By Amy Mackin
Authenticity has been at the forefront of my mind over the last year, and I’m clearly not alone. According to Merriam-Webster, “authentic” was one of the most looked-up terms in 2023, leading the company to designate it as their “ word of the year .”
Writing memoir demands constant interrogation of authenticity, and it’s within this frame that I continued to re-read and tweak my manuscript even as I pitched this “final” draft to literary agents and editors. The book, which explores my unorthodox approach to ensuring the best education for my neurodivergent child, who is named Henry in the narrative, is 10 years in the making and has gone through several iterations and genres—a traditional memoir, an essay collection, and its current form of a hybrid memoir that incorporates academic research and historical analysis—all in search of its most authentic form. The experiences documented in the book felt isolating and unique at the time, that’s my personal story, but adding an investigative approach to the narrative allowed me to reveal a larger history of ineffective educational and social systems that have failed millions of neurodivergent children across America. My story is now an authentic representation of and response to those failures as much as it is a personal memoir.
Still, authenticity is not easily defined, as evidenced by the sheer volume of dictionary searches on the word last year, and the differing motivations of various stakeholders involved in bringing a work of memoir to fruition can further complicate this process. The commercial literary market is driven by one question—how will this memoir sell? Literary critics may ask another—does the work offer a new perspective on the human condition and effectively express its ideas through skillful use of structure, themes, and language? However, the memoir writer asks a different question—is this art authentic to my individual experience and does it accurately reflect the larger circumstances that shaped it?
I don’t want to condemn others’ behavior, but it seems unavoidable if I’m to authentically describe how their conduct shaped my parenting and decision-making. Throughout many early versions of my manuscript, I routinely gave the family and friends who populate my memoir an “out” by utilizing their back stories as possible explanations for their actions or inactions—referencing my parents’ working-class upbringings as reasons for not encouraging my education, for example, or excusing my mother-in-law’s dismissive comments on my parenting style as her reaction to feeling that her own position as matriarch was somehow being threatened. I wanted the reader to assume that the people in my story had the best of intentions in mind even when their behavior seemed contrary to the mission of ensuring the best possible outcome for my son. This exculpatory approach may be appropriate in the process of building more tolerant and equitable relationships off the page, but I’m not sure it generates the most authentic creative writing on it, so I’ve removed some of the excuses I gave the other people in my memoir. In truth, I don’t believe they always had the best of intentions at heart. Nor was I always operating within this level of beneficence myself.
I feel certain some readers will view my depictions of certain family members, friends, educators, and medical professionals as hurtful or unnecessary, even in the book’s current form that incorporates research supporting the universality of my experiences. But authenticity isn’t achieved by portraying people, including those who we deeply care about, in a consistently positive light. As nonfiction writers, all we can do is show compassion to ourselves and others as we confront a vivid reflection that necessarily includes all our inherent ugliness and character flaws. I’ve come to believe that true authenticity comes from being brave enough to look in that mirror. And only then can we make something beautiful, and better, out of what we see.
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Amy Mackin writes at the intersection of media, science, cultural history, and social equity. Her criticism and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, The Writer’s Chronicle, Witness, Chalkboard, and elsewhere. Her memoir, Henry’s Classroom , is forthcoming in early 2025 from Apprentice House Press. When she’s not engaged in her own creative writing, Amy manages communications and outreach for an academic research center and mentors college students in writing across the curriculum. You can find her on Twitt e r/X and at her website .
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