Nonfiction November – Nontraditional Nonfiction
Welcome to week 3 of Nonfiction November! This week’s host is Becca of I’m Lost In Books, and this week’s topic is Nontraditional Nonfiction.
I think my first encounter with Nontraditional Nonfiction was probably in high school. Up until that point, I thought of nonfiction as the dry, boring section of the library where I was occasionally forced to delve into overweight tomes written by crusty academics in order to construct research papers. Yawn!
One of my high school history teachers, however, was eager to change our minds about nonfiction – and about U.S. history. She taught us the sort of American History X version of events, and we tackled difficult subjects that had previously been swept under the rug by the rah-rah “Go Team America!” type of history lessons we’d had shoved down our throats for years. We talked about genocide, racism, slavery, inequality, unjust wars, colonialism, hypocrisy. We talked about American involvement in the Vietnam War for the very first time in her class (I mean, how do you get to Grade 11 without knowing anything about Vietnam? Puzzlingly, our history textbooks always seemed to end at WWII…), and we were assigned sides to present a debate between Native Americans and the U.S. Government that shoved them further and further west.
I also distinctly remember being assigned to write a paper about a female figure in American history. Bored with all the usual suggestions like Presidents’ wives and the kind of do-gooders I simply couldn’t relate to, my teacher suggested I read about Emma Goldman, an anarchist and feminist who originally came to the U.S. from Russia (or, actually, present-day Lithuania), and to check out her books Living My Life (a two-volume behemoth) and Anarchism and Other Essays. Oddly enough, my relatively small, suburban library had both of these books on their shelves, so I took them home and started reading.
This was the first time I’d really found nonfiction interesting or sensational in any way. Red Emma, as she was dubbed by the press, was a larger than life figure, who seemed to rebel against most every cultural, religious, racial or sexual stereotype of her time. She drank, she smoked, she swore! She had many lovers (male and female), she distributed information about birth control in a time when this was considered absolutely scandalous, but perhaps most importantly she founded her own anarchist journal to disseminate her political ideas.
In short, Emma Goldman was quite the hellraiser, and I enjoyed reading her books, despite having found them in the nonfiction section of the library. Indeed, I found it difficult to distill all of the information packed into those books into just a short paper.
After that, my outlook on nonfiction was forever changed. It wasn’t just about the opinions of crusty academics, rehashing the same tired stories – it could be just as exciting as fiction, and was sometimes even stranger.
I’m still drawn to anything that smacks of anarchy, a bohemian lifestyle, or that promotes free-thinking and skepticism surrounding the status quo. I’ve read lots of nontraditional nonfiction since then, including:
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- Fraudulent autobiographies – fiction passed off as fact, like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces or J.T. LeRoy’s Sarah
- Creative nonfiction – blending facts and fiction, as in Hunter S. Thompson’s remarkable Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- True crime – Truman Capote invented the genre with In Cold Blood, and people have been debating its legitimacy as nonfiction ever since
- Fiction so realistically written that you’d swear it was nonfiction – like Mark Z. Danielewski’s strange and strangely terrifying House of Leaves
- Books that approach science from unusual perspectives – like Mary Roach’s Bonk
- Diaries and journals of the famous and infamous – Anaïs Nin’s, for instance, is 7 volumes!
- Creative instruction manuals for artists – most notably Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist and How To Make A Living As A Poet by Gary Mex Glazner
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My favorite kinds of Nontraditional Nonfiction are probably memoirs written by unreliable narrators. In some respect, you could argue that all memoirists and autobiographers are unreliable, and possibly even writers of fiction, rather than nonfiction, depend on how creative they get with their artistic license! But I love to see how different people tell the stories of their lives, whether they’ve lived quite remarkable lives or truly mundane ones.
Related to this, I also enjoy the roman à clef – a type of fiction that uses roots in the author’s real life to spin off into the fictional realm. You can amuse yourself by trying to guess which bits are real and which are made up, and sometimes you can find yourself quite annoyed with the author for giving you this tantalizing peek into their life, without taking any responsibility for their own actions.
What about you?
What kinds of Nontraditional Nonfiction have you read, and what got you interested in those books?
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14 Comments
Becca
Isn’t it great when a teacher goes above & beyond and inspires their students into trying & exploring new things about books? Awesome. I am a big fan of the unreliable narrator in fiction and nonfiction. Love them.
Laura Roberts
Absolutely, Becca! Looking back, I realize how lucky I was to have so many great teachers. Most of them were genuinely interested in their students, in making learning fun (even for those of us who grumbled about certain subjects), and in pushing us to really go above and beyond the stated assignments. I hope they are still teaching kids, and not burnt out by all the stupid “teach to the test” stuff they’re told to do nowadays.
Lory @ Emerald City Book Review
I was a bit unsure how to grapple with this topic, but I’m getting so many ideas from other posts. The borderline between fiction and nonfiction is a really interesting place to explore. I think those definitions are more fluid than we often like to think.
Tara @ Running 'N' Reading
This is such a fun post, Laura! I love your inclusion of “creative nonfiction;” I’ve definitely enjoyed some fiction that had many nonfiction elements mixed in that prompted me to do more searching on that particular topic/time period. As a student of history, I certainly agree with you that most narrators are unreliable; tall tales are just part of storytelling, right? :)
Sarah's Book Shelves
Oooh – this is great! Love true crime (and wrote my jr. year high school term paper on In Cold Blood) and also fiction based on true crime (Sutton, The Wife The Maid and The Mistress, etc).
Laura Roberts
Me too, Lory. I was kind of surprised that people still consider ebooks “nontraditional,” since they’ve become so popular. But then again, I just gave my mom my older Kindle last Christmas, so she’s only been reading ebooks for about a year now.
Laura Roberts
Thanks, Tara! Especially when it comes to Irish narrators… they love their tall tales. :D
Laura Roberts
Sarah: True crime is definitely interesting to me, particularly when the narrators become a little too close to the villains in the story. That ethical twinge you start to get, wondering about the lines between telling someone’s story and really believing it is what really sends shivers down my spine…
Rachel
I find unreliable narrators pretty fascinating too – especially in the sense of non-fiction.
Katie @ Doing Dewey
What a creative take on this topic! I actually really dislike nonfiction books with unreliable narrators. When I’m reading nonfiction, I really like to know exactly which parts are true.
Brona
My non-traditional forms of non-fiction didn’t make it into a post this week – too many other things going on. But I love to grab some of my non-fiction via podcasts and TED talks – from everything to do with books and authors, to environmental issues, health, self-help, history, philosophy, inspirational, music and comedians.
Laura Roberts
Katie, I hear that! Sometimes it can definitely be frustrating when you can’t figure out which part of the story is actually REAL. But I do rather like people who give a creative take on their stories, even if they eventually cite some facts and figures. ;D
Laura Roberts
Brona: I love TED Talks, too! They’re a great way to learn something every day, just by taking a few minutes out of your schedule to watch a video. I much prefer them to podcasts, for that reason.
Kim (Sophisticated Dorkiness)
Lots to think about in this post! Of the types of nontraditional nonfiction you mentioned, I tend to enjoy creative nonfiction the best. I like to know what’s real and what’s not, but I love authors that can turn something that might be dry into a story. And I’m a total sucker for nonfiction where the writer inserts themselves into the narrative in a creative way, like Mary Roach. I adore her books.