Shannon Gibney isn’t the first writer to conceive a “speculative memoir” to recount the story of her childhood but hers may be one of the most intriguing and creative in this blossoming canon. First, what is speculative memoir? In short, it’s weaving imagination, intuition, magic and the supernatural into the true events of a life. Carmen Maria Machado’s terrific memoir, “In the Dream House,” intersperses daydreams and fantasies to find the words for the harrowing narrative of an abusive relationship. In Shannon Gibney’s memoir of transracial adoption, “The Girl I Am, Was and Never Will Be,” she creates a wormhole to slip into the life she might’ve lived if her birth mother hadn’t surrendered her for adoption. Gibney, whose name on her birth certificate was Erin Powers, writes in the prologue: “What follows are other ways to tell the stories of Shannon and Erin, the known and the unknown, truth and speculation, to awaken the sleepers, to call forth the living, the dead and those residing elsewhere.” In one chapter, Gibney creates a scene where her mother has just given birth to her and the attending doctors and nurses refuse to let her mother hold the baby because she is giving her up for adoption. In another chapter she discovers the wormhole machine, a kind of collider, that her biological father, Boisey Christopher, built in a run-down warehouse and she steps through the door into her past. Gibney says there was really no other way to encompass the story of her adoption and how it left her with a lifelong search for her identity. "The tools of mainstream literary fiction are inadequate for investigating my questions," she wrote. “You can get to the edges of them but not inside them.”
— Kerri Miller | MPR News | 