Speculative Memoir Made Me Real

By Laraine Herring

The Velveteen Rabbit undid me. A stuffed Rabbit, a friendship with a living Boy, and the tale of how love and believing in what could not yet be seen turned fabric, stitches, and button eyes into fur, muscle, and whiskers.

Embracing my imagined worlds helped me become Real, too.

And as someone who is now Real, I am qualified to help define the terms of my arena. Here’s one:

Speculative memoir is an umbrella genre in which the questions of the memoirist’s book a...