SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 31
SINE QUA NON
a part of the persona as their album covers. And this project is no longer reserved for pop star
royalty. Thanks to social media, most of us engage to some degree in the project of developing
and presenting a consistent façade.
Writers of creative nonfiction rarely achieve life-altering celebrity status, but we do face
challenges with the creating a consistent and accessible persona. The narrative arc of our work
is often centered on shifts in our self-concept or identity. In each piece we write, we must
select an aspect of self to center and then show growth or change in that aspect while still
coming across as consistent, authentic, and comprehensible. While persona in pop culture is a
fabrication, something created with a human at the center who is obfuscated by the constructs
built up around them, in creative nonfiction the construction of self is more authentic because
it is made, not by adding on protective layers, but through the careful omission of certain parts.
As Jill Talbot discusses in “Crafting Persona,” in most of her essays she is “not a mother”4 even
though that aspect of her identity dominates her daily experience.
This project of carving away parts of the self is the subject of Vivian Gornick’s influential
book, The Situation and the Story. Gornick says “The subject of autobiography is always selfdefinition” and that the writer must become a “truth speaker” who is able to pull a clear,
organized meaning from their muddled, disorganized experience. In the opening chapter, she
talks about attending a memorial service where a particular attendee makes an exceptionally
moving speech. Gornick credits the power of that eulogy to its organization: “Structure
had imposed order. Order made the sentences more shapely. Shapeliness increased the
expressiveness of the language.”5 She goes on to clarify that much of this is self-organization,
finding the “proper self ” to tell a particular story. It's a powerful idea, and a valuable one, to
consider how the project of crafting the self in a piece of writing is essential to the meaning
of that piece. I’ve taught Gornick’s ideas in my nonfiction classes and seen how helpful they
can be for burgeoning essayists and memoirists—not to mention how valuable I've found
them personally. But sometimes when considering my own work, I wonder if I’ve taken her
approach too rigidly. What if emotional truth sometimes requires inconsistency, if there are
drawbacks to defining a persona too sharply?
In creative nonfiction, writers use all sorts of strategies to make their experience more
entertaining or accessible. Some create composite characters (a blend of two or more real
people) or use “reconstructed” dialogue that is placed in quotes despite being an approximation
instead of a strict transcription. I don’t want to debate the ethics of these choices here, only
to acknowledge them and to say that when we are writing about our own experiences, it’s
difficult to guarantee factual accuracy. Unlike journalists, we aren’t going into experiences for
the purpose of documenting them. Instead, we retroactively see the literary potential of our
lives and must do our best to recall what may have seemed insignificant at the time. There
is only one aspect of our experience that we can represent with unique clarity, our internal
experience, which I think is a pretty good reason not to over-work at refining it.
In considering the project of constructing a persona that is both thoughtfully produced
and authentically complex, Chappell Roan provides a compelling case study. Interestingly,
her persona became substantively less polished between her initial EP and her full-length
album. Typically, the way celebrities present themselves — whether on stage, in ghost-written
memoirs, or in slick biopics — feels like a kind of autofiction. Their persona isn’t completely
4
Jill Talbot, “Crafting Persona: The Art of Omission,” The Brevity Blog, November 2, 2023, https://brevity.
wordpress.com/2023/11/02/crafting-persona/.
5
Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 2004), 14..
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