Flash Memoir Friday: On Genre, Truth, and Speculation
And thoughts on flash memoir and impudence
On Breaking Convention
Genre conventions are just that. Conventions. Ideas about what a novel or poem are or “should” be, for example, have certainly changed over the last few centuries (decades, years?). And we could even say that strict adherence to the idea of genre is more of a marketing and cataloguing tool than an artistic idea. Still, for artists it’s good to have some sense of what came before you, to work in relation to a tradition, even if the relationship is only to say “pfffft” and go your own way.
Think about how approaches to interiority and form and narrative structure are always shifting in that world of what we call “the novel.” George Eliot, Iris Murdoch, Harriet E. Wilson, Jean Rhys— they wrote astoundingly different types of novels that touch upon what came before but which shape and stretch it for their own purposes. And there is something so particularly lovely about that— the tension between continuity and breaking away on one’s own. It’s part of the engine of literature, and it reminds me of Henry James’s phrase about nineteenth century Russian novels— they’re “loose baggy monsters.” All of literature, all of art taken together from where I stand is a loose baggy monster, a shapeshifting imp. (See also “The Imp of the Perverse, which phrase reminds me of the Succession finale, too.)
So, what does this have to do with flash memoir, you may be asking? Or you may be asking, “What IS flash memoir?” Flash memoir is a short piece of autobiographical prose that calls itself neither fiction nor prose poetry. It’s what some of us (*cough* me) call our work when it wanders back and forth over the line between prose poem and essay, when we refuse to be genre purists, perhaps. I would also suggest, though, that those who argue too strictly for what a poem is or should do, what an essay is or should do— maybe they’re taking the short view, the parochial view. If we look farther afield than, say, the New York Times bestseller list, we see that there have been literary artists in various centuries and places who exist in the lovely in-between of literature. There is the crónica, the haibun, Shōnagon's The Pillow Book. Closer to home, there are American poets like Bernadette Mayer, Gerald Stern, and Diane Seuss writing American sonnets (ones that ultra-formalists would most certainly cry are not sonnets). But they are brilliant. They stretch form and genre toward what needed to be said. Do that. Make your own form. You may not always be marketable, but your writing will be more alive. (And, listen, if you want to be marketable, do that. Or do it sometimes and the weirder stuff other times. You can do what you like.)
On Truth
Implicit in what I’m thinking through here are the ways some of us wander around in poetry, fiction, and essay as it suits us. What can you get at in fiction? Why might you choose to call it an essay, a poem? These are the questions. For me, the autobiographical seeds and threads of language and consciousness I enjoy following are sometimes better served by the leaps of poetry, the leeway of fiction. And other times, I will go ahead and make the agreement with the reader that comes with nonfiction. When you call something “memoir” or “essay” or “nonfiction,” you are telling the reader that you aren’t just making things up. And that can have its own urgency. Flash memoir is sometimes (often) the engine I need to scratch a particular itch: Here is a window into my life, through the lens of my memory and thought, made more poignant perhaps through compression.
So, is there room for the imagined in flash memoir, and in nonfiction in general? Yes. One way the imagined finds its way in is through signaling to the reader that you’re inventing a scene in order to examine different possibilities. Lisa Knopp has called this “perhapsing.” It’s one way of speculating in nonfiction, of imagining what may have happened or could happen, of fleshing out the world of the nonfiction piece. I agree with Knopp about the power of this technique in Maxine Hong Kingston’s essay “No Name Woman,” from Woman Warrior. Knopp explains,
In Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston offers [an] option [when we come to a dead end in our writing]. In the first essay, “No Name Woman,” Kingston’s mother tells her a brief, cautionary tale about her father’s sister in China, who became pregnant even though her husband had been away for years. On the night the baby is born, villagers raid the family’s house and farm. The aunt gives birth in a pigsty, and then kills herself and her baby by jumping into the well from which the family drank. Kingston’s father was so shamed by his sister’s behavior that Kingston was forbidden to ever mention her in his presence.
In order to write the essay, Kingston needed a deeper, fuller understanding of her aunt’s life and a clearer picture of what happened the night she drowned. Since the only information Kingston had was the bare-bones story that her mother had told her, Kingston chose to speculate an interior life for her aunt. I call this technique “perhapsing.” Notice in the following passage how Kingston uses perhapsing to imagine an identity for the man who impregnated her aunt (italics are mine):
Perhaps she had encountered him in the fields or on the mountain where the daughters-in-law collected fuel. Or perhaps he first noticed her in the marketplace. He was not a stranger because the village housed no strangers. She had to have dealings with him other than sex. Perhaps he worked in an adjoining field, or he sold her the cloth for the dress she sewed and wore. His demand must have surprised, then terrified her. She obeyed him; she always did as she was told.
The word perhaps cues the reader that the information Kingston is imparting is not factual but speculative. Kingston doesn’t need to use perhaps in every sentence, because we can see that one perhapsing leads to another.
Kingston’s is a speculation with a compelling urgency and intimacy to it, one that draws us forward to wonder, with the narrator, what it means to be a lost woman in the world of her ancestors China. In her own world as a Chinese-American daughter of Chinese-born parents. As Kingston writes, “Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.” The author’s speculation about her aunt’s unplanned pregnancy and whether she was able to exhibit any agency in her life— and in her death and the death of her newborn— is also an investigation into her own constraints as a Chinese-American woman from her particular family. Kingston imagines intimate knowledge of her aunt’s life, turning the story this way and that to examine different facets, in order to show that it’s a story worth examining.
What Am I Saying?
I’m saying that knowing your forebears is part of being an artist, and that breaking away from convention is part of it, too. It’s not that we have to be rugged individualists having some Oedipal, Harold Bloom moment with our literary ancestors. Rather that making art means taking in what you can, what you’re drawn to, and then doing your own thing. Because your own thing is all you ever can do.
Why do you read and write? What are you seeking to understand? What's important to you? What form will help you explore it? I think these questions evolve over time, and that we can return to them again and again. We must feed the lake, in the words of Jean Rhys:
“All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.”