The Voice of A Girl Becoming: A Solipsist's Collection of Creative Nonfiction

Abstract

The Voice of A Girl Becoming: A Solipsist’s Collection of Creative Nonfiction is a collection of eleven creative nonfiction stories and essays. Written to show how the material I have engaged with as a graduate student has shaped my writing, the critical introduction establishes the influences and choices made in the different narratives, explaining key characteristics of creative nonfiction and proposing the theory that to write in the genre, one must become a solipsist. In the following narratives, I have evoked the solipsist within me to muse over the messiness of memory, to play gleefully with structure and truth, and to speak in the personal voice. The material dealt with in this collection considers the intersection of disability and feminism, critiquing feminism’s ableism. Other notable themes are identity, religion, gender and gendered expectations, sexuality, and the presence of familial trauma. With a focus on specific images, the following stories and essays use the sharpness and nuance of language to speak on the aforementioned themes.