Suspension of the Imaginary in the Real: Fiction as Truth in the Memoir Kayla Kibbe College

In its creation and consumption, literature involves an inherent contract between reader and author. The parameters of this contract are often set by the work’s genre, and help the reader to determine whether the text should be interpreted as truth or imagination. When an author blurs this distinction, the reader considers the contract violated, and material that, under different contractual expectations, would be considered harmlessly fictitious instead becomes maliciously deceitful. Conflict almost always arises when readers discover fiction lurking beneath expectations of truth – the sacred boundaries of genre dependent on a razorblade division between fact and fiction.

Of course, any such distinction has always been impossible, genre attempting in vain to erect tenuous partitions between the ultimately inseparable principles of truth and invention in the represented world. Before the generic distinction between fiction and non-fiction had been established, even presumably “pure” fiction itself was met with skepticism, and in its earliest days, the novel was decried as deceitful, sinful, and corrupt. Based on the inherently paradoxical principle of verisimilitude, the novel devotes itself to the representation of that which...