First loves

This work explores the extent to which fiction can be used in a creative nonfiction text and still obey nonfiction’s truth-telling tenets. This work showcases an invented first person voice in the memoir of an historical personage: every assertion made is based on documented evidence, but a fictional voice draws inferences from the documented materials that suggests certain behaviours and feelings. Such investigation is necessary because reducing a biographical life story to the bare facts distilled from available documentation sometimes results in a chronicle of events that is unrepresentative of life as it is lived.