“Imagining Myself Out of Myself”

Abstract

Narrative medicine proposes a multifaceted use of narratives to bring insight and awareness into the experience of patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers. However, deciding on whether to use fictional or non-fictional narratives usually rests on unexamined assumptions about which form is trusted to have an impact on its readers or viewers. This chapter aims to contribute to an appreciation of how narrative fiction and memoir can respectively represent experiences of illness and suffering and how readers engage with them. To that effect, the author draws on Lucy Caldwell's short story “Multitudes” (2016) and Colm Tóibín's novel Nora Webster (2014), both admittedly informed by autobiographical experience, to consider the insights that they provide and the questions they raise on the power and limitations of fiction and memoir, namely whether there are limits to the testimonial power of memoir; whether fiction can prove enabling to articulate otherwise inarticulate experience; and whether the differences in the writing of memoir and fiction are replicated in how we read each form.