Contribution short abstract:

Speculative memoir blends real and folkloric elements to critique the false coherence of "happily ever afters" like fully recovering from abuse or overcoming grief. This genre evinces the overlap between personal narrative and ritual, remaining temporally and morally open and endlessly revisable.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper examines the genre of speculative memoir—first-person literary works that incorporate surreal and supernatural motifs and plot structures from folklore to locate meaning in personal, often traumatic life experiences—as rejections of “grand” narratives. Works like Carmen Maria Muchado’s In the Dream House, Sabrina Orah Mark’s Happily, and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater pointedly frustrate genre distinctions, blending real and unreal elements in order to critique the false coherence of “happily ever afters” like fully recovering from abuse or overcoming grief. I argue that fairy tales are perennially popular texts for psychology and self-help because they offer, not meaning, but time: traditional storytelling shares key traits with the practice of ritual, in which transformation is made possible through the suspension, manipulation, and re-ordering of time, insulating the teller from reality and allowing for the simultaneous existence of multiple possible selves. Fairy tales, as collections of phenomenologically resonant images rather than predetermined moral arcs, are not an escapist genre but crucibles that root us in our bodies. Scenes of enchantment lull, scenes of horror arrest: motifs that make the story memorable fight the teleological momentum that pulls the story forward and drag us down into pure affect, into feeling without coherence. Memoir and first-person essays are an unusual, hybrid genre, an artifactualized performance, a literary work that derives its authenticity from re-staged or implied orality. Writers of speculative memoir exploit this liminal space to negotiate with expectations of a “life well lived,” offering fragmentary, polyvocal texts that resist closure and coherence.