Some years ago, I wrote a memoir of a family friend — Qurratulain Hyder — for an issue of the journal Critical Muslim. It was assiduously researched. For example, I read an entire chapter of Hyder’s autobiography to condense it into one paragraph. I also consulted the diaries I’d kept over the years for references, as I was keen to tell only the truth. I vividly remembered our last meeting in Delhi, 10 years before the time of writing, but I couldn’t recall whether it was in December or January; I realised halfway through that there were huge gaps in my memory of seven years, when months and meeting slid into one another. I took a bold leap from about 1999 to 2006.

Two years later, my publisher decided to include it, along with another memoir, in my collection Hermitage and Other Stories. Apart from insisting that it was definitely non-fiction, I had no objection — after all, it was the story of a long association, not a critical essay. To my surprise, at least two critics in Pakistan designated it as autobiographical fiction, although I hadn’t invented anything, apart from reconstructing dialogue instead of reporting it as an autobiographer might (like Hyder, I have an ear as well as an eye that randomly records sound and image).

I reflected on the borderlines between invention and reality — even more so when, some months ago, I was looking for a diary to check the order in which I’d read the works of a certain writer and couldn’t find it. That wasn’t an issue for the article I was writing, just my own desire to trace the trajectory of my readings. Some of my copies of the writer’s books had dates on them; others had been borrowed or stolen. The piece I wrote was categorically non-fiction. Any transcript of memory, however, carries in it the seed of reinvention, even if chronologies are observed — when dates are missing, you either flash forward or reconstruct events.

I have never yet had to do this in a memoir. I remember, for example, the dates of my first visits to Indonesia, Istanbul and Palestine. When in doubt, I’ve written “I don’t remember” or have left the matter vague. But then I’ve written very few pieces of lifewriting. In the case of my travels, I recorded them when memories were fresh. Once, though, I read someone’s travel diary in which I played a significant part. Almost every appearance I made was different from the way I remembered it.

I experimented with a story last year in which everything — even the names of the characters — was taken directly from my life. I sent it off to an editor as a fiction. It was immediately accepted, without question; only a comment that it seemed authentic. What was the alchemy that transformed life into fiction?

Any transcript of memory, however, carries in it the seed of reinvention, even if chronologies are observed

In my case, it was my dreamy, digressive tone in a piece written when I was on my back with a broken leg. (A writer I greatly admire, Natalia Ginzburg, called her autobiography a novel, in which she hadn’t invented anything — perhaps because, with a storyteller’s instinct, she knew what to leave out, how to maintain suspense and how to follow a sequence of events without overloading her narrative with documentary evidence. But to me it read as autobiography because of its anecdotal flatness.)

In my next story, which also drew on life, I wanted to drop the burden of bare fact. Events which took place in one location were transposed to another. Names were changed and characters conflated. I had ceased to keep a diary, though the actual months in which events took place were the guide to the story’s structure.

A writer friend changed into a painter. An exhibition I’d been to inspired me to invent an artist whose paintings embodied and echoed certain issues that were vibrant, even painfully so, in my mind: my longing for Pakistan, which I hadn’t been able to visit for months because of an accident; the political situation at home in Britain and abroad (Brexit, the lockdown in Kashmir, and the pain of my friends who couldn’t reach home); sickness and death; the legacy of a forgotten artist; and, most significantly perhaps, the interface between life and the urge to recreate it.

The pandemic also led me to write in a similar mode, I couldn’t remember the sequence of events without the diary I had ceased to keep. I had to consult emails, messages, photographs and hospital appointment letters to get the inner chronology right. It won’t make any difference to the reader, I thought, only to myself, so I gave up struggling with clock time to let the events reorder themselves in a way I’d never dare to in a memoir.

I continue to reflect on what separates a memoir from a novel or a story. Even within works marketed as autobiography, I see a divide: the matter-of-fact tone of Tawfiq al Hakim’s The Prison of Life: An Autobiographical Essay, the documentary weight of Taha Hussein’s The Days, the interwoven social histories and personal reminiscences of Ada Jafferey’s Jo Rahi So Bekhabari Rahi [Only Obliviousness Remained] all have a confidence in the reliability of their own narrative, notwithstanding epiphanic interludes, that designates them as autobiography. Meanwhile, Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days and Mirabel Osler’s The Rain Tree inhabit the hinterland between memoir and novel in intriguing ways that challenge generic categories. (I don’t believe my piece on Hyder, or Ginzburg’s life story, deviate from conventional lifewriting, though they use storytelling tools.)

I found an answer in an essay by the Sufi scholar Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch, whose own autobiographical work consists of a series of interviews she gave late in life. There is, she says, “‘an’, the moment when the past ends and the future begins.”

But what separates fact from fiction, I think, is what she refers to as zaman-i-baatin, or interior time: the fire that illuminates a work in any genre, when dates, diaries and history cease to exist, and memory and imagination merge.

The columnist is a London-based novelist and short story writer

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 8th, 2020