Rachel Howard
Rachel Howard is a writer of fiction, personal essays, memoir, and dance criticism. Her debut novel is The Risk of Us.
From Howard's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: You note that The Risk of Us originated with your own family's story, but that you decided to write the story as fiction "to make a space for readers to be in this tension and ambiguity of trying to become a family, but I didn't want it to be about me." What did you see as the right blend between your own experiences and your fictional creations as you wrote the novel?--Marshal Zeringue
A: Ah, that’s a tough question. The honest answer is that I didn’t decide on a right proportion for the blend. I’ve spent a lot of years wrestling with the question of “What is the difference between memoir and fiction?” because I’ve long loved to read and write fiction, but my first book was a memoir.
I’ve come to believe that, for me, the differences are primarily two: First, the impetus for memoir (at least for me) has to do with self-excavation and self-discovery, maybe even a cathartic writing myself to the end of one life story and the beginning of another.
Second, memoir can do some relying on the power of telling the reader “This really happened.” The inner reality of its pages connects to outer, real-life reality. Whereas to me, in fiction—even if I know the story aligns in some ways with the writer’s life facts—the story has its own internal reality. Either its internal reality is fully and self-sufficiently convincing, or the work is not quite whole.
For that reason, as I wrote The Risk of Us, I treated my own family’s experience in the foster care world as a starting point for the internal reality of the book. Very quickly as I thought about the dynamics I wanted to set up between the characters and the story shape, some things...[read on]
