| By Grace Elizabeth Elkins It is nearly 7am on Phillip Island and the fog sits low. Clouds coat the trees, the pie shop on the corner, the road. Cars pierce through the haze, unfazed. They do not slow, they know the roads; each pothole and undulation from the bridge to Wonthaggi (or wherever it is they are headed). I drive with them into white space. Driving across the bridge, I cannot see the tide coming in beneath us. I cannot see it, but I know its rhythm, the ocean is infinitely unpredictable, and yet so certain. Obscured from view, it is frightening to think anything could be beneath us. Obscured from view, it is thrilling to imagine anything could be beneath us. Blankness gives space to create. |  Grace Elizabeth Elkins, a Cape Woolamai writer and teacher, has won the short section of the 2022 Bass Coast Prize for Non-Fiction with She and I (and truth and fiction). The judges commented: "Using fog on the Phillip Island bridge as a metaphor for writing memoir and the discussion of the blurred lines between what is found and what is imagined, the writer shares excerpts from her autofictional memoir to show that 'fictionalisation creates the freedom to tell complex and uncertain truths' in this cleverly conceived and executed piece. Grace is finishing a masters in writing at Deakin University and has had short fiction published in literary journals in Australia and the US. |
Writing happens in this fog. When she writes, she only knows what she has seen and felt before: images, ideas, feelings are synthesised into something new. The things we know to be true, the things we hope, the things we make-up in our daydreams, those maybe-memories that sit in our abdomen unsure whether they ever actually happened. She takes what she knows of me. She knows my stories like a close friend; the key events with details rarely spoken out loud, the emotion, what bubbles to the surface after a large glass of red wine. Yet, there is a distance. There are gaps. In writing, she brings the possibilities together, burning off the fog.
Her words tell a familiar story; the murder of a friend, that first day in hospital, the morning after a party I don’t remember. Stories that are true, but that are not. It is unclear, where I end and the stories begin. Perhaps it is a dotted line.
She builds a raw collage of my memories and her plot points.
Her words tell a familiar story; the murder of a friend, that first day in hospital, the morning after a party I don’t remember. Stories that are true, but that are not. It is unclear, where I end and the stories begin. Perhaps it is a dotted line.
She builds a raw collage of my memories and her plot points.
The silence that followed radiated confusion, fear and loss. Guilt. A common dread. A few hours later, the identification was made, the name released, and Madeleine Jones was both gone and everywhere at the same time. Everything stopped at that moment. It was all broken.
Alice’s grief erupted in a whirlwind of needs; affection, attention, and retribution. She was no longer satisfied with anyone or anything. No place, no taxi, no street was safe enough for her friends. Yet she remained reckless with herself.
Alice’s grief erupted in a whirlwind of needs; affection, attention, and retribution. She was no longer satisfied with anyone or anything. No place, no taxi, no street was safe enough for her friends. Yet she remained reckless with herself.
A new true; a lived fiction.
To write is to drive over the bridge and into the fog. She knows only what she has seen, touched, felt and tasted before this moment. She may know of a destination, but she cannot see the path forward. She goes forward anyway. Metre by metre, line by line, she writes.
I am not a writer. At the foot of the bridge I stand still. Waiting for the perfect moment of clarity, numb in the cold, yet numb in warmth too. The blankness of white space, an empty page or a cloud filled sky, paralyses. You see, there is white space in me too. Stories that have made me, that are unknowable. Lost in the complexities of consciousness and will forever be under fog. How can I write forward into the haze, when I live in the haze?
Uncertainty is liberating, for anything can happen next.
Uncertainty is terrifying, for anything could have happened.
She is my scribe. She is my bridge off of this island and to the mainland; from paralysis to possibility.
We laughed once, that we were friends born out of proximity. That if it weren’t for the random nature of university housing allocations, we never would have known each other.
I thought I was so lucky to have met him.
I thought I was so lucky to have met him.
She is an unreliable narrator. Both in the stories she tells and the creative process; she embellishes and withholds, twisting life into narrative. Truth is perhaps more complicated than it initially seems. Fiction means that a story is not true, but it can tell a form of truth. It can tear at the edges of actuality to reveal bigger picture truths than strict adherence to the facts may allow. Fiction may be truth-adjacent. She reframes real, lived experiences to tell a more complete truth than I could. It is a subjective truth, and perhaps one that is laden with falsities but it is an almost-truth. When I cannot provide any certainty or clarity, she listens to what we do know and takes the next step forward through the fog.
In this collaboration between versions of myself, the narration is unreliable. There are different lenses through which I look at my life and they do not all tell the same story. I know this inconsistency is alive in my work due to choices of form and the very nature of writing about illness, grief and other moments in which a character’s understanding of the world around them narrows. But aren’t we all, to some extent, an unreliable narrator when telling our truth. Humans are beautifully inconsistent — inspired by the aspirations of others yet stuck on our own repeating loops. The stories we tell ourselves, the stories that shape our foundations are never impartial, never complete. We are not objective, or rational, or consistent. As we permeate the boundaries between self and story, this partial knowing of the self echoes into character and narrator.
She and I are writing a novel. In it, much of the plot is true. It is my story of early adulthood, illness and university. It could also be referred to a contemporary exploration of neuropsychiatric illness or The Yellow Wallpaper, if Charlotte Perkins Gilman went to law school in 2014. It is for much of the piece, a true story.
When I first became ill, I knew I wanted to tell the story one day. Then, it was all about redemption. I wanted to be someone who despite being struck-down at 19, had then gone on to do great things — run marathons, work for the United Nations, publish a memoir, etc. I tried, many times to write that victory memoir. But I couldn’t. Partly because that story doesn’t exist, and partly because I don’t have enough knowledge of my own experience to be committed to truth. Illness is like that. It is perhaps even more significant when the illness is impacting the brain. For that period of acute illness, and for intermittent periods long after, my perceptions and interpretations were warped. Some memories linger under a cloud of fog, others are simply blank. I also cannot be certain if the memories I do have are accurate. The truth is so specific, so complete, how could I ever be sure?
In this collaboration between versions of myself, the narration is unreliable. There are different lenses through which I look at my life and they do not all tell the same story. I know this inconsistency is alive in my work due to choices of form and the very nature of writing about illness, grief and other moments in which a character’s understanding of the world around them narrows. But aren’t we all, to some extent, an unreliable narrator when telling our truth. Humans are beautifully inconsistent — inspired by the aspirations of others yet stuck on our own repeating loops. The stories we tell ourselves, the stories that shape our foundations are never impartial, never complete. We are not objective, or rational, or consistent. As we permeate the boundaries between self and story, this partial knowing of the self echoes into character and narrator.
She and I are writing a novel. In it, much of the plot is true. It is my story of early adulthood, illness and university. It could also be referred to a contemporary exploration of neuropsychiatric illness or The Yellow Wallpaper, if Charlotte Perkins Gilman went to law school in 2014. It is for much of the piece, a true story.
When I first became ill, I knew I wanted to tell the story one day. Then, it was all about redemption. I wanted to be someone who despite being struck-down at 19, had then gone on to do great things — run marathons, work for the United Nations, publish a memoir, etc. I tried, many times to write that victory memoir. But I couldn’t. Partly because that story doesn’t exist, and partly because I don’t have enough knowledge of my own experience to be committed to truth. Illness is like that. It is perhaps even more significant when the illness is impacting the brain. For that period of acute illness, and for intermittent periods long after, my perceptions and interpretations were warped. Some memories linger under a cloud of fog, others are simply blank. I also cannot be certain if the memories I do have are accurate. The truth is so specific, so complete, how could I ever be sure?
I stared at my three remaining Coco Pops. Their outlines blurred, they looked as if they had lifted from the bowl below them. For a moment I watched, then I crushed each remaining pop one by one beneath my thumb. Just to be sure their levitation was my imagination. The world became more three-dimensional than it should. Background faded to allow every object, every face, to develop a new depth in the picture. Voices filled the air with a strange flavour, each sound with its own taste. I opened my mouth, hoping to hear better, to understand. The colours shifted, I could feel purple descend over the room. It wrapped my skin, it changed the lights. I blinked, trying to refocus my vision or reset my thoughts. I watched as the people at the table dissolved and I was left with the carnival of my senses. There was a moment when it was good. Great. Euphoric. This carnival was freedom. Freedom that tasted like dancing chased by absinthe, and everything was that best bit off-kilter. It held all the absurdity of a dream, and yet I was fully awake. For a moment.
Then I woke. There was a pain in my head. Right in the centre, between the two lobes. It was like a knife, large and flat, was between the halves of my brain and trying to create space between them. Pushing them apart, twisting as I grasped for thoughts. It left my mind empty of everything except this ache. I could hear voices. They hovered above me but sounded as though they were echoes from a cave deep underwater. Or maybe I was deep underwater. Safe. Free. I opened my eyes. My cheek was pressed against the linoleum floor, I could see a crowd of feet. I closed my eyes tight, squeezing them together hoping that I could make it go away: the pain in my head, the onlookers, my being on the floor. The room wasn’t bright but in that moment, it was blinding. I pressed my hand into the linoleum, trying to find a grounded base before acknowledging anyone else. I pushed both hands firmly into the ground, attempting to sit up, but my arms were limp against my weight and the gentle touch of someone, I don’t know who it was, was enough to make me surrender to my weakness, and so I stayed lying on the floor.
Then I woke. There was a pain in my head. Right in the centre, between the two lobes. It was like a knife, large and flat, was between the halves of my brain and trying to create space between them. Pushing them apart, twisting as I grasped for thoughts. It left my mind empty of everything except this ache. I could hear voices. They hovered above me but sounded as though they were echoes from a cave deep underwater. Or maybe I was deep underwater. Safe. Free. I opened my eyes. My cheek was pressed against the linoleum floor, I could see a crowd of feet. I closed my eyes tight, squeezing them together hoping that I could make it go away: the pain in my head, the onlookers, my being on the floor. The room wasn’t bright but in that moment, it was blinding. I pressed my hand into the linoleum, trying to find a grounded base before acknowledging anyone else. I pushed both hands firmly into the ground, attempting to sit up, but my arms were limp against my weight and the gentle touch of someone, I don’t know who it was, was enough to make me surrender to my weakness, and so I stayed lying on the floor.
Narrational unreliability is heightened by altered consciousness. How can one hold a reliable account of their own dissociation, seizure or collapse? When the self is fractured, when the narrator’s experience is fractured, the narrative retelling will reflect the unreliability of a fractured self. A story that is pieced together. She knows where it starts, the moments of false hope, and what it felt like on the dark night of the soul. She knows we are okay, and that the ending may be incomplete, but it is not bleak. I know the triggers, I know where there is white space where there were once memories.
We have enough information to recreate a story, but isn’t fully my story. It draws upon theorists, other literary works and collective cultural understandings that have fed my imagination over the years. That have fed her. This autofiction work relies on the use of imagination to present a cohesive story. It is a process of uncovering and a process of creation. I am learning to sit with the discomfort of knowing that I may never be quite certain of what was found and what was imagined.
We have enough information to recreate a story, but isn’t fully my story. It draws upon theorists, other literary works and collective cultural understandings that have fed my imagination over the years. That have fed her. This autofiction work relies on the use of imagination to present a cohesive story. It is a process of uncovering and a process of creation. I am learning to sit with the discomfort of knowing that I may never be quite certain of what was found and what was imagined.
I listened to frosted grass blades crush beneath my feet and felt like I was running a marathon. Twenty minutes and 600 metres later I was on the edge of campus. Mum arrived in a cab directly from the airport, her nerves and anticipation enough for both of us, I held on to my apathy. I didn’t want further tests, I didn’t want another doctor. I wanted a burrito, and the darkness of my room.
…
I thought about the nausea, the headaches, the dizziness and darkest thoughts. I thought about the nights I stayed awake all night and how they were the relief, because they were the nights I didn’t fall or wake up where I wasn’t supposed to be.
I rested my head against the slightly sticky cab window and watched as row boats moved across the lake.
…
I thought about the nausea, the headaches, the dizziness and darkest thoughts. I thought about the nights I stayed awake all night and how they were the relief, because they were the nights I didn’t fall or wake up where I wasn’t supposed to be.
I rested my head against the slightly sticky cab window and watched as row boats moved across the lake.
The lines between author, character and narrator are blurred. For she is me, and I am her. Together, we write a story that is both made-up, and completely true.
Telling the truth through fiction is inherently paradoxical. It is a tense and permeable line that fosters unreliability. It is also an act of reclamation. I am limited by a lack of certainty, I never will be sure of some of the details of my formative young-adult years. Perhaps we all are, to an extent, limited by our own low-lying fog. The interweaving of fiction, the characterisation of self, is an opportunity to bring unknowable stories to light. With the essence of subjective truth and a proximity to real experience that full-fiction, for lack of a better term, does not possess, a truth-adjacent recreation allows for more stories to be told, more voices to be heard, by letting go of the bounds of verifiability.
When you step into the fog
fictionalisation creates the freedom to tell complex and uncertain truths.
A bridge between lands.
Bibliography
Whilst the above manifesto is a creative work, my understanding of this topic has largely been informed by the following theoretical and literary works --
Cleghorn E (2021) Unwell Women: a journey through medicine and myth in a man-made world, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.
Delchamps V (2020) ‘“A Slight Hysterical Tendency”: Performing Diagnosis in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper’, in Braun J (ed) Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations of Hysteria, Leuven University Press, Leuven.
Gilman CP (1892/2015) The Yellow Wallpaper, Open Road Integrated Media, New York.
Gilman CP (1913/2003) ‘Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper’, Short Story Criticism, vol. 63.
Hansen PK (2017) ‘Autofiction and Authorial Unreliable Narration’ in Hansen PK, Pier J, Roussin P and Schmid W (eds) Emerging Vectors of Narratology, De Gruyter, Berlin.
Marshall JW (2020) ‘Traumatic dances of “the non-self” bodily incoherence and the hysterical archive’ in Braun J (ed.) Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations of Hysteria, Leuven University Press, Leuven.
Matthews GJ (2018) ‘Illness Narratives and the Consolations of Autofiction’, in Dix H (ed.) Autofiction in English, Springer International Publishing AG, Cham.
Paulsen SL and Lanius UF (2014) ‘Introduction: The Ubiquity of Dissociation’, in Lanius UF, Paulsen SL and Corrigan FM (eds) Neurobiology and Treatment of Traumatic Dissociation: Towards an Embodied Self, Springer Publishing Company, New York.
Shklovsky V (2016) ‘Art as Technique’, in Rivkin J and Ryan M (eds) Literary Theory: an anthology, 3rd ed, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken.
Stromberg D (2017) ‘Beyond unreliability: resisting naturalisation of normative horizons’, in Hansen PK, Pier J, Roussin P and Schmid W (Eds) Emerging Vectors of Narratology, De Gruyter, Berlin.
Syed T and Lafrance WC (2011) ‘Nonepileptic seizures’, in Schmitz B, Syed T and Lafrance WC (eds) The Neuropsychiatry of Epilepsy, 2nd ed, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Telling the truth through fiction is inherently paradoxical. It is a tense and permeable line that fosters unreliability. It is also an act of reclamation. I am limited by a lack of certainty, I never will be sure of some of the details of my formative young-adult years. Perhaps we all are, to an extent, limited by our own low-lying fog. The interweaving of fiction, the characterisation of self, is an opportunity to bring unknowable stories to light. With the essence of subjective truth and a proximity to real experience that full-fiction, for lack of a better term, does not possess, a truth-adjacent recreation allows for more stories to be told, more voices to be heard, by letting go of the bounds of verifiability.
When you step into the fog
fictionalisation creates the freedom to tell complex and uncertain truths.
A bridge between lands.
Bibliography
Whilst the above manifesto is a creative work, my understanding of this topic has largely been informed by the following theoretical and literary works --
Cleghorn E (2021) Unwell Women: a journey through medicine and myth in a man-made world, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.
Delchamps V (2020) ‘“A Slight Hysterical Tendency”: Performing Diagnosis in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper’, in Braun J (ed) Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations of Hysteria, Leuven University Press, Leuven.
Gilman CP (1892/2015) The Yellow Wallpaper, Open Road Integrated Media, New York.
Gilman CP (1913/2003) ‘Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper’, Short Story Criticism, vol. 63.
Hansen PK (2017) ‘Autofiction and Authorial Unreliable Narration’ in Hansen PK, Pier J, Roussin P and Schmid W (eds) Emerging Vectors of Narratology, De Gruyter, Berlin.
Marshall JW (2020) ‘Traumatic dances of “the non-self” bodily incoherence and the hysterical archive’ in Braun J (ed.) Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations of Hysteria, Leuven University Press, Leuven.
Matthews GJ (2018) ‘Illness Narratives and the Consolations of Autofiction’, in Dix H (ed.) Autofiction in English, Springer International Publishing AG, Cham.
Paulsen SL and Lanius UF (2014) ‘Introduction: The Ubiquity of Dissociation’, in Lanius UF, Paulsen SL and Corrigan FM (eds) Neurobiology and Treatment of Traumatic Dissociation: Towards an Embodied Self, Springer Publishing Company, New York.
Shklovsky V (2016) ‘Art as Technique’, in Rivkin J and Ryan M (eds) Literary Theory: an anthology, 3rd ed, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken.
Stromberg D (2017) ‘Beyond unreliability: resisting naturalisation of normative horizons’, in Hansen PK, Pier J, Roussin P and Schmid W (Eds) Emerging Vectors of Narratology, De Gruyter, Berlin.
Syed T and Lafrance WC (2011) ‘Nonepileptic seizures’, in Schmitz B, Syed T and Lafrance WC (eds) The Neuropsychiatry of Epilepsy, 2nd ed, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.