Inventive Memoir

You might not think of memoir as a genre that lends itself to invention – it’s supposed to be true. But memoir is a literary form that can be inventive and innovative, in its form and prose style. I hope to show you, with a list of examples, just how imaginative memoir can be. Some of the books below incorporate dreams, formal experiments, and even fiction to get at an emotional truth and tell the story of a life or lives. I included pieces of publishers’ descriptions in quotation marks, and my own words alongside.

Pathemata, or, The Story of My Mouth by Maggie Neslon

“Pathemata merges a pain diary chronicling a decade of jaw pain with dreams and dailies, eventually blurring the lines between embodied, unconscious, and everyday life. In scrupulously distilled prose, Pathemata offers a tragicomic portrait of a particularly unnerving and isolating moment in recent history, as well as an abiding account of how it feels to inhabit a mortal body in struggle to connect with others.” I found this slim book riveting. Unlike more typical illness narratives, Pathemata is less about the pursuit and discovery of a diagnosis and cure, and more about interior experience.

The Crying Book by Heather Christle

"Award-winning poet Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and must reckon with her own struggles with depression and the birth of her first child. How she faces her joy, grief, anxiety, impending motherhood, and conflicted truce with the world results in a moving meditation on the nature, rapture, and perils of crying--from the history of tear-catching gadgets (including the woman who designed a gun that shoots tears) to the science behind animal tears (including moths who drink them) to the fraught role of white women's tears in racist violence." That publisher’s description is accurate, but it doesn’t completely convey the experience of reading The Crying Book, in which all these memories, stories, and facts are stitched together like a patchwork quilt.

The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey

I’m holding a copy of The Möbius Book now: it has two beginnings, two front covers, and two parts, one fiction and one nonfiction. You can begin reading either part first, and each speak to one another, although they are not connected in obvious or simplistic ways. “Adrift after a sudden breakup and its ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey's appetite vanished, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith's absence and reemergence. She and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, grief-driven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and of narrative itself. The result is a book of uncommon vulnerability and wisdom, and heartbreaking -- and heart-mending -- exploration of endings and beginnings. A hybrid work with no beginning or ending, readable from either side, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith's power, and inherent danger.”

Aurelia, Aurélia: A Memoir by Kathryn Davis

I’ve gradually been reading all of Kathryn Davis’ imaginative fiction, and her memoir is no less inventive. “Kathryn Davis's hypnotic new book is a meditation on the way imagination shapes life, and how life, as it moves forward, shapes imagination. At its center is the death of her husband, Eric. The book unfolds as a study of their marriage, its deep joys and stinging frustrations; it is also a book about time, the inexorable events that determine beginnings and endings."

The Years by Annie Ernaux

"The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present -- even projections into the future -- photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity.” It is a rare memoir indeed that de-privileges the author’s narrative voice. Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, and The Years, considered by many to be her magnum opus, is a good place to start with her work.

U and I: A True Story by Nicholson Baker

“The author discusses the influence of John Updike on his novels, explains what features of Updike's writings he finds most attractive, and examines the life of a writer.” That’s true, but what this blurb doesn’t tell you, is that Nicholson Baker wrote this discussion of Updike without revisiting any of Updike’s books. He even dwells on a particular sentence, remembered from Updike, that he recalls incorrectly.

Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Voyage From Paris to Marseilles by Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop

“Autonauts of the Cosmoroute is a travelogue, a love story, an irreverent collection of visual and verbal snapshots. In May 1982, Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop climbed aboard Fafner, their VW camper van, and embarked on an exploration of the uncharted territory of the Paris-Marseilles freeway. It was a route they’d covered before, usually in about ten hours, but his time they loaded up with supplies and prepared for an arduous voyage of thirty-three days without leaving the autoroute. Along the way they would uncover the hidden side of the freeway and record The trip’s vital minutiae with light-hearted abandon. At roadside rest areas, armed with typewriters, cameras, and mutual affection, the authors composed this book.” See also: Cortázar’s short story “The Southern Thruway,” collected in All Fires the Fire.

I hope some of these seven book recommendations are inspiring to you. What are your favorite memoirs?

• Corina, West Windsor Branch