Memoir is a genre at the edge, a liminal space where autobiographical facts meet with the fiction writer’s techniques, where perception collides with imagination. These works have often been questioned on veracity and ethics, but as advances in memory studies bring to light the plasticity of our recollections, the discussion becomes ever more fraught. This paper, a conversation between my creative practice and cognitive neuroscience, presents writing at the intersection of body and landscape, living and dead, physical and psychological. It argues that the body is a spectral space, and one which can be (somewhat) understood through an examination of our layered and shifting self. Writing life and the body, this paper gives voice to cross-hatched perspectives on identity, love and grief, exploring the people, places, images and objects that continue to haunt my work and memory. It suggests a blurring of lyric essay and memory studies might better express moments of internal crisis and confrontation arising in bodies haunted by their pasts. Therefore, it encourages experimental forms of memoir, embracing more fractured, unstable, digressive and self-referential modes which reflect our current understanding of memory as a re-creation, rather than a record of experience. The paper welcomes memoir working at/on the thresholds, and tries to articulate the value of liminality in the form.
Marie O’Rourke
Marie O’Rourke is a creative writer and PhD candidate from Curtin University investigating the quirks of memory. Her creative and critical work has been published in Mediating memory: Tracing the limits of memoir (Routledge, 2018), Westerly, Meniscus, TEXT journal, New writing, a/b and ABR.
