Reading the Genre: Composing a Life

Narrative nonfiction, creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction…it goes by many names. Mostly, it’s not fiction. It’s story-telling based on actual experience, using fictional techniques. But our actual experiences, the ones we might want to relate, appear in our lives randomly and certainly without the dramatic sequencing of good fiction. Hence, the nonfiction writer creates literature as he or she narrates experiences seen in retrospect—through recollection, reflection, and reconsideration.

Mary Catherine Bateson talks about the random discontinuities in our lives, the actual crux of the stories we tell: 

      Often continuity is visible only in retrospect. There’s a process that occurs that you don’t even                 know is going on…The discontinuities associated [with challenging life experiences] allow more time for growth and change in a lengthened life span…Usually we think of wisdom in terms of lofty abstractions, not survival skills, absolute truths, not tactful equivocations. And yet the central survival skill is surely the capacity to pay attention and respond to changing circumstances, to learn and adapt, to fit into new environments…
                                                                                   (from Composing a Life, 1990)