‘You’ll Fall Through All Those Boys’: Fiction, Narration and Truthfulness in Memoir

My thesis consists of a critical commentary and memoir. Through theoretical reflection and creative practice, I explore my parents’ experiences of war, research-based fiction in life writing, and an experimental form of narration to explore the nature of truthfulness in memoir. Ultimately, the creative work is an attempt to get closer to my parents, and to understand who they were before they met.

The title of the memoir, ‘You’ll Fall Through All Those Boys’, is an old family saying on my mother’s side. Despite this, I use it as a metaphor for both stories: for my mother’s wartime friendships, and my father’s army experiences. The memoir is presented in two parts. Part one contains two separate stories, one for my mother and one for my father, running alongside each other as alternating chapters. The stories are set between 1943 and 1949, and I am present in the stories, narrating them as a ghost from the future. Part two contains transcripts of my mother’s memories, which I recorded digitally during the final years of her life.I present the commentary before the creative piece, as an attempt to defend the use of research-based fiction and immersive narration in memoir. I explain how this combined method of exploring truthfulness can enhance an understanding of family history for life writers. To support the method, I examine theories from writers such as Laurence Lerner on history and fiction, Wolfgang Iser on the real and imaginary, W.G. Sebald on fiction and truthfulness, and Melanie Anderson on spectrality. I explain how I use postmemory experiences to add an extra dimension to ghost narration, in order to heighten the truthfulness of the stories. Marianne Hirsch defines postmemory as the ‘relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.’¹

The combined method of exploring truthfulness in memoir constitutes my original contribution to creative writing practice. I attempt to recover gaps in family memories and historical research through creative practice and, in particular, through the interpolation of ghost narrator into the framework of memoir.