Within the umbrella of “creative nonfiction” there exists a subgenre known as “speculative nonfiction.” It’s not a widely-used term. You’re not likely to find it on Publisher’s Marketplace or the shelf labels of bookstores. But as the art of writing about life has become more popular, it’s an undeniable trend that memoirs are becoming less about navel gazing and more about big-picture speculation. Nowadays, when writers and readers in the know refer to “memoir,” it’s not simply a retrospective on someone’s life, but a creative look at life-as-we-know-it.
When we speculate in creative nonfiction, we walk towards the unknown through dream, prophesy, supposition, and fantasy (Antonetta et al). Speculative nonfiction plays with the limits of memory and perception, exploring liminality, the paranormal, the natural world, and the supernatural (itself also quite “natural”). While firmly rooted in real places, eras, and people, creative nonfiction that speculates invites us to explore the possibilities of what might have been and what could be. For the memoirist who deals heavily in speculation as a vehicle for reflection, there’s a great freedom in being able to tell a story that's 100% true without it being 100% literal. This creative freedom makes it possible to convey the "bigness" of seemingly little experiences, or to blur the sharper edges of more explicit or painful experiences, or perhaps to better reflect an author’s lived experience of reality.
While speculative nonfiction is a craft technique, it’s also a growing subgenre in its own right, and not exclusive to personal stories and memoir. The following are standout titles from recent years that exemplify “speculative nonfiction,” encouraging us to think differently about human life and reality itself.
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Ellen Wayland-Smith's The Science of Last Things uses the human body to explore themes of individualism, frailty, aging, and society's intolerance for death. Through a series of essays, the human body is a transcendent topic that spans the Old Testament, Greek mythology, and the modern American medical system. Wayland-Smith's essays all highlight the struggle of separating one's own human body from the animal-like physiology that shapes its being. By using speculative fiction as a vehicle to explore philosophical, metaphysical, and science-based topics in a way that feels cohesive, Wayland-Smith creates an interesting conversation around health, healing, and finding peace in the space where spirit meets material self.
In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit smartly and profoundly intertwines the role of walking in human history and the very personal experience of being lost. With the concept of wanderlust at the center of A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Solnit patches moments from her own life together with accounts from search-and-rescue teams, the endeavors of history's great conquerors, and natural transformations that occur in nature. This piece of speculative travel literature touches on philosophical and metaphysical questions about what it means to be lost.
One of speculative nonfiction's strengths is that it creates a safely distanced space from the knee-jerk emotions that a situation might trigger in order to allow the author and reader to collaborate on a thought experience. Susanne Antonetta's experimental The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here creates such a safe yet provocative container for ontological (i.e. existential) questing and self-reflection. In this book of mini essays, Antonetta uses her family's seaside New Jersey property as a place to pose questions about her grandmother's Christian Science beliefs.
As she reflects on her own struggles with bipolar disorder and drug use, Antonetta offers a meditation on her family history that raises questions about the meaning of existence, consciousness, and reality. To add meat and depth, the author's memories and recollections are sprinkled in alongside conversations with lauded neuroscientists, physicists, and spiritualists.
With similar threads of spirituality and metaphysics, The Unwritten Book speculates on death and the afterlife using an experimental form. In this genre-bending read that blurs the lines of fiction and nonfiction more than traditional memoir might allow, Samantha Hunt's explores ghosts, ghost stories, and hauntings. In a series of loosely related essays, Hunt does her best to walk the line between the dead and the living with visits to mediums, experimental health treatments, and attempts to piece together her deceased father's incomplete work in order to understand the meaning of his life.
Bruja by Wendy C. Ortiz is like a trip to the dark side of the moon. It has both feet in the dream world, with very little contextual grounding in day-to-day lived reality. This truly unique and experimental "dreamoire" is a personal history and travel log into the author's subconscious to contemplate the self within the deepest recesses of the mind. While Bruja reads like magical realism, the essays are documentation of Ortiz's dreams over a period of four years. It's ability to weave a felt sense of narrative arc will surprise and delight.
Other newer speculative nonfiction releases like The Argonauts and Bluets are more overt in their biographical source material. For example, Maggie Nelson carefully reconstructs her relationship and parenthood journey with transgender artist Harry Dodge in The Argonauts to create a commentary on romance, family life, and society's expectations. However, the memoir's non-chronological vignettes make use of the creative liberties afforded by the speculative nonfiction genre.
The book's title itself is a reference to ancient Greek sailors who would continually rebuild their ships by swapping parts in and out. In Bluets, Nelson showcases a much blurrier personal meditation by focusing on the color blue as a medium for exploring themes of grief, love, and existential isolation.
Offering a brilliant example of what a more straightforward memoir with a toe in the waters of speculative nonfiction can look like, Robin Hemley's Nola is an exploration of faith, family lore, and madness inspired by the author's discovery of his schizophrenic sister Nola's autobiography, with edits completed by their mother. Hemley uses the autobiography to reconstruct the life of his sister following her death at age 25. In Nola, Hemley explores themes of religion, the toll of mental health, and the unavoidable fragmentation caused by the unknowable nature of what a person chooses to expose or reveal.
Perhaps the OG of speculative nonfiction, Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior is a blend of mythology and literary memoir. Reality gives way to seeming unreality, ghosts—both figurative and literal—haunt the prose, and our narrator / protagonist becomes a folk hero. This masterful exploration of mixed-race identity, immigration, and a complicated mother-daughter relationship charts family secrets and coming of age in 1940s and 50s California in an ever-present atmosphere of mythical mystery.
Jeffrey Kripal's book is a gateway read into speculative thinking, a bridge between science and spirituality that explores near-death experiences, psychic dreams, and paranormal encounters. This is not a literary read like the above titles, and is more like a sci-fi self-help guide for the mind. For Jeffrey Kripal, the "flip" is an epiphany moment, the reversal of perspective following a life-changing experience. In writing The Flip, he seeks to encourage more minds to change and open. Near-death experience not required.
Earth is a hot mess. Where to next? The moon, of course. In Another Fine Mess, Pope Brock brushes past Earthly environmental and geopolitical themes and goes straight to contemplating life on the moon. Clever, absurdist, and wry, this collection is a bric-a-brac of pop culture, science, and history exploring the imagined logistics of living in moon colonies after Earth is destroyed. Buried under the excitement of the new technologies that will ultimately give mankind a fresh start in a new world is the sentiment that humankind's desire for progress is both its saving grace and its biggest risk for full extinction. While critical of humankind, Another Fine Mess will charm you to outer space with its outlandish speculation.
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We need outlandish speculation in our lives. When reality seems stranger than fiction—whether in a global or personal sense—it’s helpful to have new frameworks for facing into the unknown. The above memoirs and essay collections share insights and inspiration without prescription or presumption. They muse, wonder, and fantasize, reminding us that imagination is the foremost ingredient for (re)invention.
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