I Write Good Memoir. My Former-Family Is Pissed.
And That’s Just Too Damn Bad.
Creative Nonfiction is sometimes defined as “True Stories, Well-Told,” or at least Lee Gutkind, founder of Creative Nonfiction Magazine, and pillar of the craft uses that as the tagline of the mag’s masthead.
Many creative nonfiction pieces take the form of essay, rather than book-length, and therefore rely heavily on the concept of setting the frame, creating a narrative that is compelling, thus drawing the reader in to the writer’s experience. It is much like a filmmaker, looking through the lens, to capture the visual space that her viewers will see, and excluding from the picture what they will not. We are, after all, inviting our readers in to a sliver of our lives, and hopefully a compelling one.
I typically have been just such an essayist, inviting my readers into slim portions of my lived experience rather than writing in broad strokes an analysis or history of the whole. I’ve written about “that one day,” where I didn’t have enough money to buy my wedding bouquet, or “that time” when my cousin dared me to ask if I was adopted. I’ve written about how it felt to bury my mother, a woman with whom I had a fraught relationship, and I’ve written about how each of my three children handled their inheritance from her in ways as different as each of their personalities. I’ve also…
