Beyond Memoir: Playing with Meta
Teresa Dovalpage
Truth be told, I didn’t have the slightest idea what “metafiction” meant until I saw it used to describe The Novel Detective, my most recent book published by Soho Crime. I soon learned it is a style of storytelling that deliberately blurs the lines between reality, the author’s life and the text as such.
Then I realized that, years ago, I had unknowingly taken my first step toward meta-writing. I had intended to write a sort of memoir, centered on my teenage years in Cuba and my experiences growing up there. The beginning came easily. I wrote about the escuela al campo (the mandatory countryside camps for harvesting tobacco and fruit), the traditions of the Afro-Cuban religion Santería, and everyday scenes inside the bodegas and the crowded buses we called guaguas.
Soon, however, reality got in the way. My stable family (a pharmacist mother, a construction worker father, and grandparents who lived with us) and myself, a nerdish only child, all lacked dramatic flair. I didn’t have grand adventures, nor, luckily, major tragedies, to recount. To save the project, I let go of the truth. That memoir evolved into total fiction and became my debut with Soho Press, A Girl like Che Guevara, published in 2004.
Years later, I launched the Havana Mystery series with Soho Crime—a collection of crime novels set in Cuba. Of course, every book contains autobiographical elements. The main character of Death Comes in through the Kitchen studies English literature at the University of Havana like I did, and the recipes included in the story are authentic and my own grandmother’s; Queen of Bones revolves around the Cuban-Chinese community I researched for my Master’s degree while Death of a Telenovela Star and Death under the Perseids draw from the cruises my husband and I have taken. Still, those books are strictly fiction with my personal experiences just adding a few insider touches to the plots.
But something shifted when I started writing The Novel Detective. Instead of hiding behind a fictional character, I decided to step directly into the story using my own name, history, and quirks. I was going to dive headfirst into the story, no matter what.
Enter Teresa: a crime novelist living in Hobbs, New Mexico (just like me), who returns to Cuba in 2020 to investigate a decades-old murder that has haunted her since she left the island in 1980. Her chapters alternate with the ones focused on Teresita, her teenage self. That was truly me at fourteen: a nosy, bookish girl navigating a school environment where student-teacher hanky-panky was an open and unadmitted secret. While the crime and the investigation are pure fiction, the school atmosphere, the daily routines, and most of the characters (including a cameo by my mother) are totally real.
For writers standing on the edge of the diving board, not quite ready to take the plunge into the deep end of memoir, experimenting with metafiction offers a good alternative. The most important lesson I learned was the flexible relationship that meta allows the writer to establish with the truth. I happily inserted myself into the pages as a character, but publishing the book under a fiction imprint granted me a creative passport. For example, my character Teresita comes to the U.S. during the Mariel Boatlift in 1980, while the real me didn’t arrive until 1996 under completely different circumstances—I married an American, like the main character of Death under the Perseids. With metafiction, you can invent or alter historical timelines without anyone calling you a liar and triggering an A Million Little Pieces-style controversy.
Then I realized that, years ago, I had unknowingly taken my first step toward meta-writing. I had intended to write a sort of memoir, centered on my teenage years in Cuba and my experiences growing up there. The beginning came easily. I wrote about the escuela al campo (the mandatory countryside camps for harvesting tobacco and fruit), the traditions of the Afro-Cuban religion Santería, and everyday scenes inside the bodegas and the crowded buses we called guaguas.
Soon, however, reality got in the way. My stable family (a pharmacist mother, a construction worker father, and grandparents who lived with us) and myself, a nerdish only child, all lacked dramatic flair. I didn’t have grand adventures, nor, luckily, major tragedies, to recount. To save the project, I let go of the truth. That memoir evolved into total fiction and became my debut with Soho Press, A Girl like Che Guevara, published in 2004.
Years later, I launched the Havana Mystery series with Soho Crime—a collection of crime novels set in Cuba. Of course, every book contains autobiographical elements. The main character of Death Comes in through the Kitchen studies English literature at the University of Havana like I did, and the recipes included in the story are authentic and my own grandmother’s; Queen of Bones revolves around the Cuban-Chinese community I researched for my Master’s degree while Death of a Telenovela Star and Death under the Perseids draw from the cruises my husband and I have taken. Still, those books are strictly fiction with my personal experiences just adding a few insider touches to the plots.
But something shifted when I started writing The Novel Detective. Instead of hiding behind a fictional character, I decided to step directly into the story using my own name, history, and quirks. I was going to dive headfirst into the story, no matter what.
Enter Teresa: a crime novelist living in Hobbs, New Mexico (just like me), who returns to Cuba in 2020 to investigate a decades-old murder that has haunted her since she left the island in 1980. Her chapters alternate with the ones focused on Teresita, her teenage self. That was truly me at fourteen: a nosy, bookish girl navigating a school environment where student-teacher hanky-panky was an open and unadmitted secret. While the crime and the investigation are pure fiction, the school atmosphere, the daily routines, and most of the characters (including a cameo by my mother) are totally real.
For writers standing on the edge of the diving board, not quite ready to take the plunge into the deep end of memoir, experimenting with metafiction offers a good alternative. The most important lesson I learned was the flexible relationship that meta allows the writer to establish with the truth. I happily inserted myself into the pages as a character, but publishing the book under a fiction imprint granted me a creative passport. For example, my character Teresita comes to the U.S. during the Mariel Boatlift in 1980, while the real me didn’t arrive until 1996 under completely different circumstances—I married an American, like the main character of Death under the Perseids. With metafiction, you can invent or alter historical timelines without anyone calling you a liar and triggering an A Million Little Pieces-style controversy.
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It also gave me the power to rewrite personal history. Through the meta lens, I punished the “bad guys” of my youth, even if they weren’t quite as villainous in real life as I painted them on the page. Without giving away the plot, I can share that I turned a disagreeable, bossy teacher into a fictional nemesis who gets properly punished at the end. And that, dear readers, was quite amusing!
Then, of course, there is the free trip down Memory Lane. While writing The Novel Detective, I revisited the haunted building where most of the story takes place: La Manzana de Gómez. Once one of the first indoor malls in Latin America, it had become a half-abandoned shell by the time I studied there. In the 1980 chapters, I wandered through its dusty hallways, entered its cobwebbed classrooms, and remembered the three years I spent there... I felt like a fourteen-year-old girl all over again. In the 2020 chapters, I walked through the immaculate lobby of the building’s current incarnation, the luxurious Gran Hotel Manzana Kempinski. |
Manzana de Gomez front elevation, Havana, Cuba | Wikipedia - Public Domain
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The most unexpected bonus of the meta experiment was self-insight. Forced to analyze my character’s thoughts and motivations helped me understand why I am driven to write mysteries in the first place. So The Novel Detective became a meta-mirror: it is about a writer planning to write a novel, and what happens when that writer herself becomes part of the plot.
My final advice to anyone who wants to write a memoir but worries about wandering too far from the facts is simple: don’t let rigid genres box you in. Give yourself permission to experiment and play with metafiction. If nothing else, it is a great amount of fun. |
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