Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person's life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don't quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms.

Which is mightily ironic since one of the most common criticisms of American women novelists (it's a load of crap but it gets bandied about a good bit) is that they don't write the "big" stories about "universal" or "worldly" concepts...Jesus. Um, when we do? We get told to get back in the kitchen and bedroom - go back to writing about love-y wife-y mother-y things.

It may be true too that I would not have encountered the most important books and art and ideas of my life had I not chased down a Ph.D. I've thought about that a lot....MAYBE I would have found the same books on my own, but I can't know for sure.

Every once in a while a messy character who manifests a REAL body emerges, for instance, Lisbeth Salander - and certainly commercial genre fiction is full of examples of real bodied sexual encounters or violence encounters - but for the most part, and particularly if you are a woman or minority author, your characters' bodies have to fit a kind of norm inside a narrow set of narrative pre-ordained and sanctioned scripts.

Laughter can shake you from the delirium of grief

Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It's difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.

Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person's life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don't quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms.