In a talk she gave in the 1980s entitled “The Site of Memory”, Toni Morrison said her goals as a novelist sprang from the great Black literary tradition of slave narratives, of autobiography; in that way, she said, her work had similarities to that of nonfiction writers. Both require an excavation of buried memories, what Morrison called literary archeology. “On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind, and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply.” To do so, she said, the writer must commit an “act of imagination” bound up with memory.

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As I began the journey of writing about my own life and that of my loved ones, I wanted to write in the great tradition of my African American literary inheritance; but having spent many years as a journalist, I found using my imagination counterintuitive. It felt like making things up. Still, I forged ahead, excavating memories—i.e., my “remains”, and capturing them best I could on the page.

As I began the journey of writing about my own life and that of my loved ones, I wanted to write in the great tradition of my African American literary inheritance.

As I wrote first one and now a second memoir, I came to know a simple, liberating fact: Every time I put a lived experience into written words, I did indeed use my imagination. I realized there’s simply no way to know for sure what someone was thinking or feeling at a given time, unless I could talk to that person. And because I was writing about loved ones no longer alive, that was not an option. Even for conjuring my own past self, memory isn’t always reliable. How then might I access my own and my loved ones’ interiority, while staying true to the truth?

I understood that to excavate, I needed tools. I used the most important tool for memoirists—my own memory—but I also relied on others’ voices as well as research, and highly curated timelines.  I’m a big fan of timelines, by the way. They provide a cultural marker for a given scenario or moment in our own or another person’s life.

For my first memoir, The World According To Fannie Davis—about my mother’s life as a bookie in an underground lottery business known as the Numbers—I created eight different timelines for the book; and for my latest memoir, Love, Rita—about how my older sister Rita modeled ways to live boldly before her own life was cut short by lupus—I created four different timelines: of key moments in her life, in my own life, in our hometown of Detroit during the years of Rita’s life, and of the big moments in American culture during those same years.

Employing timelines, interviews, and research to capture the context of a given moment, while also drawing from memory, I could recreate what actually happened. I then relied upon select craft techniques I’ve honed from writing two novels—sensory detail, tension, setting and characterization—to do the world-building necessary for conveying it all convincingly.

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While I was researching The World According To Fannie Davis, my uncle told me that in the early days of building her risky Numbers business, my mother used to sit nervously in a movie theater to wait out the announcement of each day’s winning 3-digit numbers. That anecdote felt like a real archeological find, as it spoke to something my mother had never told anyone, certainly not me: how she managed to deal with the anxiety that comes with such a high-stakes profession. Based on that golden nugget my uncle shared, coupled with the timelines I created, research I’d done on what movies were out at the time, what I knew about myself as an infant, and the edict that my mother lived by, I crafted this scene:

To alleviate stress, Mama created a daily ritual. With her older children at school, she’d carry me in her arms to the movies at the Mercury Theater on Schaefer Highway. “She’d just set up there in the dark, and wait it out,” says Uncle John. The moving pictures calmed Mama, and each week that went by without a big payout allowed her to build her reserve.

As she sat in that darkened theater watching Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass and Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Diahann Carroll in Paris Blues with me cuddled in her arms, a quiet baby, she held fast to her belief that God helps those who help themselves.

I’ve learned as a memoirist to construct worlds that careful excavation implies.

This is how I was able to provide a glimpse into my mother’s interior life. I did a similar thing in Love, Rita. In capturing a seismic moment in my sister’s life, and in our family’s—when she was the first in our family to attend college, at age 16—I wanted to know what that felt like for her; but I hadn’t asked her back then, when I was only 12, and I couldn’t ask her now. What I did remember was how I felt. Relying again on my timelines and research coupled with memory, I placed Rita’s life within context to create this passage:

Rita left for Fisk at a brand-new, post-civil-rights moment when pride in our culture was gaining traction. That year Shirley Chisholm convincingly campaigned for President, and Andrew Young and Barbara Jordan became our first Black congressional members from the south since Reconstruction. Muhammed Ali, soon to regain his heavyweight title, graced the September 1972 cover of Ebony magazine with his pretty wife and baby son. Also, songs of empowerment dominated the airwaves that summer, including one of Rita’s favorites, the Staple Singers’ gospel infused hit “I’ll Take You There.” Despite what was happening in the country—including Watergate and Vietnam—we were an optimistic Black family that late August day. Rita was headed off to college!

When I think about it now, Mavis Staples could’ve been singing directly to Rita, her deep lusty voice tumbling out from radios and 8-track players and turntables, with its promising invitation to freedom: “I know a place,” she shared in confidence. “Ain’t nobody cryin’, ain’t nobody worried, ain’t no smilin’ faces, lyin’ to the races…I’ll take you there…Oh, let me take you there!” Rita was on her way to a special new freedom, and I felt sheer excitement over getting to accompany her, to witness this big adventure taking place in my sister’s life.

Thanks to the great Toni Morrison giving me permission, I’ve learned as a memoirist to construct worlds that careful excavation implies. And I needn’t worry about making things up. I can commit an act of imagination. I can invent the truth.

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Love, Rita: An American Story of Sisterhood, Joy, Loss, and Legacy by Bridgett M. Davis is available from Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.