Ana Maria Spagna | September 2021

  Ever since the adjective “creative” was tacked on “nonfiction” sometime in the late 1980s, volumes of pages have been written and thousands of workshop hours have been spent debating how much a first person narrator can make up. Writers, scholars, and readers have carved their own slots on the truth-to-imagination spectrum. In To Show and to Tell, Phillip Lopate makes the argument against speculation in plain terms. “It’s not that difficult to invent,” he writes, “the harder imaginative task for nonfiction writers is that of seeing the pattern in actual experience and putting it into some order…Understanding is thick imagining.”¹ His point is as practical as it is ethical. When you speculate you create a stumbling block for the reader who, instead of paying attention to the story, stops to wonder, “Hey, how did the author know?” He argues for writer to be assiduous in the use of cues in letting the reader know whenever she makes a statement that strays from known truth.

  Lisa Knopp focuses on one of these—the word “perhaps”—in her oft-cited craft essay “Perhapsing: The Use of Speculation in Nonfiction.” She turns to Maxine Hong Kingston’s classic hybrid text Woman Warrior to point out how the cue “perhaps” works to both access memory and to recreate scene without crossing boundary. “By perhapsing,” Knopp writes, “Kingston offers motives, actions, justifications, and specific details that add richness, texture, and complexity absent in her mother’s account, without crossing the line into fiction.”² Knopp’s clever contribution to the ongoing conversation—to make “perhaps” a verb—has offered permission and inspiration to many writers paralyzed by the debate.

  To be clear, “perhapsing” is no recent phenomenon. Montaigne has inhabited the realm of “perhaps” for centuries. Kim Stafford has contrasted the essayist’s task with that of a commentator on the NPR radio program “This I Believe.” We need a show, he once said to me, called “This, I Wonder.” The challenge lies in letting the reader know when the “wondering” begins. And “perhapsing” is far from the only tool available.

  It’s worth taking a closer look at some others because the techniques a writer chooses to use—including hedging, dramatization, cues, or radical shifts in language—do more than separate the work from fiction. They define the parameters of the growing kinship between the writer and the subject: how the author knows what she does and, more urgently, the fact that she wants to know more.

  For specific examples, I’ll turn to two sub-sub-genres of creative nonfiction: the family memoir, and what we’ll call “immersion biography” (with a brief detour into the realm of the lyric essay, glamorous and rebellious, notorious for taking liberties formerly reserved for poetry.) In a family memoir, the writer explores the experience of an ancestor, someone she may or may not have known personally. In doing so she inevitably finds herself dwelling in scenes she never experienced, and, therefore, often turns to speculation. Several memoirs have done so in interesting and differing ways, including Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat, Falling Through the Earth by Danielle Trussoni, and Among the Living and the Dead by Inara Verzemnieks. In immersion biography, a writer tries to recreate the life of a person who is dead and to whom they are not related, at least in part, by immersing herself, as a character, in the story. Recent examples include The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs, and The Fact of a Body by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich.

  In Brother, I’m Dying, Edwidge Danticat explores the life stories of her immigrant father in Brooklyn and his brother, Uncle Joseph, who remained in Haiti, as well as other characters living in Haiti during intense political unrest, including a close family friend, Marie Micheline. As such, it offers a primer in methods of speculation including hedging: telling more than one version of the story, and telling how the story was told to you.

  “Hedging” refers to the mid-sentence words or phrases that nod to uncertainty. “Perhaps” is one; “maybe” is another. Others include: “might,” “may,” “probably,” “could have,” “would have,” or “I imagine that….” In the following dramatic paragraph describing Marie Micheline’s last moments of life, Danticat hedges insistently, in every sentence, reminding us that she knows none of this for certain, which also serves to create tension, foreshadowing, as readers begin to suspect the reason she can’t know for certain: because Marie Micheline will soon be dead.

She was probably just reaching over to slip the files into a small metal cabinet beside her when she heard one gunshot followed by a volley of bullets. Looking up, she would have seen a whirl of camouflage racing past the open metal gate. At this point, she may have thought of the forty people who according to newspaper reports had died that week, caught in the crossfire of such battles all over Port-au-Prince. She may have thought of Ruth or of her three young sons, Pouchon, Marc and Ronald, who were due back from school at any time. She may have thought of Tante Denise, to whom she was to give an insulin shot in a few minutes. Of Uncle Joseph, whose blood pressure she also monitored daily at the same time.³

  Note how Danticat assures readers know that the information following the hedge word has stemmed from research. Forty people have died “according to newspaper reports.” The blood pressure, which has been monitored daily was recorded somewhere. Danticat surely saw those records, but rather than laboriously walk the reader through the research, she tucks it tidily into this one dramatic paragraph.

  Still, why hedge in every single sentence? Isn’t it a bit too intrusive? Wouldn’t one be enough? The insistent hedging does double duty: it lets us know she’s making it up, but also gives us the palpable sense of her desire to understand this woman. The hedging puts Danticat, as narrator, into the scene (even without an “I”) as someone who has relived this moment in her own mind, over and over.

  Often a writer’s basis for facts, as such, isn’t a written record, but another person’s account. In this case, there’s not just a problem of subjectivity (how does the writer know?) but also the problem of reliable sources (how would the other person know?)

  Here Danticat portrays a scene in Uncle Joseph’s life via a conversation with Uncle Franck, the person who heard the story firsthand. She dramatizes the imprecise way the story reached her, through the blurry lens of another person’s memory (and in doing so subtly interrogates memory, something she does more infrequently in the memoir than most memoirists).

“They say they’re going to put me in prison,” Uncle Franck remembers Uncle Joseph saying. It was difficult to register emotion on the voice box, but Uncle Franck thought he sounded like he was caught up in something he had no way of understanding. “It’s not true. They can’t put you in prison,” Uncle Franck recalls telling him. “You have a visa. You have papers. Did you tell them how long you’ve been coming here?”⁴

  Danticat does not find it sufficient to say “Uncle Franck remembers Uncle Joseph saying” once. In the very next sentence, she reminds us again about the source of the information: “Uncle Franck recalls telling him.” As with hedging, she risks sounding repetitive in order to be clear about the source of information and, I’d argue, to underscore—in this case to dramatize—what’s unknown, what the narrator is trying to know.

Other writers are not as direct (or repetitive) when nodding to the source(s) of a speculative passage. Much of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks follows Rebecca Skloot as a narrator/researcher, a character on the page, as she tracks the story of a black woman’s cells taken without her permission and used, over decades, for medical research. Throughout the book, we see Skloot set up an interview, enter the room, sit down, etc. But early in the book, she’s more interested in Henrietta Lacks herself, the woman at the heart of the story, who has been dead for fifty years. In the very first chapter, Skloot fully inhabits Henrietta’s perspective with a third-person limited point of view, but as she does so, she slyly cites her sources. Skloot writes:

About a week after telling her cousins she thought something was wrong, at the age of twenty nine, Henrietta turned up pregnant.⁵

The cousins don’t even get their own sentence. Skloot relegates them to a subordinate clause to keep the momentum going. And the cousins aren’t the only source. On the same page she infers, but does not outright state or explain, another potential source: Henrietta’s friends. “For more than a year,” Skloot writes, “she’d been telling her closest girlfriends something didn’t feel right.”⁶

Once she has established credibility, Skloot launches into this boldly speculative passage, an intimate scene of Henrietta alone.

She filled her bathtub, lowered herself into the warm water, and spread her legs. With the door closed to her children, husband and cousins, Henrietta slid a finger inside herself and rubbed it across her cervix until she found what she somehow knew she’d find: a hard lump, deep inside, as though someone had lodged a marble just to the left of the opening to her womb”⁷

  The prose slows here, and the final long sentence, the crucial moment, relies on figurative language: “as though someone had lodged a marble….” Whether Skloot’s own or one Henrietta used herself, the marble analogy is the most vivid in the chapter and lies at the heart of everything that’s to come.

  Still, it’s crucial that Skloot keeps this passage short. A longer description would risk slipping into what Lopate calls “concretized abstraction”—so many imagined sensual details that the reader is actually moved farther from the heart of the matter.⁸

  Which brings us to the role of language. While hedging and acknowledging sources are commonplace in creative nonfiction, other less transparent techniques can be equally effective and more artful. A writer’s voice, for example, can modulate to signal a transition from the place of what’s known to what’s less known, from what was to what might have been. Critic Lee Martin offers an interesting working definition of this kind of “modulation” in an essay titled “Split Toning” in Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction. Borrowing terminology from developing photographs, he describes “split toning” as using poetic language to signal incomplete knowledge much the way the beauty and texture of a sepia photograph relies on a process of incomplete bleaching.⁹

  In Among the Living and the Dead, Inara Verzemnieks uses poetic language in precisely this way. To be sure, some of the book, like Danticat’s and Skloot’s, dramatizes her own journey—physical and emotional—to understand the lives of her Latvian grandparents who survived both World War II and the oppression of the Soviet regime that came in the wake of the war. When Verzemnieks sits at the Latvian farmhouse kitchen table with relatives in contemporary time, her workaday prose relies on declarative sentences and short sections of dialogue. But when Verzemnieks shifts into speculative mode, she lets loose.

In the following fully imagined passage, a scene for which a writer would have no way to glean firsthand knowledge, she doesn’t bother with hedging (why would the reader need a “may have” or “perhaps” considering the situation?); she melds sensual description and figurative language with raw facts of history.

Through the blood and mucus, great-great grandfather, takes his first gasp of air, mouth working like one of the carp rising to the surface of the manor’s moat. He is technically the first in his family to breathe freely—while he has been floating in his mother’s belly, the barons, under calls for reform, have torn up all the peasant’s hereditary obligation, effectively emancipating all serfs—and yet my great-great-grandfather is born as much under the control of the barons as his ancestors ever were.¹⁰

The image of the newborn compared with the carp lures the reader into the next sentence where you get what Latvian (Russian, at this point) history has been and what it will be, a sense of the class conflict and where the family stands, all at once. Most impressively, Verzemnieks includes no years, no famous people’s names, no proper nouns at all. She uses imagination to give a history lesson, and in doing so—by dwelling in this imagined space—she personalizes the history and universalizes the personal. (She also spares the reader a two-century-long info dump, for which we are grateful.)

  In The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, Jeff Hobbs takes the opposite tack. The consistency of his voice as he recounts the life of his college roommate, Rob Peace, lends him credibility and denotes respect, both critical in a book in which a white man tells a black man’s story—and tells it, moreover, with a near-total lack of “I” for the first two thirds of the text, before he meets Rob in college.

  Hobbs takes a huge leap, for example, when he channels Rob’s thoughts at a moment when Rob is completely alone on a trip to Brazil after college. “There it was, Copacabana. The white sand rolled out on either side, and the green water before him stretched a few thousand miles to Antarctica, which at the moment sent a cool breeze north over the city.”¹¹ Maybe Rob told Hobbs about this experience, but probably not in those words, or even close. Because the voice is unmistakably Hobbs’s—“which at that moment sent a cool breeze…” is a distinctly writerly phrase—and because we know Rob is dead, we know, even without a cue, the author is imagining this moment. Hobbs’s desire to recreate this quiet happy moment in his friend’s life feels more urgent than if this move into Rob’s mind occurred in a more dramatic scene or if Hobbs tried to capture Rob’s voice in reflection.

  But it’s not just Rob. Hobbs writes from several different characters’ perspectives (all of whom are still alive, all of whom he was able to interview, which lends credibility) always in a close third-person point of view.

  Consider this example where Hobbs writes from Rob’s mother Jackie’s point of view:

In the shaded rear compartments of her mind, Jackie had always expected the call to come in the middle of the night when it would jar her awake from the pleasant seclusion of dreaming.¹²

  Are those Jackie’s words? Probably not. “The pleasant seclusion of dreaming” is, again, a writerly phrase, an indicator that Hobbs is behind the passage, which we know anyway. Imagine if he had tried to capture the cadence of Jackie’s speech, especially if her speech carried markers of blackness. Hobbs owns his own language, which avoids dangers of condescension or appropriation, and also creates cohesion. We’re never allowed to forget that this isn’t just a story about Robert Peace: It’s the story of Jeff Hobbs trying to understand Robert Peace.

  While the examples so far have focused on relatively short passages, many family memoirs include entire sections or chapters of speculation. In The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother—published more than twenty years ago, lest anyone complain about newfangledness—James McBride writes from his mother’s first-person point of view in chapters set off in italics. Bonnie Rough uses the same alternating chapter format in Carrier: Untangling the Danger in my DNA to inhabit the first-person voice of her grandfather, Earl, who carries the gene for a disease that runs in her family. “I couldn’t breathe at night,” begins the first chapter in which Earl appears. “I would wake up in a panic because I forgot to inhale.”¹³ Rough announces her approach by leaping into this internal space immediately, even before narration. In a more recent memoir, All You Can Ever Know, Nicole Chung includes chapters from her birth sister Cindy’s voice even before we know who Cindy is. The approach, in other words, is fairly widespread, and the specific techniques, both for speculating and for flagging the speculation, vary widely.

  Danielle Trussoni opens Falling Through the Earth, a memoir that braids her own childhood experiences living with her father, a Vietnam veteran, with his experiences in the war, with this “Note to Reader:”

Although some of my father’s Vietnam stories were told to me in passing, years ago, many of them were also recorded in taped interviews that I conducted with him. I have reproduced these stories as accurately as possible. In order to spare the feelings of acquaintances, I have changed the names and physical characteristics of minor characters. The names of major characters have not been changed.¹⁴

  Once she has set the strategic and ethical groundwork, she speculates with little separation between her story and her father’s. The transitions between narratives, in her case, occur mid-chapter, with only white space between them. She includes direct dialogue, even though there’s no way that’s verifiable. She appropriates her father’s story as completely as an omniscient narrator would by including thoughts of characters other than her father as well, particularly his best friend, Goodman. “Goodman was restless,” Trussoni writes, “pacing and chain-smoking, slapping mosquitoes and looking into the night, as if he could see past the monsoon clouds blocking out the moon and stars.”¹⁵ The wholeness of her portrayal of her father’s experiences as a “tunnel rat”—a soldier who crawled into tunnels where the enemy lived, one of the most dangerous duties in Vietnam—suggests a willingness to share his terror and woundedness, rather than exploit his heroism.

  One way out of the tiresome dichotomy—fiction versus nonfiction—or a way beyond it, perhaps, is to look to poetry for direction. Not required to be as marvelously conceived as fiction or as fastidiously fact-checked as nonfiction, poetry is, as they say, what it is. In poetry, and increasingly in lyric essays, readers will gladly enter the mysterious in-between world of “what if,” especially when the world is imbued with unrestrained passion.

  Perhaps, no contemporary essayist claimed this territory more movingly than Brian Doyle. He captured the emotional weight of 9/11 (“Leap”) and the Sandy Hook shootings (“Dawn and Mary”) by imagining the experiences of those caught in the middle of the horror. He often adopted the perspectives of children and animals, and in the lesser-known essay “Joe’s Boy,” he speculates about the life of Jesus Christ himself. He starts with reasonable if unconventional suppositions: “He must have had a crush on a girl… He must have punched and in turn been punched…. He might have sobbed at a death …,” and then he crescendos into longer more lyrical sentences:

Maybe he ran naked howling laughing through the village on a dare…. Maybe he gnashed his teeth at the incomprehensible stupidity of sheep and maybe he gawked when an eagle the size of a tent flapped past his head and maybe what he wanted above all else like every child ever born was to leap ahead in time and bite into life…”¹⁶

  His exaggerated speculations expose his passion: Doyle was a devoted Catholic; his deep faith drives his desire to connect with “Joe’s Boy,” to gleefully abide in the mysterious unknowable space between human and divine.

  As in poetry, passion in essays arises from a wide range of emotions, one of which is pure delight. An insistent playfulness gives rise to Elena Passarello’s wildly speculative collection Animals Strike Curious Poses, in which she employs a variety of literary forms—from lists to iambic pentameter to translation of a dirty joke in the sign language vocabulary of a gorilla—to dramatize the experiences of several famous animals in history. In “Harriet,” for example, she uses second person to imagine the perspective of the most famous tortoise Charles Darwin brought aboard the Beagle in 1835.

He will shortly thereafter name you “Harry,” but don’t doubt that some part of him knows you’re all woman. Feel his delicate touch as he swiftly flips you and runs his fingers along your soft, salty underbelly, scrutinizing each shingle, each shank.¹⁷

  The exuberance of both premise and prose is as cheeky as it is seductive. If there’s no way to know that Harry was in love with Charles Darwin, well, there’s no way to know that she wasn’t either.

  Neither Doyle nor Passarello use the first person pronoun but they’re nevertheless transparent about their speculation. They are not aiming for accuracy but for possibility, not trying to get something right, but to forge a new understanding, and perhaps as a result, a new connection.

  This desire for connection, this palpable yearning, can be explicit or implicit. It’s exciting to see at work in short lyric essays, yes, but it offers even greater potential in books because the longer a writer dwells in the speculative place, the more likely she is to emerge changed. Speculation, in other words, ends up playing a dramatic role as much as an artistic one.

  In fact, all of the books discussed so far, in which the author appears as a first-person narrator, illustrate some measure of transformation. In Brother, I’m Dying, Edwidge Danticat, as character, is pregnant with her first child; the act of reimagining her father’s and uncle’s stories at once becomes a way of knitting together a family story in which her daughter, a child of the diaspora, can belong. By the end, she is a mother. In Falling Through the Earth, Danielle Trussoni, as character, ends up traveling to Vietnam to discover the extent to which her own vulnerability and volatility mirrors her father’s. As she faces the fact that he and other soldiers were hardly blameless victims, she emerges with a deeper understanding of her own complicity in her family’s dysfunction, and is able to ask her mother for forgiveness. Inara Vezemnieks’s journeys to Latvia in Among the Living and the Dead uncover a devastating, and relatively recent, family history of loss, through which her own sense of loss is explained, and as a result, alleviated. In The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, the wide chasm between the two men born of the differences in race and background—so much unknown, so much overlooked, so much misunderstood—grows smaller, though it can never disappear, over the course of the book, until Jeff Hobbs’s curiosity morphs into the outrage implied in the title. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks—a book drenched in science, a book about science, a book assigned now in medical school courses—Rebecca Skloot’s immersion in the belief system of the Lacks family brings her to a new understanding of religion:

In that moment … I understood completely how some of the Lackses could believe, without doubt, that Henrietta had been chosen by the Lord to become an immortal being. If you believe the Bible in the literal truth, the immortality of Henrietta’s cell makes perfect sense.¹⁸

  In none of these cases, crucially, is the transformation radical. These books stubbornly resist stock redemptive narratives; redemption is, after all, a personal transformation, and through speculation, these stories transcend the merely personal. The writer is changed precisely because she sees herself in the other. It’s a complicated game of projection.

  The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich insistently spotlights this process of projection. The book tells the story of the murder of a six-year-old boy by Ricky Langley, an admitted pedophile, who has landed on death row. Marzano-Lesnevich, a law student and a victim of childhood sexual abuse, becomes obsessed with the murder—and the associated morality of the death penalty—and, in long sections of text, they speculate about Ricky’s early life. In this particularly audacious passage, they imagine the moments before a car crash that occurred before Ricky was even conceived.

I imagine the station wagon my parents had when I was a child, but that was the early 1980s, so subtract now, the faux-wood paneling, the power steering. Give this family a smaller car, and in the back, five children crammed in, four across.¹⁹

  The scene is fully fabricated using all the tools at their disposal. Marzano-Lesnevich has hedged with “I imagine….” They have slowed to introduce more lyrical language. But they also refuse to let readers forget how much of themself they are bringing to the task; they state up front that they are thinking about their own station wagon.

  They intrude on the narrative in this way, over and over, throughout the book, sometimes trying the reader’s patience, testing the extent of credulity. On page 37, they describe Ricky’s mother, Bessie, in scene, without hedging, without attribution: “She lands heavily, her pink housedress with the little blue flowers puffing out from her ample lap.” Two pages later they disclose this fact:

The housedress I have borrowed for Bessie in this scene—pink with tiny blue flowers, a smoked polyester collar with lace appliquéd on it, the dress that puffs out from her lap as she lands heavily in the chair and turns to face her son—is not recorded in any transcript or file. It is my grandmother’s dress. When I picture Bessie I imagine my grandmother, these two women will turn out to be linked by so much.²⁰

  The final line “these two women will turn out to be linked by so much” speaks to the idea of projection. It’s not simply that they have turned to something they know—their grandmother’s dress—to describe something about which they are unsure of. Their fascination with Ricky’s life stems directly from the fact that they were abused by their grandfather, this grandmother’s husband. They are toying with the reader, foreshadowing the revelations to come, but also dramatizing the way traumatic memory crowds imagination, demanding attention. At the end of the book, their changed perspectives on Ricky’s life, their own trauma, and the death penalty, strike the reader as inevitably intertwined.

  This reading gives Marzano-Lesnevich credit—admiration even—for their earnest motivation. Plenty of nonfiction writers and critics take a more skeptical stance. Joan Didion famously claims in the preface to Slouching Toward Bethlehem: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”²¹ Janet Malcolm in the opening pages of The Murderer and the Journalist goes further. “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself” she writes, knows what he does is “morally reprehensible.” The writer who may seem to a potential source so friendly and sympathetic “never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own.”²² Isn’t this even truer for a “nonfiction” writer who dares to actually make stuff up about others? (Even if the subject is dead?) The issue of appropriation may be the most ethically vexing of them all. In many contemporary conversations, critics focus on cultural appropriation: colonizers telling the stories of the colonized or more insidiously, writers claiming to tell stories of the “voiceless,” as though any human being is voiceless. All nonfiction writing, including memoirs that portray family members, requires appropriation. Usually, the appropriator has good intentions, but everyone knows where that well-paved road leads.

  Does motivation matter? Do we allow more room for speculation if an author is trying to find out about an illness that could affect an unborn child, as Bonnie Rough is doing in Carrier, versus a researcher working on sheer curiosity, as Rebecca Skloot does? Are the rules different for a close friend? Or for a convicted murderer? What about animals? Who has the right to imagine an animal’s thoughts? A scientist? A poet? Only a fiction writer?

  It’s tempting to conclude that intentions are beside the point, except that intention is so closely linked to desire, and desire to connect—to shrink the space between us—is what drives life and literature alike. Speculation isn’t a technique for which a writer needs permission. It’s the reason for writing in the first place. When nonfiction writers speculate boldly, even audaciously, about what others, living or dead, have thought, felt, or believed, they are trying to create a kind of kinship. One thrill of dwelling in this subjunctive space for a long while—for an entire book, say—is that as the possibility of this kinship grows, it remains elusive, even as, in the best cases, the narrator emerges changed.

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Ana Maria Spagna is the author of several books including the braided nonfiction narrative, Reclaimers, the memoir/history, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus, winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, and three collections of essays, most recently, Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going. She teaches in the MFA program at Antioch and Western Colorado University.

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Notes