Swimming to the Moon

: truth, fiction, memory, and a memoir. A childhood and its exegesis

Abstract

This thesis examines both the loss and partial reclamation of agency, identity, and coherence. Matching a stand-alone memoir of a fractured childhood to a short exegesis, which interrogates the concept of memory, the price sexual abuse, parental absence, and dissociation impose on recall, the debts memoirists owe both living and dead, the writing of the memoir, and the complex relationship between the character writing, the character being written about, and the other behind the curtain, writing both.

Opening, aged six, on a sunlit beach in Malta, and closing thirteen years later on moonlit rocks in Oslo fjord, its scenes bracket a childhood (seen from then and now, in respectively third person and first), which, being sixty years distant, is as much history of political, philosophical, and cultural change, as current.

In the naming of the act, and the acceptance of its price - but also in acknowledging the hinterland of maladaptive daydreaming, and so a lifelong career as a novelist that this particular fracturing brings - the creative strives through narrative structure to mirror the splintering found in complex trauma, while the exegesis considers whether memory, splintered or not, can in any real sense be accurate, and whether the self (on, or off the page), can in any sense be said to be real.

Date of Award	2 Jul 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Dina Nayeri (Supervisor)