Nobody's memoir: An unreliable history of fragments

In this essay, the authors discuss the possibilities of partial and fallible memories to provide source material for creative memoir, and the abnegation of individual authorial control as a key element of creative process. Considering Jonathan Gottschall’s characterisation of narrative as central to human experience, the authors explore the way in which their own fragmented and discrete personal narratives, when ‘recycled into mutant strains,’ as Gareth E Rees puts it, may be combined and shaped into what they describe as ‘a shared psychogeography of memories,’ which belongs to both writers, and to neither. They illustrate how, in practice, this creates a narrator who is, as other collaborative writers have acknowledged in the past, an independent third entity, and that this speaker adopts the role of a psychopomp, leading both writers and readers through a strangely familiar landscape that, ultimately, is nobody’s creation but its own.