Do You Know What Happens Next?

Revisiting Carmen Maria Machado showed me that memoir doesn’t have to resolve itself to be honest—or settle for a single version of the truth.

Next month at Narratively Academy, Haley Swanson is teaching a six-week workshop class on how to ethically use speculation in memoir and essay. Today, she shares her perspective about what forms speculation has taken in her own work and how she found herself writing in this direction.

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A couple of years ago, I was stuck on an essay detailing my ambivalence towards motherhood. I understood the source of my indifference (a messy family of origin) and that it was intensified by everyone around me insisting these feelings were simply a “phase.” I knew how to relay these facts—but not how to transcend them, how to make meaning of them for my imagined reader. In short, how to turn it into an essay.

And so I started to question the nonfiction writer’s unspoken promise to “the truth.” Frankly, it felt presumptuous to claim what I wrote—my first-person and therefore inherently subjective perspective—was unequivocally the truth. Not to mention boring; my favorite essayists and memoirists were usually rooting around for answers in the dark, not airing out their collection of facts for readers to applaud.

Immediately, I thought of Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In the Dream House, which served as a sort of literary worry stone for me. Whenever I found myself feeling hemmed in by real or imagined writing “rules,” I’d re-read her “Dream House As Choose Your Own Adventure” chapter. The narrator (or “you”, as Machado’s memoir is written in second person) awakes to their girlfriend staring at them, saying that the narrator tossed and turned all night, keeping her awake. The narrator, frozen, lists out all the ways events could transpire next:

“If you apologize profusely, go to page 163. If you tell her to wake you up next time your elbows touch her in your sleep, go to page 164. If you tell her to calm down, go to page 166.”

Besides this being a singularly brilliant craft decision in its mirroring of the impossible stuck-ness of an abusive relationship, it is also a clear reflection of how life lived, and not simply remembered, feels. It’s a wonder any of us gain enough clarity to write about past events, about past selves, with any degree of assuredness; often, the confusion, the indecision, the constant state of wondering what’s going to happen next, falls away with time—and so, too, from our essays.

Chronicling my indecision surrounding motherhood, only to declare in writing that I had decided one way or the other, didn’t feel “true.” Frankly, claiming I was writing my feelings out with the goal of deciding also felt false. I was writing about my indecision because I didn’t know who I could be as a mother, who other members of my family could’ve been under different circumstances, how these two unrealities affect one another in the reality that is. In fact, I found those questions to be more “true” to my lived experience than forcing myself into some sort of fabricated “aha!” moment.

And so I imagined that child of mine. And that led me to imagine my mother and who she was before me or my brother existed. Surely she imagined me in turn, before I existed. And my brother, who he might become. I followed these speculations down, down, down; each one felt much more true to the pain and the hope that lived at the center of my essay.

Because that’s the thing about writing nonfiction: Sometimes it’s not the true events that speak. It’s the true emotions. Slippery, unruly creatures that evade sensory description and transcend the observable world we try so desperately hard to relay, to build, in essay.

In a 2018 Q&A with Electric Literature, Carmen Maria Machado said of In the Dream House, which was then a work in progress:

“I have fictional sections that use tropes as extended metaphors. As I was writing the first draft of this book, I kept thinking, ‘Am I allowed to do this?’”

The answer is a resounding yes. Our job as nonfiction writers is not to relay events beat for beat no matter what, but instead to strive for unflinching honesty about the myriad of shapes the truth can take.

And the truth is: Just because it’s nonfiction doesn’t mean we know what happens next.

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Ready to try it out?

In Writing the “What If”—Speculative Nonfiction Workshop, a six-week class led by author and editor Haley Swanson, writers will engage with memoirs, poems, and essays that play with the “what if” of things—speculating on what could’ve been—and work on incorporating this approach into your own nonfiction writing.

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