The article argues that fiction and fantasy are an artistic necessity in autobiography.

The article argues that fiction and fantasy are an artistic necessity in autobiography, and analyzes the vicinity of the fantastic and its function in Maxine Hong-Kingston's A Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among shades (1976). In this autobiographical novel, the main character, who remains nameless over the book, undergoes a series of transformative experiences which lead her to explore and approach to terms with her identity as a Chinese-American. These experiences, however, take place in both the 'real' world and in her 'fantasy' world. Mythology and imagination function as a kind of measure of Kingston's identity and her be in agony to ...