Meet Me at Lennon’s: Historical biofiction as a self-conscious narrative device in historiographic metafiction

Abstract

Meet Me at Lennon’s is a self-conscious work of historical fiction or what Linda Hutcheon (1988) terms “historiographic metafiction”. The novel is structured as a contemporary frame story in which a series of historical “bio-tales”, set in Brisbane during the Second World War, are embedded. Though fictional, the bio-tales are based on experiences of real women as recorded in commemorative publications, memoirs, oral and popular histories. Meet Me at Lennon’s uses the contrivance of “faux” historical bio-tales or “microhistories” as a narrative device to expose how authors use textual relics and invention when writing historical biofictions, thereby spotlighting the ethical dilemmas such authors must grapple with when representing the imagined subjectivities of real historical people. The novel aims to re-imagine the Brisbane home front as a site of historical and narrative contention, gendered resistance, collective memory, nostalgia, and place, while exploring both the potential and limitations of historical biofiction as a restorative or correctional narrative device to history’s omissions and misrepresentations. This article discusses the use of the novel’s bio-tales as a narrative device in relation to the goals of both historical biofiction and historiographic metafiction, and in the space where these two genres collude and collide.