Metafiction in My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry Anonymous College

One of the biggest themes in My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorryis about the power of writing and storytelling. The metafictional aspect of this novel unfolds as Elsa becomes more self-sufficient and less cynical about the world around her. This theme is explored through many passages in the novel which reinforce the primacy of storytelling as a means of rewriting the past, and eventually, this act of rewriting spills over from the fantastic and shared world of the grandmother-granddaughter story-telling and into Elsa’s real life.

The story opens with an exposition regarding Elsa’s superior intelligence compared to her peers, as well as the conflict with the adults in her life, who regard her as overly precocious (Backman). However, the one person who understands her is her grandmother, who tells her fantastic stories. Of these fantasy places, “…Miamas is Granny and Elsa’s favorite kingdom, because there storytelling is considered the noblest profession of all. The currency there is imagination; instead of buying something with coins, you buy it with a good story. Libraries aren’t known as libraries but as ‘banks,’ and every fairy tale is worth a fortune” (Backman 14). This passage does more than establish the...