We’re living in a story-time. Call it secondary or digital orality; even literate people mostly don’t read books, and comment sections operate more like spoken language than print media. The theorist Anna Kornbluh calls it “immediacy,” the condition of “too-late capitalism”: a rejection of the abstract and the symbolic in favor of the present moment, the personal and experiential. The rise of social media and destabilization of institutional knowledge and scientific authority have created a “value crisis,” and we have responded by trusting only what we see as “real,” direct, unfiltered, unprofessional. We don’t want studies—we want stories. We want true stories, from people who lived them, our only moral lighthouses in a sea of decontextualized information.

For the publishing industry, the rejection of “mediation” includes fictionality itself, the deliberate and artful construction of alternate realities, otherwise known as “making things up.” “Immediacy,” as a theory, explains a whole swath of publishing trends: celebrity memoirs dominating bestseller lists, the popularity of first-person present-tense, the rise of autofiction and of #ownvoices, even readerly rejections of “unlikeable” characters and the naïve belief that descriptions of bad behavior can only be endorsements of it. It’s every time a quote from a fictional character is circulated as their author’s opinion, and every biopic about a beloved writer that shows them literally living the stories they did, in fact, imagine.

This allergy to fictionality ironically makes it harder to tell personal narratives, which are (though we dislike confronting this directly) still works of art. How can writers tell only the truth when they write from the margins, within spaces of multiple, contested truths? When a profound experience like war, natural disaster, mass shooting, or domestic violence is shared with others, whose version is the “true story”? How can experiences of trauma be represented directly, when (as Elaine Scarry says) pain is its own language, resistant to translation?

I have a theory that folklore is a cheat code.

Speculative memoir, which I define broadly as life-writing that incorporates elements from folklore to find meaning in personal, often traumatic experiences, is a way of bargaining with literary trends by reaching back for fictions older than writing itself. No one could accuse you of invention, because these fantasies are culturally inherited and communally owned. Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, Sabrina Orah Mark’s Happily, Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal’s Magical/Realism, and others blend real and unreal elements to reject the false coherence of “happily ever afters” like fully recovering from abuse or overcoming grief.

What makes folklore so useful for writing the self is that these are stories with centuries, even millennia of experience resisting closure. Closure is for books—folktales are never over; they begin again every time we tell them, each rendition invoking and transforming all previous versions. Ursula K. Le Guin tells us that “living, as we do, in the middle,” we forget that stories don’t have arcs—they have spirals. An arc is what happens when you’re looking at a single section of story snipped out of context, pressed between pages like a flower. This is what writers of speculative memoir get right, and how they take fairy tales back to their oral roots. Life stories are not literary plots with linear arcs and resolutions, but all middle, spirals in which past pain continually interrupts and remakes the present. In Mark’s Happily: A Personal History With Fairy Tales, she says, “when I write, I spin a long, knotted rope. I toss the rope down. It is me who is climbing up, and it is me who is climbing down” (70). A spiral allows for the possibility of multiple centers, past and present selves existing simultaneously. As Le Guin wrote about Sleeping Beauty, “the story is about that still center,” the power that lies not in breaking enchantments, but in living for a little while within one. Trauma is suffered and overcome at the same time; at some level, the spell is never broken.

Oral tales in performance are, literally, a spell: shared time set apart from everyday life, where nothing and so everything matters. Repeated events loaded with symbolic cultural meaning are what anthropologists call “ritual.” Victor Turner wrote about the continuum between “social dramas” (the scripted, serious events that are deeply important to a society, like weddings and funerals) and “aesthetic dramas” (theater, purely for entertainment). He (with Richard Schechner) draws this relationship as a bisected figure eight laid on its side—art imitating life and life imitating art—and calls it a “magic mirror” (73, 104). The real, serious work of ritual and the fantastical, frivolous play of theater meet in the middle, go through a dark woods together.

Speculative memoir breaks fairy tales open, puts us back in the liminal zone, and makes familiar stories strange again to recover their magic. This makes it particularly useful for marginalized writers, whose folk stories are always being sought out as markers of exotic otherness, and simultaneously treated as warped reflections of European folklore. (It’s the same Eurocentric instinct behind the appeal of Campbell’s “hero with a thousand faces”—any unfamiliar culture is just your own in disguise.) If you think you know how the story goes, see it as “inauthentic” when it surprises you, you are looking for comfort, not magic. You can’t have transformation without uncertainty.

In an interview with Electric Lit, Sofia Samatar reflects, “Everyone seems to be saying this…that it’s precisely the tropes of fantasy and science fiction that are capable of expressing trauma, it’s the impossible that conveys emotional reality…It’s life writing that doesn’t encourage people to put you in a box.…It’s too weird for that.” Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater is subtitled “a novel,” but like their protagonist, Emezi identifies as an ogbanje, a multi-headed god-parasite from Nigerian folklore, sometimes compared (or reduced) to European changelings. Emezi offers their story as a decolonial reframing: Their identity is not something to “solve,” not a metaphor for mental illness and gender dysphoria, but a real, embodied cultural reality. 

When you sample the immense breadth and cultural variety of oral storytelling, you begin to see the parts before the whole: Fairy tales are not lessons to get right or wrong, but evocative, available vocabularies of motifs. Motifs are ingredients for story, the gut-punches of sheer feeling that make the story stick in the mind of an oral storyteller: blood on snow in an ebony frame, brothers transformed into birds, iron shoes and hidden hearts. In Machado’s In the Dream House, she uses footnotes to anchor specific visceral memories of domestic abuse in the folklorist Stith Thompson’s motif index. Typically, the motif index is used in conjunction with the tale type index—motifs help us figure out what story we’re in. But Machado’s motifs are free-floating, grasping for a usable plot structure and not finding any. When she has morning sickness symptoms, she buys a pregnancy test, even though she knows it is impossible. Fearing her girlfriend’s jealous accusations, she footnotes every available supernatural explanation: conception from eating mango, lemon, mandrake, watercress, conception from swallowing a pearl, a peppercorn, drinking saint’s tears, from spit or blood or fire, a panicky litany of motifs that would never appear in a single story. Every tale type is tried on and discarded. “I broke the stories down,” Machado writes, “because I was breaking down and I didn’t know what else to do” (149). But breaking the stories also shows us that the stories were meant to be broken, that these stories do not exist to tell us what to do, but instead show us how to feel, and (because folklore is always shared) to feel with us, to give our feelings the weight and resonance of tradition.

A drum I’m endlessly beating in my classes on fairy tales is that centuries of “fixing” oral folklore into print has created a false impression that stories are concrete things, texts to decipher or disenchant. Students always want to know what the story is “really about,” as if the point of fantasy is to obscure rather than to reveal. But oral stories always had context, were always “about” the moment of telling, about the context the publishing process simultaneously obliterates and mines for authenticity (Bruno Latour calls it “purification and hybridization”). A writer using traditional stories to talk about their own life, making folklore personal once again, “fixes” the stories by “unfixing” them. 

Using folklore in life-writing is a way to slip the trap of “mediation” by collapsing the individual and the culture, the past and the present, the way ritual and oral storytelling does. Villarreal calls the source of her writing “a black, starry pool in my center, the nebula I was connected to before I was born. It is a knowing beyond language. I light candles for my dead, listen for their voices. I write from this starry center; I write what they say until it’s true” (7). If you are not sure what the true story is, the writing of it as folklore not only makes it true, it unwrites its own creativity, makes it always have been true. Folklore is never “made up,” it is always “found out,” always-already known. What could be more immediate than that?

References

Cheney et al. 2018. “Why Adding Monsters and Fairies to a Memoir Can Make It Even More Real.” Electric Lit. https://electricliterature.com/why-adding-monsters-and-fairies-to-a-memoir-can-make-it-even-more-real/.

Emezi, Akwaeke. 2018. Freshwater: A Novel. Grove Atlantic.

Kornbluh, Anna. 2024. Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Verso.

Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press.

Le Guin, Ursula K. 1980. “It Was a Dark and Story Night; or, Why Are We Huddling about the Campfire?” 187–96, in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. University of Chicago Press.

_______________. 2002 [1998]. “The Wilderness Within.” 203–210, in Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales, ed. Kate Bernheimer. Anchor Books.

Machado, Carmen Maria. 2020. In the Dream House: A Memoir. Graywolf Press.

Mark, Sabrina Orah. 2023. Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales. Random House.

Scarry, Elaine. 1987. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press.

Schechner, Richard. 2019. “From Ritual to Theatre and Back: The Structure/Process of the Efficacy-Entertainment Dyad.” 311–24, in Symposium of the Whole. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. PAJ Publications.

Villarreal, Vanessa Angélica. 2024. Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders. Tiny Reparations Books.

© 2026 Kristiana Willsey