addressing the ‘anCient quarreL’marketing campaign which made much of the author’s own sadness, encourages
readers to read the work as a disclosure of the author’s personal experience. This
is despite halligan’s stated attempt to keep the two separate: ‘Clare isn’t me. she’s
like me. some of her experience, terrors, have been mine. some haven’t ’ (2001: 9).
The work undertaken to produce both novel and essay/memoir follows similar lines:
investigation, observation, reflection. But its juxtapositioning of memoir and fiction
both explores and draws attention to contemporary debates about whether literature
can represent the complexities of life with any accuracy, and what it means to ‘tell the
truth’ in a period when the idea of any absolute truth is outmoded and discarded.
practice- led research that involves creative non- fiction to some extent replicates the
work of a traditional humanities or social sciences researcher, as lee gutkind points
out, writing that ‘Creative non- fiction differs from fiction because it is necessarily and
scrupulously accurate and the presentation of information ... is paramount’ (gutkind
1997: 15). Writers deal with this imperative by employing research techniques such as
interviews, surveys, archival research and participant observation. however, they also
employ the techniques of the creative researcher: thinking through writing, and analysing
the data through the filter of creative practice. To a far greater extent than writers of
poetry or fiction, they are bound by the data they have gathered; and, as a corollary, the
ethical aspects of their practice are more focused. Readers tend to believe something that
is labelled ‘non- fiction’ in a way they will not necessarily believe fiction – and creative
non- fiction, drawing as it does on the seductive poetics of literature (as plato warned us)
is particularly good at convincing its readers about its truth, whether or not this truth can
be substantiated. Theodore Rees- Cheney has noted that cognitive scientists suggest that:
even the most conscientious and intelligent reader may soon forget the factual
content of a piece if material [has] entered the brain with little emotion
wrapped around it [and] humans remember best what enters the brain in an
envelope of emotion.
(Rees- Cheney 2005: 36–7)This does place on producers of creative non- fiction a responsibility to ensure the
quality of the communication of facts and evidences, and not simply to use the form
to win over the minds of readers. in addressing this issue, researchers in creative non-
fiction have also contributed knowledge about the limits and the shape of ethical
responsibility in textual practice.
daphne patai sums up the question for writers:
a person telling her life story is, in a sense, offering up her self for her own and
her listener’s scrutiny ... Whether we should appropriate another’s life in this
way becomes a legitimate question.
(patai 1987: 24–5)This question seems particularly apparent in relation to a research assessment of
how audience expectations and prior knowledge of actual events can shape perceptions
and interpretations of the resulting work, even when those events and characters are
changed and the work is declared to be one of fiction (Brien 2009). The reception