By Matt Homrich-Knieling

My parents aren’t dead, but they’ve died hundreds, probably thousands of times.

This isn’t a clever word-play riddle; it represents my reality of living with separation anxiety. As a child, separation from my parents meant certain catastrophe. It wasn’t just a fear that my parents could die on the way to the grocery store or post office, it was a fear that they had died. And with that came a tormenting mix of terror, desperation, and grief. Again and again.

I’m writing a memoir that, in part, interrogates my acute childhood fears and the ways those fears manifest today, but conveying the visceral and disorienting effects of separation anxiety quickly became a challenge.

I found a solution by reading speculative memoirs, such as The Night Parade by Jami Nakamura Lin and A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens by Laraine Herring. (Though not discussed below, the memoirs My Body is a Book of Rules by Elissa Washuta and Carmen Maria Machado‘s In the Dream House were also quite helpful.)

Speculative memoir, I observed, uses imaginative scenes, suppositions, dreams, nightmares and fantastical elements to illustrate, reveal, and understand the complexities of personal story. In The Night Parade, for example, Lin wrote a highly imaginative chapter that uses second-person to tell a nebulous, dreamlike story of a toddler whose grandparents are babysitting her. The toddler soon finds herself on a boat, weaving across time and space as her grandparents narrate painful histories, including Japanese incarceration during WWII:

You look toward the voice. Now the sky is filled with planes and smoke. You can see, from far away, a newfangled kind of ship coming toward you–a ship so large it barely fits in the river. We’re in World War Two now, Grandma explains.      

In a similarly imaginative style, Herring wrote much of A Constellation of Ghosts in the format of a play with four characters: herself, her deceased father in the form of a raven, and her deceased paternal grandparents. Herring uses this fantastical, speculative narrative to explore complex questions: How do our ancestors’ experiences shape—explicitly and implicitly, spiritually and genetically—who we become? How does grief manifest in our bodies and our imaginations and what are we to do with that grief?

In both of these examples, the authors use their lived experiences, ancestral stories, and imaginations to construct speculative realities that unearth intergenerational narratives and emotional truths. Or as Lin has suggested, you can “let your imagination wander, assemble snapshots from movies you’ve seen, fragments from books you’ve read, trying to create a scene to fill the gap where all the lost stories live.”

In my memoir, I draw from sessions where my therapist facilitated an exercise putting me in conversation with my childhood-self, struggling with the severe separation anxiety. Originally, I wrote these experiences as conventional scenes in my therapist’s office. After reading speculative memoir, I decided to fade my therapist out of these scenes, and I created new, imagined scenes of me in dialogue with my younger-self:

“Does it get better?” my younger-self asks. His voice is shaky with desperation but his eyes, wide and focused, reveal a sense of hope.

“No,” I say after a short pause. I wish I could lie to him. “It gets different, but not better.”

“Then how can you help me?” he asks. He seems confused, like he doesn’t understand why I’m here with him in the first place.

“I was hoping you could help me.”

Much like Lin and Herring, I was able to use imagined moments to unearth emotional truths. By animating my younger self, allowing him a voice of his own, a chance to rebut and justify and lament, I found a way to illustrate how my childhood anxieties and fears can be traced along to fears I experience today, and show the winding, perpetual path toward healing. Despite the imaginative nature of these scenes, they felt remarkably more real and honest to me.

There is an obvious tension in memoir: Memory is inherently subjective and unreliable. Rather than trying to erase that tension by sticking with objective facts as much as possible, speculative memoir leans into that tension and tries to understand what our subjectivities can teach us about our lives and histories.

My experiences of separation anxiety are a sort of haunting, an illusion, a terrifying magic trick of the mind. To write them as such, I need to think outside the confines of traditional conventions. To get as close as I can to the truth, I need to trust what my imagination can reveal.

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Matt Homrich-Knieling is a writer, educator, and parent living in Detroit, MI. He is currently an MFA student at Western Connecticut State University studying Creative Nonfiction and Editing. Matt is the editor-in-chief for Poor Yorick, the literary journal for WCSU’s MFA program. His writing has been published in Metro Parent, Edsurge, Edutopia, and elsewhere. You can follow Matt on Instagram at @mattymarvwrites.