Circle of Wonders - Truth-telling in Storytelling

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Kathryn Heyman chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Circle of Wonders. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: • ‘Circle of Wonders’ is a novel about a group of women who gather in the Blue Mountains to support their friend Ronnie Bloom through the final month of her life. • ‘Circle of Wonders’ began as a memoir shortly after Kathryn’s sister and mother died in the same month during 2020. • Ten weeks later, Kathryn decided to write the book as fictional version of the story. It is then that she found the story’s circular, lunar structure. • Kathryn explains why the story needed multiple voices rather than one: capturing an ‘ensemble’ or ‘choral’ experience of community meant she no longer had the ethical right to tell it as memoir. • Kathryn reflects on the ethics of writing about real people. • Drawing on William Faulkner, Kathryn distinguishes facts from emotional truth, arguing that fiction can sometimes reach a more profoundly truthful place than memoir by freeing the writer from strict fidelity to external events. • The book’s structure mirrors the lunar cycle, with the final breath looping back into the first sentence, reflecting Kathryn’s belief that ‘all time is now’ and every ending is also a beginning. • Kathryn closes our conversation with advice for writers straddling memoir, biography and fiction: write the story as it arrives first, then decide on its category. She recommends British novelist Jill Dawson as a model for biographical fiction.