What is Literary Nonfiction, anyway?

Categories matter. Genres matter. Definitions matter. Right?

Well, yes and no. And for a writer, all this prescriptive theorizing can be downright stifling.

I’ll begin with a story. In a previous post, I mentioned my first book, Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth. I felt absolutely compelled to write this story. As a child, I had grown up with the 1965 Debbie Reynolds movie, The Unsinkable Molly Brown. My mother adored that film, and felt it her duty to make sure her three young daughters saw it as a source of inspiration. (“You can do anything!”) Later (much later), when I was in graduate school and I began to do research on the history of women in the West, I was shocked to find that the movie – which was generally accepted as fact – had almost nothing to do with the real Margaret Tobin Brown. Her name wasn’t even Molly. Nor was she a saloon girl. She was a young Irish Catholic girl who moved West and became a feminist and a human rights activist, and with Judge Ben Lindsey she helped build the first Juvenile Court in the country in Denver. She left behind writings, photographs, and transcripts – including a description of her experience on the Titanic – and it had all been overlooked in favor of a silly myth. So I did a lot of research, and wrote a book.

I suspect every young writer feels unprepared when their first book finally hits bookshelves (actually, that feeling never really goes away). I was lucky to find a good publisher who believed in me, believed in the story, and helped launch my first book tour. It took a bit of wrangling with my editor, but they let me write the book the way I wanted; that is, a true story told in a dramatic style. Today we might call that Narrative Nonfiction, but that term wasn’t around back then. My goal was to tell a true, heavily researched story (yes, I believe in footnotes), but with the dramatic pulse of a novel. As I’ve mentioned before, Think like a poet, write like a novelist, tell the truth.

So, with much trepidation, I had my first book signing at a bookstore. The audience was pretty diverse, and I was surprised to have to field a number of questions about the construction of the Titanic ship (mostly from men). Yes, Margaret was on the Titanic – but it’s a relatively small part of the story. The real story is about her remarkable life, and the book is most accurately described as a work of history, or women’s history, written in a lyrical style. But the bookstore had decided to shelve and market my book under “Ships” (including warships, chronicles, etc.), and thus more than a few of my audience members were expecting to hear about shipbuilding and such! (Despite the title, which I thought was quite clear.)

It all turned out fine. The audience loved my reading. That book, published in 1999, has never gone out of print. It won several awards and is now in its third printing and still selling briskly. But that first bookstore taught me an important lesson: Trust your intuition, and don’t worry about fitting into categories. Write your book. Tell the story you need to tell, in the form that best suits it.

Now, of course, Literary Nonfiction is an established category and genre, in bookstores and in academia. I always love going into my favorite bookstore in New York, The Strand, where the entire bottom floor is filled with Literary Nonfiction, and described as such! Now we have many ways to describe Literary Nonfiction: Narrative Nonfiction, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Literary Journalism, and many forms of the Essay, to name just a few. There are plenty of hybrid forms as well. Each of these subgenres is unique and distinct.

But where does the writer begin to think about her work in Literary Nonfiction in a way that is helpful and not prescriptive? Inspirational but not confining? That’s where we’ll begin with my next newsletter.

Thanks for reading!

Kristen

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