when calling for a reconceptualizing of literary genre to include some kinds of memoir, and then he began using the term in the titles for courses he taught at Ohio University (Madden 1969: 7248). Others credit the National Endowment for the Arts, and still others link the term back to an award given by the Canadian Authors Guild in 1943 (Bradley 2015). Like the genre itself, the origin stories overlap and provide multiple entry points to understanding, but most agree that in the mid‐twentieth‐century American publishers and academics underwent a paradigm shift that led to a new genre designation, a fresh way to understand work that had been written for centuries but was read beyond the borders of fiction and poetry.
In the American 1970s, literary writers, editors, and academics who had long considered essays, memoirs, and reportage a side pursuit to the dominant literary genres of fiction, poetry, and drama began to consider nonfiction a creative genre in its own right. Out of this shift came the description of nonfiction as the “fourth genre,” a moniker that became the name of another CNF literary journal, The Fourth Genre, founded in 1999, focusing on new creative nonfiction as well as reviews of new nonfiction books and craft articles and roundtables about the art of nonfiction writing.
The passage from sidelines to center has been anything but smooth in terms of contemporary critical reception, not unrelated to both the popularization of psychotherapy and the advent of identity politics in the American 1980s and 1990s. This was a period when television talk shows made public what had been private experience – everything from drug and alcohol addiction to marital infidelity to child abuse – legitimizing open discussion of what had previously been secret. At the same time, underrepresented identity groups, emerging out of the dramatic social changes of the 1960s and 1970s Civil Rights, anti‐war and second‐wave feminist movements, began to organize and claim language for experience, leading to memoirs and other nonfiction works by writers of color, lesbians and gays, the poor, the disabled, as well as writers with stories to tell about recovering from addiction, dying of AIDS‐related illness, and surviving rape. This all came to the literary fore during the 1990s, in a period known in literary circles as “the memoir craze.” In 1997, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani coined the term “memoir craze” in a review entitled “Woe is me, Perils and Rewards of Memoirs.” She observes that the “current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive, and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring, and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as the examined one” (Kakutani 1997).
Most contemporary nonfiction writers agree with Kakutani’s artistic sentiment, but not her tone, and since that time the study of creative nonfiction craft has evolved substantively. As more kinds of content began to gather under the creative nonfiction designation – books, for instance, about the spiritual experience of nature, the political necessity of memory, retreat and return within families, the interrogation of place and space, intersections of identity, and the reassessment of gender binaries – the conversation has expanded. Today the term “creative nonfiction” refers to essays and memoirs but also subgeneric forms such as the travel essay, nature writing, city writing, the segmented lyric, the graphic memoir, image‐plus‐text, and all manner of hybrid forms, as well related works in other disciplines such as the first‐person documentary and the essay film.
The pre‐creative nonfiction era threads leading onto today’s genre conversation date back centuries, perhaps even all the way to the origins of the written word. The most often discussed of these links in relation to contemporary memoir is an early Christian text, The Confessions by St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. In his accounting of childhood, personal value formation, and sin, written between 397 and 400 CE, Augustine recorded the elements of his life well lived, chronicling earthly pleasures soon shed for the love of God. His euphoric recall of past misdeeds, resistance, and eventual redemption is still the template for the confession narrative, which has melded into the late twentieth‐century recovery narratives of all manner of addiction, including Catherine Knapp’s Drinking, A Love Story (1996), Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted (1998), and Mary Karr’s Lit (2009).
Memory, assessment, and change were not the only strands of influence developing over the centuries. Another was that of lyric observation texts such as The Pillow Book, written, by the eleventh‐century Japanese lady‐in‐waiting Sei Shonagon. Her lyric jottings in a bound notebook kept, most likely only metaphorically, under her pillow, included accounts of outings, observations of the bad behavior of lovers, and lists of things both vile and delightful, a poetic diary conveying not so much the story as the felt experience of life in the court of the Empress.
The lyric mode, which more commonly refers to poetry, is a literary strategy that gets at encounters of beingness – the visceral, and often embodied, impression or experience of moment/image/understanding, obtained without telling a story, but rather through illuminating subject or even opening subject to some new view, without explaining; more like a painting than a story. Indeed, Shonagon’s expressions do resemble a still life or a screen print executed quickly, with a few elegant brushstrokes, in the moments after a lover leaves, as the work of the day begins, a day more or less like the day before, either annoying or luminous. Shonagon’s pillow book is a mirror held close, reflecting back within limits that controlled and contained her world. Contemporary American lyric essayist Carmen Gimenez Smith is one contemporary writer whose work could be described in similar terms; her book Bring Down the Little Birds (2010) is a collection of the ephemera and daily lists of all she loves and hates within the enclosure of new motherhood.
Another era of note is Renaissance Europe. In sixteenth‐century France, Michel de Montaigne, philosopher, nobleman, statesman, and author of personal associative prose, popularized the word “essay” – essai in French, meaning to attempt or try. Publishing most of his essays between 1580 and 1588, Montaigne wrote about everything from idleness to anger to drunkenness to cannibals to smells – demonstrating ways an author can circle subjects, trying out both personal and intellectual routes to understanding, in search of surprise and new awareness. The portrayal of whole self – and with a self‐effacing sense of humor – is what countless contemporary Americans inherit from Montaigne: essayists such as Philip Lopate in Getting Personal (2003), Megan Daum in The Unspeakable (2014), and Patrick Madden in Quotidiana (2010). Montaigne wrote when cities were expanding, the printing press was invented, and the refinement of the flat glass mirror altered the presentation of the self. It is no surprise that the experience of seeing oneself relatively clearly for the first time would lead to art‐making aware of this new form of seeing.
In his book Memoir: A History (2009), Ben Yagoda writes, “The American memoir is so capacious that it cannot be contained by just one category; this is the time of a million little subgenres” (Yagoda 2009: 10). Yagoda’s comments refer to memoir but if we consider all the nonfiction subforms we can see links reaching back into colonial times, when we also find the beginnings of reportage, essay, and new American hybrids, with lyric forms soon to follow.
One of the first texts written in what would soon be America (by an English colonist) blended approaches resembling both memoir and reportage. Scholar Jay Parini, in The Promised Land (2008), called Of Plymouth Plantation, written by William Bradford, one of the pilgrims who arrived in the colonies on the Mayflower, a mythmaking book (Parini 2008: 3). Though written while the colony was forming, beginning in 1620, the book was not published until 1856, after the handwritten manuscript was discovered by an American antiquarian visiting London. Once the chronicle came to print it was an immediate sensation, leading Abraham Lincoln to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday celebrating American survival through cooperation with Indigenous tribes, and thus inscribing what European and Native American relations might have been, before they devolved. “Americans find themselves staring through the prism of this text,” Parini wrote, “into their own complex and beautiful origins” (Parini 2008: 24).
Other forms that developed in the colonial era were the Protestant conversion narratives – related to Augustine’s Confessions but more reflective of harsh Puritan religious culture – and a related form known today as the captivity narrative. The original captivity narratives were dependent on the European‐American demonization and destruction of the Indigenous tribal culture, while at the same time they chronicled a territory at war. These story forms resemble the confessional arc – a path interrupted, great change, and restored life led anew – a template that would be employed with very different content in both American slave narratives and European Holocaust narratives.
The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) was one of the first American literary hits. What’s interesting about this book is less the expected racism and relinquishment of self to God, and more the way Rowlandson’s essay creates a complex portrait where her captors are more often kind than cruel and where the ideological infrastructures of the Puritan world come into question, as the composition of her text leads her into complexity rather than dogma. In his book The Making of the American Essay (2016), nonfiction writer and twenty‐first‐century literary provocateur John D’Agata writes:
This other voice that occasionally emerges from the book is quiet, hesitant, and tinged with skepticism, and when it’s set against the confidence that’s exhibited elsewhere, a troubling and pervasive dissonance is exposed, a kind of rupture that we can imagine Rowlandson tumbling through in the book, trapped within that rift between knowing how to deflect a difficult personal experience with elegantly abstract Christian exegesis, and not knowing how to do anything at all but open her eyes with resignation to the world. I think this is the first great essay that America produced.
(D’Agata 2016: 18)
Near the end of the Narrative, one of Rowlandson’s Wampanoag captors hands the narrator a mirror: “He asked me, When I washed me? I told him not this month, then he fetched me some water himself, and bid me wash, and gave me the glass to see how I looked” (D’Agata 2016: 42). One wonders what kind of American face Mary Rowlandson really saw?
Some half‐dozen years after the United States was established, another French philosopher wrote his version of the confessional narrative, but this one is secular. In The Confessions of Jean‐Jacques Rousseau (1782), the author departs from the spiritual autobiography model to tell of worldliness and accomplishment. We see this secular self‐made man autobiography again in America in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, published posthumously in 1791, a life story chronicling Franklin’s self‐education and life journey from tradesmen to statesman, but deflecting rather than boasting, as if viewing his esteemed reflection with a sideways glance. Orman Seavey, in his introduction to a 1999 reprinting, writes, “self revelation on Franklin’s part always takes the route of indirection” (Franklin and Seavey 1999: ix).
One of Franklin’s strategies of indirection was to begin the book in direct address to his son, a device that would be employed again by American personal nonfiction writers in later moments of urgency and change, their subject as much the state of democracy as their own American lives. James Baldwin addressed his nephew in his scathing volume about American racism, The Fire Next Time (1963), Ta‐Nehisi Coates published his equally wrenching Between the World and Me (2015), also about racism in America, in the form of a letter to his son, and Kiese Laymon does the same in Heavy (2018), his memoir written in direct address to his mother about the black body and the black family in the American South. Note how each of these books begins:
Benjamin Franklin (1791): Dear Son, I have ever had a Pleasure in obtaining any little Anecdotes of my Ancestors. You may remember the Enquiries I made among the Remains of my Relations when you were with me in England; and the journey I took for that purpose. Now imagining it may be equally agreable [sic] to you to know the Circumstances of my Life, many of which you are yet unacquainted with… Having emerg’d from the Poverty & Obscurity in which I was born & bred, to a State of Affluence & some Degree of Reputation.
(Franklin and Seavey 1999: 3)
James Baldwin (1963): I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. Like him you are tough, dark, vulnerable, moody – with a very definite tendency to sound truculent because you want no one to think you are soft. You may be like your grandfather in this… Well, he is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.
(Baldwin 2013: 4)
Ta‐Nehisi Coates ( 2015 ): Son, Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. […] Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history.
(Coates 2015: 5)
Kiese Laymon ( 2018): I did not want to write to you. I wanted to write a lie. I did not want to write honestly about black lies, black thighs, black loves, black laughs, black foods, black addictions, black stretch marks, black dollars, black words, black abuses, black blues, black belly buttons, black wins, black beens, black bends, black consent, black parents, or black children. I did not want to write about us. I wanted to write an American memoir.
(Laymon 2018: 1).
What each of these quintessentially American writers sees in his mirror is the mess, struggle, and hope of the United States of America itself.
Moving forward from Ben Franklin into the first 100 years of American identity we begin to see a multitude of first‐person American literary voices, many as innovative and artful as work we see today. However, with new voices come complex questions about authorship. Autobiography of Ma‐ka‐tai‐me‐she‐kia‐kiak, or Black Hawk (1833) by Black Hawk was narrated to a journalist through a translator after his capture by United States military forces. The book has been described as a rare example of an autobiography of an unassimilated American Indian. However, as will be the case with another, later, Native as‐told‐to autobiography, Black Elk Speaks (1932), readers can’t be sure how mediation impacts message. Does oral tradition translate to the written word? Is this book a work of autobiography, long‐form journalism, or fiction? Though scholars have verified at least a collaborative intention in Black Hawk’s book (Black Hawk and Nichols 1999), it will be 150 years before Native writers are free to address these questions directly in print.
First published as early as the 1700s, but emerging in full in the mid‐nineteenth century, the large body of American literature we know today as slave narratives faced some of the same questions of authenticity. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Jacobs recounts her story, using the pen name Linda Brent, in the style of domestic fiction of the antebellum period, an intentional literary and abolitionist move to arouse compassion among readers, and which, along with political expediency, marks a middle ground between testimony and artful composition, asking readers to consider not only her experience but also what it means to speak experience to power. Abolitionists – such as Jacobs’s editor, first‐wave feminist and writer Lydia Childs – made it possible for such work to be published in its time. Feminist academics such as literary scholar Jean Fagen Yellin, whose exhaustive authenticating research, including the discovery of a cache of Jacobs’s letters, clarified Lydia Childs’s role as Jacobs’s editor and not (as some presumed) the ghostwriter of the text. Yellin’s discovery made it possible for the work to resurface in a manner that leads us to read this book as not just a view on slavery but also an account, indeed, actually “written by herself” (Jacobs 2009: xix–liii).
And so we see emerge, alongside the already old tradition of spiritual autobiographies, a literature committed to documentary illumination as well as narrative craft. Meanwhile, some writers had also been at work perfecting the art of observation. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) might be one of the first immersion projects, but narrative journalism didn’t begin to take hold until the late nineteenth century, with the artful reportage of Stephen Crane and Adam Cahan, both better known as novelists but whom historians of reportage credit with the invention literary journalism in their work at the urban evening newspaper New York Commercial Advertiser (Hartsock 2000).
Two artful nonfictions published on the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were Specimen Days (1882) by Walt Whitman and The Education of Henry Adams (1907) by Henry Adams. Whitman was a definitive poet of the nineteenth century, his long lines so prose‐like in sound and texture it is no surprise that his observational, lyric prose collage would read like a series of prose poems. Essayist Leslie Jamison (author of The Recovering and other essay work) has written about her love of Specimen Days:
Specimen Days is Whitman’s attempt to document all the objects that became part of him across the course of one stretching cycle. In these fragments, he is perpetually fascinated by the possibility of absorbing the world and being absorbed by it. […] At moments, his language nearly shatters, hurling itself against hyperbole, in order to give us some sense of what it won’t ever be able to convey.
(Whitman 2014: 1–13)
Specimen Days, in its undefinable hybridity and deep communion of prose, poetry, and observation, is antecedent to twenty‐first‐century lyric essays such as those in Judith Kitchen’s Half in Shade (2012), Colette Brooks’s In the City: Random Acts of Awareness (2003), and Julie Marie Wade’s Catechism: A Love Story (2016).
In The Education of Henry Adams (1907), we see a break in the parameters of consciousness and character. Writing in the third person, Adams uses storytelling strategies to get at not just experience, not just history, but the unease of time and change. His use of language to get under the ineffable surface of things predicts later writers like Annie Dillard, whose ruminations on the mundane consciousness of childhood, in her memoir An American Childhood (1987), has much in common with this passage from The Education: “Of all this that was being done to complicate his education, he knew only the color of yellow. He first found himself sitting on a yellow kitchen floor in strong sunlight. He was three years old when he took this earliest step in education; a lesson in color” (Adams 1999: 11). At the start of the twentieth century, nonfiction is still considered marginal to fiction and poetry, but by this time there is no mistaking the family resemblance Adams’s book casts in the American mirror.
Though it will be the mid‐1960s before narrative journalism is described critically as a literary art form, and the 1980s before the term “creative nonfiction” fully enters the literary parlance, by the start of the twentieth century the alliance of art and information in myriad works is impossible to ignore. Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain (1903), describing deserts of the Southwest, and John Muir’s The Yosemite (1912), describing the mountains of the American West, are antecedent to contemporary naturalist nonfiction writer Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge (1991). Immigration autobiographers such as Mary Antin are antecedent to countless later immigrant memoirs including Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (1989) and Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1994). Socialist journalist John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World (1919) is antecedent to American left works like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (2001); and civil rights activist, intellectual, and editor W.E.B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks (1903) is a clear forerunner to Ta‐Nehisi Coates’s Beautiful Struggle (2008) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014).
Other notable pre‐CNF era writers of the mid‐twentieth century were known for biting intellect and sharp descriptive clarity. Their work includes the ringing essays and urban sketches of E.B. White (Here is New York [1949]); the interrogative short memoirs of Mary McCarthy (Memories of a Catholic Girlhood [1957]), complete with inner chapters describing where she had remembered and where she had invented; the travel letters and artist portraits of Janet Flanner/Genet (Men and Monuments [1957]); the nonfiction novel/immersion reportage of Truman Capote (In Cold Blood [1965]); and the literary memoir (Stop Time [1967]) by Frank Conroy, who helped invent the contemporary literary memoir, and whose only prior claim to notoriety was having once been an adolescent boy.
In the mid‐twentieth century, CNF is still not quite a genre, yet the biggest nonfictional stirs of the era came as a result of American imaginative nonfiction writing that did the hands‐on work of taking on war, injustice, human rights, the environment, identity, immigration, the counterculture, and new parameters of intellect. These included James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a Works Progress Administration‐funded writer and photographer collaboration in Appalachia; Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), a coming‐of‐age memoir whose alternate title was American Hunger and whose working title was, interestingly, considering the roots of the genre, Black Confession; John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946), a nonfiction novel that predates Capote’s In Cold Blood, about the aftermath of the atom bomb attack of Japan; Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), a memoir about growing up Chinese American in San Francisco; James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name (1961), cuttingly political and psychological essays that changed the conversation on race in America; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), the environmental activist masterpiece that led to the American ban on DDT; Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), a coming‐of‐age memoir about race and manhood in New York City; Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation (1966), a new kind of cultural and philosophical criticism that changed the conversation on art and culture; Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966), pre‐Gonzo journalism about the bike gang world; Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets (1967), a Puerto Rican coming‐of‐age story set in Spanish Harlem; Tom Wolf’s The Electric Kool‐Aid Acid Test (1968), one of the first participatory New Journalism works about drugs and youth counterculture; Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968), personal journalism about counterculture change in San Francisco; Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968), a cranky desert sojourn about inhabiting and honoring the natural world; Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), the first in a seven‐memoir series about overcoming racism and trauma; and M. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), a hybrid work by a Native American author of Kiowa descent that employs experimental form to render the lived experience of tribal history, oral tradition, and cultural marginalization of his people, without the point‐of‐view barriers obscuring the dictated Black Hawk and Black Elk autobiographies. These are works that cracked open not just literary genres but the mid‐century American world. Or perhaps we could say, cracked the mirror? One wonders what is the face America now sees in these reflections.
The 1970s were the turning point upon which the genres spun and the old centers no longer held. The fourth genre was now irrevocably visible. In the time between this turning point and the present day, CNF practitioners began to frame genre values and commonalities, create new subforms, and instigate debates, adding up to a diverse, multilayered, and ongoing conversation on questions that will likely never be settled.
The most commonly held genre values vary depending on the subgenre: a memoirist likely engaged in scene‐based story, the speaker more unguarded on the page, as compared to the thinking and interpretation of the essayist, and a deeper reliance on image, sound, and pattern of the lyric writer – keeping in mind that most contemporary forms are somewhat hybrid, meaning these values overlap. The literary memoir, for instance, is defined as memory‐plus‐reflection, while the personal essay is a question supported by the narrative evidence of memoir and experience, and the lyric can be anything from a prose poem to long‐form narrative, broken up by structural or language choices encouraging immersion over interpretation.
The genre values of CNF include (i) an unveiled narrator, whether frank, wry, or elusive, writing without the mask of the fiction writer; (ii) getting no credit for life itself, meaning craft is necessary to transform experience into art; (iii) expansion of the story‐writing maxim of show‐don’t‐tell to show‐and‐tell, a work’s action, summary, and reflection deepened by the possibilities of well‐wrought language; (iv) recreation of the self as a character telling his or her version of the truth; and (v) a distinction between situation and story, a concept Vivian Gornick introduced in her book about nonfiction writing, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (2001), to distinguish between the surface of event and the deep subject realization of a fully imagined essay or memoir. “Every work of literature has both a situation and a story,” Gornick wrote. “The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: The insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say” (13).
The subforms of nonfiction include the segmented essay, popularized by Annie Dillard’s early work, Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982); the braided essay that combines dissonant threads to create new meaning; and the hermit crab essay which conveys meaning through the embrace of an exterior form, as essayist Brenda Miller’s Seasons of the Body (2002) demonstrates; and the mosaic or collage essay, a category that came into nonfiction parlance after Philip Lopate used “mosaic” as a classification in The Art of the Personal Essay (1994).
The anti‐memoir is a stance some personal nonfiction writers such as Ander Monson (Vanishing Point: Not A Memoir [2010]) have embraced when publishing nonfiction that eschews memoir‐style frankness, vulnerability, and redemption, emphasizing instead idiosyncratic form, idea, and conceptual wit. Another example is Lauren Slater’s Lying, A Metaphorical Memoir (2001), which describes itself on the cover of the first edition with this sentence, seemingly part of the book’s title: There is only one kind of memoir I can see to write and that’s a playful, impish, exasperating text, shaped, if it could be, like a question mark.
“Truthiness” – language popularized on TV satirist Stephen Colbert’s satirical TV show The Colbert Report, meaning untruths that appear to be true – refers in this context to the spectrum of invention, from the fabrication of small details or omission of facts, to memoir frauds such as books by writers who falsely claim they have, for instance, survived the Holocaust or escaped an inner‐city street gang, making use of the old conversion and captivity arcs by pretending actuality and concocting experience that justifies the form. The discussion among nonfiction writers, about whether or not invention should ever be the province of the work, is hotly debated, and authors come in at every point on the continuum – from all art is invention, so anything goes to nonfiction writers have a “contract with the reader” broken when any detail is invented. Contemporary authors such as John D’Agata (The Lifespan of a Fact [2012]) and David Shields (Reality Hunger [2010]) have even written books (definitely not memoirs) that play with and build on these debates. Many more writers are comfortable in the middle. In his book Truth in Nonfiction (2008), David Lazar wrote: “falsehoods can be useful if the writer of essays or memoir can catch herself or himself in the act, displaying the insight and ability to self‐correct that is among the rare pleasures of different forms of memory writing” (2008: x). The truth in nonfiction debate is a disagreement that will likely never be settled. If form is a mirror then contemporary CNF can’t help but reflect our shifting, slippery times.
Six books published first between 1970 and 1980 will stand in here for the many that broke ground for today’s nonfiction renaissance. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Annie Dillard paid homage to Thoreau’s Walden (1854) while also evoking the rhapsodic prose of classic spiritual autobiographies. Maxine Hong Kingston told her own Chinese American story interlaced with the stories of several generations of Chinese immigrants in her two‐part epic The Woman Warrior (1976) and its later companion China Men (1980). Kingston considers the two‐book series a biography of her people – one about the women and the other about the men, echoing their separations when Chinese men came to America to build the railroads. British‐turned‐Californian documentary novelist Christopher Isherwood returned to the setting of his famous The Berlin Stories (1945) in his first memoir, Christopher and His Kind (1976), remembering the Weimar era this time as an out homosexual, admitting his reason for traveling to Germany had been to meet beautiful young men. In Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977), immersive reportage and narrative description bring home the visceral experience of the American war in Vietnam; and the psychological legacy carried by children of Holocaust survivors was burned into the page by Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus (1980), first published as a serial in Raw Magazine.
If new genre doors opened in the American 1970s, by the 1980s nonfiction had moved all the way into the house. Patricia Hampl’s A Romantic Education (1981) ruminated on her Czech American family’s old country in her memoir about political change and the necessity of memory. Hunger of Memory (1982) was controversial because of author Richard Rodriguez’s stance against affirmative action, but the book also delved into the estrangement of education leading to schisms in immigrant American families. Poet Audre Lorde coined the term “biomythography” to categorize her Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), a melding of stories about both her Caribbean immigrant family of origin and her pre‐Stonewall chosen lesbian families, the biomythography her intersectional hybrid container. Narratives of place, space, and intersectional identity were also at play in John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers (1984), part family memoir, part interview‐based reconstruction, part diatribe about the relationship between two African American brothers, one a Rhodes Scholar and college professor, the other in prison for robbery and murder, as well as in Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) a book that inhabits the borderlands of Texas and Mexico, as well as Spanish and English, and is inhabited by the visible, speaking lesbian body. Intimate history animates Vivian Gornick’s memoir Fierce Attachments (1987), a book that interlays her mother’s Manhattan and Bronx histories with her own, the time frames held together through the repetition of their perpetual mother–daughter arguments that take place while they walk the streets of a city embedded with both their stories.
What’s happening in CNF today is not so different from what happened in antiquity. Forms, be they confessions or pillow books, reports or stories, genres or mirrors, are still containers, inevitable in their reproductions, voracious in their mutability, beholden to what in the world needs telling.
What has needed telling between the 1980s and the present day is has been every facet of living. Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life (1989) and Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club (1995) published narratives of captivity and release from family abuse. Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted (1993) mingles the drama of memory with the hard fact of documents, facsimiles of Kaysen’s medical records. Anne Carson’s Plainwater (1995) dissolves the lines between poetry, essay, classical texts, and pilgrimage narratives. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) delivers unconventional desire page‐center, mingling memoir and theory in an innovative form some are calling autotheory, and printing her archives in the margins. John D’Agata’s About a Mountain (2010) and Paisley Rekdal’s The Broken Country bring lyric impression to essayistic query, reportage, and research; Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast (1996) and Mary Cappello’s Called Back (2009) depict illness as interrogations of interior spaces; Bernard Cooper’s My Avant‐Garde Education (2015), Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004), and Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit (2017) converse with visual and conceptual art in their examinations of American identity; Paul Lisicky’s The Narrow Door, A Memoir of Friendship (2016), Kisha Lewellyn Schlegal’s Fear Icons (2018), and Elizabeth Alexander’s The Light of the World (2015) circle grief, loss, fear, and other intangibles with sensate moment and lyric rumination; Deborah A. Miranda’s Bad Indians (2013), Catherine Taylor’s You, Me, and the Violence (2017), and Ames Hawkins’s These Are Love(d) Letters (2019) combine found texts and objects with autobiography, history, and theory, creating new artifact‐based nonfiction forms; Ira Sukrungruang’s Southside Buddhist (2014), Melissa Febos’s Abandon Me (2017), and T Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls (2019) uncover and reassemble intersecting layers of place, race, sexuality, family, and coming of age; Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005) and Hilton Als’s White Girls (2013) collect the nuances and shadow politics of the sociopolitical atmosphere; Lia Purpura’s All The Fierce Tethers (2019), Nicole Walker’s Sustainability, A Love Story, and Lauret Savoy’s Trace: Memory, Race, and the American Landscape (2015) yoke fierce observation to the long legacy of environmental writing. Some nonfiction writers collect artifacts and memories as if each page is another drawer in a memory cabinet; some reinvigorate rumination with animating images and startling voice; some wait and observe, for months or even years, their immersion making space for the witness of others.
Three twenty‐first‐century books in the creative nonfiction compendium, a list now with far too many entries to count, are transperson narratives, one a linear activist memoir, one a non‐linear anti‐memoir, one a lyric series on desire. In Redefining Realness (2014), Janet Mock tells the story of realizing girlhood as a young child while constantly being reminded of a body assigned the designation of boy. The story of her medical and social gender confirmation process rings with her admonishment to her readers to take note of who we are to ourselves, a mantra she repeats as often as the confession memoirists of antiquity call out to God. In Man Alive: A True Story About Violence, Forgiveness, and Becoming a Man (2015), Thomas Page McBee does not call out so much as dial in, layering the stories of childhood rape by a father figure against a near‐death experience by the hand of a mugger who pulls back only when noticing the man he’s assaulting has the body of a woman, all funneling into a narrative that asks: If I will be a man, what kind of man will I be? McBee’s gender confirmation process takes apart what in the world makes us who we are to ourselves. T. Fleischmann’s Syzygy, Beauty: An Essay (2011) is a lyric prism, each vignette a record of indefinable boundaries between genders, bodies, loves, desires, and form. This voice and imagery immerse the reader, almost literally, pulling us into the center of an ever‐shifting interiority. These books are not novels, nor are they poems. They are mirrors that refract as much as they reflect, offering us only whatever skewed and delightful light actuality has to give.
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) features one more scene where the narrator is reflected, but this time there are no mirrors. The narrator sees a delivery woman in work pants, a plaid shirt, a big belt, and a ring of keys (Bechdel 2006: 117–119), and she is riveted. Despite all her father has told her, here is a woman who dresses like a man, a woman who is masculine, and the narrator sees herself clearly for the first time, in this moment, possibly not even fully remembered by the author until she writes it down, here on the page, in this frame – for this is the purpose of the nonfiction page, to square off such moments – where the life we can all see her living begins.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 26 (LATINA/O LITERARY FORMS).