Whatever You Write, There You Are

Creative nonfiction can take many forms, be it a meandering lyric essay or longform narrative journalism, and its practitioners don’t always agree on how creative one can be with the truth. When a writer does decide to adhere to fact, they have at their disposal two main subjects—the self and everything outside the self. But even when nonfiction writers plan to turn their gaze outward, what they discover can have a tricky way of bringing them back to themselves. Exploring the world through interviews, travel, and library stacks can help clarify facets of experience that might have seemed singular or ordinary. Put another way, when writers get away from what’s going on inside their head, they just might see their own life in a new light and find something universal in the personal.

What results is what you might call a “backdoor memoir”: a book that seems at first to focus on an outside phenomenon—the reproductive cycle of eels, say, or the love letters of a Southern Gothic novelist, or the oil-and-gas industry in the North Sea—but ends up revealing just as much about its author