Fictional memoir distress
Completely accidentally I've recently read a few stories that are framed as the narrator actively writing the story as a document, a testimony of some sort. Fictional memoirs is, I think, the term. But this is more specific. They describe the actual act of writing, there's this sense of a deliberate archival attempt, a vain hope of it ever being read, their current feelings about past events, committing their experience to posterity.
Most recently has been I Who Have Never Known MenJacqueline Harpman, 1995, The WallMarlen Haushofer, 1963, and KallocainKarin Boye, 1940. This little bunch also happen to be dystopian. So that's been such good fun (she says, in dead-eyed despair.)
A few observations on this style. Firstly, it can be very sad. Secondly, it can be very sad. Thirdly, it can be very sad.
Some of my favourite books also: The Handmaid's TaleMargaret Atwood, 1985, Parable of the SowerOctavia Butler, 1993 (ish, more a journal), and Remains of the DayKazuo Ishiguro, 1989.
Some other examples I can think of off the top of my head: PiranesiSusanna Clarke, 2020, Interview With the VampireAnne Rice, 1976, The Blind AssassinMargaret Atwood, 2000 (bonus embedded narrative), maybe AtonementIan McEwan, 2001. I've not read LolitaVladimir Nabokov, 1955 and I'm not going to, but it is also. WeYevgeny Zamyatin, 1924 is on my list, as is The Name of the RoseUmberto Eco, 1980 which I have around here somewhere, and GileadMarilynne Robinson, 2004.
I love epistolary novels, which this doesn't feel far from, in terms of voice. Over the same recent time period I've read PerspectivesLaurent Binet, 2026, 84 Charing Cross RoadHelene Hanff, 1970, and The CorrespondentVirginia Evans, 2025. There's also The Book of SaltMonique Truong, 2003 which is framed as a letter, but just the one so it actually feels less epistolary and more memoir.
Then there is the more straightforward fictional autobiography. An autobiography being more comprehensive, over the whole of a life, a memoir being more selective and thematic. So your Jane Eyre or David Copperfield.
Or the five-layers of something like Frankenstein or Tenant of Wildfell Hall where it's a letter about a memoir reading a letter with a diary enclosed about a story someone else told them type thing. I love that too.
Real observations would be it is ripe for unreliable narrators, a trope I love. Also I think the influence makes me treat all first person past tense narratives with a bit of suspicion. Where is the narrator now? How do they feel about the events they are narrating? Are those feelings seeping in? Why not? For no good reason first person past tense feels automatically slightly melancholy to me.
I've written before about fictional biographies, an entirely separate thing, in Fiction versus biography.
The specific vibe of these books is the distress under which they are being written. And the distress under which I therefore read them.
Filed under Reading.
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