How does writing fiction differ from writing memoir?
Barnes: Memoir is autobiography made into story, into an arc of meaning. One writes to find meaning in the ritual act of writing, to see if one’s calling is true. Beside me as I write are a book of hymns, a King James Bible, a concordance. Who am I and why, are the questions that define the writer. What happens to an abandoned faith, to the defining traditions? What happens to the lost servant of those traditions? How can one find the end of chaos in literature? If stories are how we define ourselves, reworking our stories is how we find ourselves. Stories help us rediscover the loss of a sacred master plot. What happens when our stories can’t be accepted by our families, our community, the people of our old faiths? What happens when the stories of our families are stories of abuse and oppression, when what you want to tell is how your own life, its literal truth, is a sacrilege? So we have lost our way. And the quest looks like a road to catastrophe, especially when dire prophecies co
