Natalia Rachel Singer always wanted to write memoir but, she says, "I didn't really understand it was available to me as a nonfamous person. As a living, female, nonfamous person, I didn't think it was something I could do."

Singer spent many years writing short stories that dug deep but somehow always hit a thick slab of bedrock. Nonfiction was the sledgehammer that helped her break through that block. Writing memoir, she says, allowed her to find her own style, which she characterizes as a digressive, episodic process, rather than a straightforward narrative voice.

Singer's essay, "Nonfiction in First-Person, Without Apology," retells the argument she waged against the voice inside her own mind that insisted she could not write in the ways she wanted to write. Writing nonfiction, she says, has brought a freedom to her other writing that she had never known.

"What I found for myself is that when I began to write creative nonfiction, and decided I was going to use my own material in a very direct way - still understanding that metaphor and invention are very much part of that process - I found that the part of me that wanted to see my own life as text was satisfied, and my fiction has become more playful, more surreal."

She acknowledges that some people might have problems with a writer's want-ing to see her "life as text."

"I think on the one hand, it's sort of narcissistic to see yourself as a central character in a story. But fiction writers write about themselves," she counters. "I want everything I go through to have some kind of purpose."

She likes to read the work of writers who are trying to learn from their lives.

"Chaucer said the purpose of literature is to instruct and delight," she says. "I know that I write nonfiction when I am clear that I have something to say. That's the prime motive."