In its creation and consumption, literature involves an inherent contract between reader and author. The parameters of this contract are often set by the genre of the work and help the reader determine whether the text should be interpreted as truth or imagination. When an author blurs this distinction, the reader considers the contract to have been violated, and material that under different contractual expectations would be considered harmless fiction instead becomes misleading and malicious. Conflict almost always arises when readers discover fiction hidden behind expectations of truth – the sacred boundaries of genre dependent on a razor-edge division between fact and fiction. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Of course, such a distinction has always been impossible, with the genre attempting in vain to erect tenuous partitions between the ultimately inseparable principles of truth and invention in the world depicted. Before the generic distinction between fiction and nonfiction was established, even supposedly "pure" fiction itself was greeted with skepticism, and in its early days the novel was decried as deceptive, sinful, and corrupt. Based on the inherently paradoxical principle of verisimilitude, the novel is dedicated to the representation of what resembles reality, but is in fact fiction. Thus, even in its simplest and most recognizable form, the story inextricably mixes fact and fiction, the real and the imaginary, making it impossible for any author to satisfactorily separate the two. This conflict only becomes more acute in the memoir genre. Although authors often fail to meet the expectations set by even the clearest generic distinctions, the limitations of memoirs remain obscure from the outset. Generically distinct from autobiography, memoirs do not necessarily promise nonfiction, but nevertheless plausibly recount the real experiences of real individuals. Through their memoirs, Maxine Hong Kingston and Allison Bechdel explore the tentative boundary between truth and fiction, both ultimately viewing the latter as a means of discovering and transmitting the former. By unabashedly blending fact and fiction, The Woman Warrior and Fun Home highlight the ultimately arbitrary nature of genre. These memoirs illustrate truth as equally dependent on what happened and what did not or perhaps did not happen. In The Woman Warrior, Kingston extends this principle to speech, and her story constructs meaning as much through what is said as through what is left unsaid. Noting the importance of silence in memoirs, Jill Parrott remarks: Scenes without verbal communication, words that are not spoken intentionally, or words that are altered or omitted serve as important a function in the overall rhetorical strategy of the text as do words that are expressed. They are “simultaneously meaningful” in the sense that they exist side by side on the page and work together to form the complete meaning-generating artifact of the text. (377). Indeed, it can even be said that silence – at least in principle if not in practice – dominates The Woman Warrior, the memoir itself opening with the command to silence: "You must not tell anyone what I m 'preparing to tell you' (Kingston 3). . In this first section, Kingston establishes the power of silence through its use as a weapon. The eponymous “No Name Woman” of the introductory story, Kingston’s anonymous aunt, becomes the victim of silence. In an attemptto erase all memory of her existence, her family forbids any mention of her name, or – in Parrott's Foucauldian terminology – “the family forcefully suppresses the linguistic representation of her name, dehumanizing her and symbolically denying her existence” (378 ). . So, for Kingston's family, silence – what is left unsaid – is as powerful a statement as any truth spoken or written. As Kingston herself says: “There is more to this silence. They want me to participate in his punishment. And I did” (Kingston 16). Silence not only erases past truth, but actively serves to create and transmit a new truth, in the construction of which Kingston is obliged, through silence, to participate. In an attempt to regain power, Kingston breaks this silence, making "the rhetorical choice 'to prolong the existence of this long-dead relative by telling the story'" (Parrott 379). Of course, however, Kingston cannot give a factual account of her aunt's story, it is possible that this truth was sacrificed to years of obligatory silence spanning generations. Instead, Kingston presents multiple variations of the story, depicting her aunt alternately as a victim of rape and coercion, and also as a romantic, a young woman in love. Deprived of facts, Kingston must create truth from fiction, filling the gaps left by silence with her own interpretations. In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel also creates meaning from the absence of linguistic representation. As in Kingston, the history of the Bechdel family is of course also marked by silence and repression. However, as a graphic memoir, the "gaps" left by the absence of expression in Fun Home manifest themselves more literally in the form of the story - that is, in the "gutter" between the illustrations, of which the vacancy is silently responsible for creating meaning between each illustrated scene. Thus, as in The Woman Warrior, meaning in Fun Home is constructed not only in spite of absence, but literally through absence. Of course, for Bechdel, this structural absence reflects real gaps in his knowledge. Bechdel's understanding of her father's life and death is necessarily incomplete, and in her attempt to make sense of it, she illustrates and conveys as historical events that she could not know were accurate, because she did not wasn't there. Through illustration, Bechdel avoids some of the responsibility for conveying the facts promised by the autobiographical tendency of her work, creating a rift in the contract between herself and the reader by rejecting linguistic representation and turning instead to representation graphic in which she is free to illustrate it. his own version of the truth. Perhaps the best example of Bechdel turning to illustration as a means of conveying the unknowable as truth is in his depictions of his father's death. Like Kingston, Bechdel defines his own personal memoir largely in terms of his family history. Like Kingston, Bechdel grapples with the uncertain circumstances surrounding the death of a loved one – in this case, his father – and must fill in the gaps in his knowledge with speculation. The notion of his death as a suicide is an unproven – and perpetually unprovable – theory that dominates the narrative, and Bechdel illustrates the scene several times throughout the memoir. In creating these images, Bechdel manages to redefine and ultimately possess a crucial moment of which, not having witnessed it, his knowledge is incomplete. Although Bechdel remains bound by her autobiographical contract with the reader and isforced to temper her assumptions about her father's death with admissions of uncertainty like: "Maybe he didn't notice the truck coming because he was preoccupied with the divorce," and " People often have accidents when they are distraught,” in her illustrations she remains free to recreate and describe the truth according to her own interpretations (28). Bechdel's deliberate revision of facts through visual imagery is also evident in the variations. of his treatment of memory through these two – sometimes competing – mediums of text and image. Remembering an old story her grandmother told her in her youth about her father's childhood, Bechdel supplements her grandmother's account with illustrations of the events she describes. In one of these illustrations, Bechdel depicts a man as a milkman who, in his grandmother's story, is actually described as being a postman. Once again, Bechdel qualifies his revision as illustrated by text, including the confessional aside: "I know Mort was a postman, but I always imagined him as a milkman, all in white, a reverse reaper" (41 ). Here, Bechdel once again deliberately deviates from the facts, enjoying the freedom to interpret and express his own version of the truth through his illustrations. This variation between the realities presented in Bechdel's linguistic and visual representations reflects the idea of ​​multiplicity as truth – an idea that ultimately defines Bechdel's personal narrative and her understanding of herself as an individual. For both Bechdel and Kingston, the individual is an amalgam of different influences and individuals, including the family. As Bobby Fong remarks about The Woman Warrior: Kingston reconstructs a past from fragments of memory, notably the stories told to him by his mother. This past is not simply made up of remembered facts, but of myths and stories told and transformed to meet the needs of the narrator. The work is chronological and open; as readers we have the sense of a life in progress, with an evolving order, but not a static one, always unfinished. (117). Although Fong argues that Kingston's abandonment of the traditional autobiographical focus on the self as an individual in favor of "defining oneself according to one's place in a kinship lineage" uniquely reflects Eastern culture, this can be extended to the work of Bechdel. a decidedly Western interpretation of the American family as well (Fong 118). For both authors, identity depends on family history, and understanding this history is crucial to understanding oneself. Thus, Bechdel and Kingston have no choice but to fill in the gaps in their knowledge with their own inventions and speculations, using fiction to create and convey the truth of their own personal identities. If readers expecting a factual autobiography feel betrayed by these tendencies toward speculation and fabrication, they will certainly be shocked and confused by Kingston and Bechdel's ventures into true fiction. The Woman Warrior and Fun Home integrate fiction directly into the telling of their personal stories – Kingston through myth, Bechdel through intertextuality. In this way, Kingston and Bechdel irrevocably blur the division between fact and fiction, using both to define themselves through their narrative and shattering any assumed expectation or promise of fact the reader may have about the genre. In "White Tigers," Kingston moves away from the previous section's speculative interpretation of relatively recent family history, instead imagining herself as the legendary Fa Mu Lan. This story is one of many.