Unspoken: Experimental Life Writing and Child Narration

Abstract

ABSTRACT Children are, more or less, voiceless—historically, within society, and even throughout literature. Particularly in the realms of life writing, children’s voicelessness is no more on display (or rather, a lack of display). We’ve yet to allow them their voice divorced from the ‘safer’ confines of fiction. Why? Utilising my doctoral research at the University of Nottingham, where I explore this strange phenomenon via creative experimentation of my debut memoir alongside critical exploration of life writing’s ‘limits’, my essay highlights said voicelessness of child narrators within life writing, questioning this seemingly exclusive reign of the traditional adult narrator. Applying a semi-autoethnographic exploration of my earliest life writings, I aim to expose this gap in both learning and creativity, championing the inherent enlightenment child narration begets, and suggesting an untapped resource at play. Truth is not gate-kept to the mouths of adults; and in advocating for experimental life writing, we must ask ourselves how narratorial freedoms have (or have not), and should be, considered when it comes to stories inherited from truth.