Warlight

Nathaniel’s childhood is full of stories—the novels on Rose’s bookcase, the plays she performs with her children, the legends of King Arthur that she tells them, and her own “twice-told tales” (6) about her childhood. As an adult, Nathaniel gradually comes to understand that storytelling is a means to make sense of the chaotic experience of life. Because of his mother’s absence and enigmatic identity, he never feels quite complete, and he writes his memoir to better understand his mother and himself. In Warlight, the past is never a single, objective truth. Instead, memory is an act of reconstruction that mirrors the techniques of fiction, aiming to assemble a cohesive but subjective narrative out of the fragmentary and emotionally fraught raw material of experience.

Nathaniel begins his narrative with the moment of his parents’ abandonment, a trauma he revisits in hopes of demystifying his past. He frames his project in literary terms, where retracing his memories is like “clarifying a fable” (4) of his family. Recognizing that the memoir is similar to fiction and relies on similar literary tropes and devices, Nathaniel admits that the end result is shaped as much by the imperatives of art as by the factual record.