Eight titles that will leave you questioning if your memories are real

Lindsay Starck is a writer, editor, and professor based in Minneapolis. She studied at Yale, Notre Dame, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first novel, Noah’s Wife, was published in 2016 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Her short prose has recently appeared in the New England Review, Ploughshares, the Bellevue Literary Review, The Cincinnati Review, and the Southern Review. Her academic articles have been published in Modern Fiction, The Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and Adaptation.

Starck's newest novel is Monsters We Have Made.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight books that are concerned with:

What is real versus what is imagined? What is remembered and what is crafted? How do we know when to trust our perception, what do we do when our memories or our senses fail us, and what does “evidence” even mean in a world as slippery and shifting as we are?

One title on Strack's list:

The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be by Shannon Gibney

“The literature of adoption,” writes Shannon Gibney, “is a fictional genre in itself.” In The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be, Gibney leans into this argument by weaving together her own actual adoption story (including documents and photographs) and the story of what might have happened if she had remained with her birth mother. By intentionally combining memoir with speculative fiction, the book illuminates the multiple pathways that exist between the past and the present. Gibney’s fictionalization of memory liberates the narrator from the impossible project of perfectly reconstructing the past, provides her a new angle on the present, and reminds us that the boundaries between inside and outside, truth and dream, fact and fiction are much more permeable than they appear.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue