The cover of Julie Myerson’s newest release seems to luxuriate in its contradictions. The title Nonfiction, rendered in a jumbo font, dominates the top margin while the only slightly smaller A Novel anchors the bottom. The book, first published in the UK in 2022 and released to American audiences in January of this year by Tin House, is shelved with fiction as per the publisher’s Library of Congress Cataloging data, and indeed the front matter includes a short statement that attests to the work’s fictionality. And yet that title demands speculation—as does the way the novel’s circumstances so closely mimic territory Myerson covered in her 2009 memoir The Lost Child. That book documented the author’s experience parenting her son as he suffered from drug addiction; this one follows a fictional mother as she parents an addict daughter. Writers like Jo Ann Beard, Amy Hempel, and Sheila Heti have long challenged the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction with their work. It is, after all, a brave new nonbinary world, and narrative has as much to gain from spectrums as the rest of us. It’s also fair to say that there’s nothing more tantalizing to readers than a whiff of truth.
But where to find it? To borrow from Vivian Gornick’s 2001 book The Situation and the Story, the specifics of Nonfiction might not be real, but the story, or as Gornick describes it, the “emotional experience that preoccupies the writer,” is. Raw pain and confusion, the desperation of trying to fix something so completely beyond one’s control, underscores the mother’s entire narration. On some basic level, isn’t emotional truth what we most require of any narrative? Readers tend to lose patience with books that don’t elicit genuine feeling; Myerson’s story was so emotionally searing I had a hard time putting it down.
But what is perhaps even more compelling is Myerson’s preoccupation with the nature of motherhood itself. The British public took the author to task after the publication of The Lost Child. A 2009 story in The Guardian says Myerson “has become a figure of hate, with some accusing her of being a poor mother and others of attempting to use her son Jake’s problems for commercial gain.” A New York Times review of the memoir from the same year questions whether a male author would have endured such harsh criticism. In it, Myerson is quoted as saying “A bit of witch burning is what it felt like.” This, then, is where I felt Nonfiction was at its most nonfictional: when investigating what success or failure as a mother looks like, by questioning who defines the terms, by being an artifact of Myerson’s own consideration of the topic.
Early in Nonfiction, the narrator, on a trip away from home, isn’t worried when she receives an odd call from her daughter. “I don’t behave like a normal parent—instead I return to my book and I finish my dinner and I sleep. What kind of mother behaves like that?” she asks. This is before any real trouble starts and yet it seems to point to an essential fault in the narrator’s ability to parent, as if this single act of relatively—completely?—benign self-indulgence could account for all the harrowing moments to come. The narrator’s husband tells her she shouldn’t think this way, shouldn’t indulge in “rumination.” “Now that he knows its name, he tries not to do it any more. He even went and did a course for it—weeks and weeks of an evening class, to help him stay in the moment and take charge of his most frightening thoughts and put a stop to the rumination.” He begs the narrator to try it and is exasperated when she won’t. Her realization: “I don’t know who I am without my most unforgiving and self-lacerating thoughts.” I winced when I read this. I can so easily imagine reassuring this narrator if she were my friend, telling her it’s perfectly okay to take care of herself all while knowing that deep down I’d be feeling exactly the same. It’s almost as if Myerson is acknowledging the ways in which self-blame is a survival skill, both as a first step toward fixing faults and as a way to undercut potential criticism by criticizing yourself first. Or maybe it’s just that the only way to be seen as a “good” mother is to accept absolutely all of the blame.
At the same time as she’s contemplating motherhood, Myerson’s narrator is also thinking about her role as a daughter. In considering the fractured relationship with her own mother, the narrator thinks “I don’t think my mother ever meant to spend her whole life being angry with me. I used to like to tell myself that she did it on purpose—that she got some kind of special satisfaction from all the spite and accusations and point scoring—but I don’t believe that now. I think that all she ever wanted was some love and attention—for people to listen to her, to see her clearly, to understand her for who she was. Because isn’t that all any of us want?” It’s hard not to hear Myerson herself in this passage given all she’s been through. When we consider that the mother in Nonfiction is also an author, the overlaps between the facts and the fiction accumulate to a point where they become nearly impossible to ignore. “My mother was right about me. She is right. Because the terrible thing about writers—that thing that singles them out from all the other normal and careful and decent people—is that whatever happens to them, however many painful and unexpected and frightening things, and however much they might stand to lose by describing them, it doesn’t stop them—Nothing stops them. Nothing. Once they’ve started, that’s it—they’ll go to any lengths to find the right words. But it wasn’t true. It isn’t true. It’s never really true, is it?”
Perhaps the only real truth is that we writers will tell the same story many times over, will circle the same situations repeatedly, and in multiple genres, until we reach what feels like an essential understanding of our experience. I don’t know Myerson’s personal goals for Nonfiction—whether she was exploring her son’s drug addiction, the limits of mothering and the pitfalls of motherhood, or the responsibility authors have to their subjects—nor should I. But I do know she succeeded in capturing the emotional complexity inherent to all these issues, her rejection of easy, black-or-white answers suggesting there’s nuance and depth to be found in the vast shades of gray.
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