Fictions; Fantasies; and Thought Experiments

Abstract

Some of the most interesting and celebrated lifewriting books this year have defied categorization. Through formal experimentation, metanarrative, the signaling of fictionality in memoir and of veracity in fiction, they prompt audiences to consider the multiple ways a life can be shared. Genre-disrupting texts are, of course, not new in auto/biography, and over the years have been especially common in Canada. In the 1990 Literary History of Canada, Shirley Neuman recognized that "the Canadian life-writing which is most sophisticated and thoughtful about problems of inscribing the self in literature . . .crosses and re-crosses the border between auto/biography and fiction in order to question static and holistic conceptions of the writing subject” (qtd. in Saul 261).