Stories and Memories, Flashes and Forms

 

When I wrote my second novel, Bellflower, I was thinking about the end of a life, making sense of events and memories. I had seen loved ones lose their sense of time and place. At the end of my grandmother's life, she sometimes thought my mother was her sister; once, she asked about a place she hadn’t been for decades. I was contemplating that phrase—"her life flashed before her eyes"—and imagining the flashes of memory that might be playing on the screen of my grandmother’s mind during those last weeks of her life.

Bellflower is a “novel-in-moments,” the story of three families told in interconnecting flashes from their lives. The method is not unlike a novel-in-stories, books like Olive Kitteridge and The Things They Carried, and a novel that was one of the fundamentals for me as a youngish undergraduate: Winesburg, Ohio. 

If life is but a series of moments we’ll remember in flashes near our end, why shouldn’t memoir take a variety of inconsistent forms? Reader, it does! And for the past several years, I’ve been seeking out both novels and memoirs that experiment with methods of storytelling. Often, the line between genres is blurry, or filtered through a questionable lens. As memory itself is. There are novels that seem to be hardly veiled autobiography, memoirs so considered in their creative approach that they seem only partially true. Writers attempting to make some sense of their own life (or to distill and express some of what they’ve experienced into a fictional story) stretch, process, and create, and the myriad of forms for memoirs (and novels) continues to expand like the colorful feathers of a peacock’s tail.

A few such books made my list of Favorite Reads, 2020—things like Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl, a memoir that imbues the natural world into Renkl’s mediations on life, love, and grief, and Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill, a novel that reads like a series of journal entries (basically, a memoir). But you can read about those at the link.

Here are some recent reads.

Constellations, by Sinead Gleason, is a study of the female body in general and specifically, it’s about Gleason’s body—illnesses, losses, and other physical changes and experiences. By telling the story of her corporeal self, she explores the intangibles of her "self."  The topics in this collection of essays  vary as much as the methods Gleason employs writing them. She writes about things like pregnancy and breastfeeding, leukemia and blood transfusions, hair and loss. Despite a lifetime of bodily trials, an appreciation for the body—with all of its imperfections—emerges.

Wife / Daughter / Self: A Memoir in Essays, by Beth Kephart, is bold where form is concerned, a read that feels very accurately like being dropped directly into someone’s consciousness. In sections that consider her relation to her husband and her widowed father, Kephart contemplates how these relationships have contributed to her life and development. Often, the result is unflinching. Uncomfortable questions are posed; self-doubt and questions remain as much as answers are found. There is little continuity in form from one section to the next and often, following the thread of Kephart’s thoughts requires a fair amount of effort. There are whole sections told in dialogue, lyrical passages brimming with visceral details, short, pointed revelations that sometimes feel apropos of nothing. As I said, it reads, perhaps, similar to how the mind functions: circuitry firing away, colors and light, flashes of a life.

 

The Suicide Index, by Joan Wickersham, is a memoir centered around the suicide committed by the author’s father. She recounts memories and attempts to make some sense of this incomprehensible loss. This searing look at a particular brand of grief is touching, contemplative, and strikes universal chords about love and loss.

 

Would you like more reading suggestions in this vein? Check out this recent Lithub post, "7 Autobiographies and Memoirs That Remind Us of the Messiness of Memory."

And watch this space for information about my summer reading project for 2021. Regular readers may recall that each summer, I choose a theme and build a reading list around it. Last summer, I read books tied together by association with France, and in 2019, I learned an awful lot about trees. Here's a hint about the focus of my reading for this summer, in the form of a quote from the first book I'll read:

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are suppose, by some, to dream."

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More Considerations: Form in Fiction

I recently read a book about narrative form. Wait, don’t stop reading! The book is Meander, Spiral, Explode, by Jane Alison, an author and writing teacher. Her premise is fairly simple: the traditional story arc is a limited way to imagine the creation of fiction. Why not use other patterns, those found in nature and all around? Why not meander through the text, exploring side alleys. Or maintain a bit more focus, with a plot that spins in a spiral around a central point. Or construct a narrative in which “a powerful center holds the fictional world…tightly in its gravitational force." In other words, an explosion. Alison takes us through a variety of patterns, with examples from literary history and with an eagerness for discovery and creation. For a good summary of the book’s argument, read this.

 

I marked many passages while reading Alison’s explorations, but one stood above all others:

 

“The point now: Sebald’s Emigrants was the first book to show me a way beyond the casual arc to create powerful forward motion in narrative: motion less inside the story than inside your mind as you construct sense. This motion involved pattern, arising (I later learned) ‘from the spatial interweavings of images and phrases independent of any time-sequence of narrative action’ (Joseph Frank, ‘The Idea of Spatial Form’).”

 

Aside from the text mentions, what she’s talking about is that sense of figuring things out, that exercise of filling in white space with what your conscious (and subconscious) is absorbing as you read a story. Plot and character clues, yes, but also the building of elements such as repeated imagery, or the deepening of meaning when a phrase is repeated or used at pivotal moments. Stuff like that. Think about when you’re reading a mystery and something suddenly becomes apparent. A lightbulb moment. That feeling, only it’s about the entirety of the thing you’re reading.

 

And it occurs to me that this has been a preoccupation of mine from the first moment I began to write. My autobiographical first novel, about the experience of being adopted and finding my biological family, was written from the POV of three different women, each with their own story stemming from that event—the adoption—and how it shaped their lives. Alison might call that a radial, or explosion. The second novel I wrote was called ”Good Sunday” and although I did imagine a structure for it, roughly related to the Catholic Church’s Stations of the Cross (don’t ask—I was young!), this novel takes place over the course of the day and really is probably a meander, as it unifies the story and characters through a series of seemingly random events and imagery. In my third finished (and first published) novel, The Qualities of Wood, my initial impulse was to write a book that seemed like a mystery—with a dead body and cast of possible suspects—but surprise!—the real mystery would be the slow revelation of character, which would sneak up almost imperceptibly as the main character thinks she’s actually solving something else. (A note: as it turns out, readers of mystery, by and large, are not thrilled with a book that pretends to be a mystery but actually isn’t).

 

And I’ve yammered on and on this year about my most recent book, Bellflower, which is certainly my most obvious experimentation with form. I won’t say more since I’ve already said plenty, but you can read about its form here.

 

I think anything I write moving forward will start with a consideration of form. If you had asked me where those past projects began, I might have said things like setting, or character, or—in the case of yet another unpublished, untitled novel I wrote after TQOW—an idea. Form is something I deal with as a writing teacher, when I point out the traditional arc structure, show examples of novels that effectively employ it, and then, those that effectively don’t. All of teaching (and learning) about writing seems to follow another type of pattern: Here is what has been written already. Here are some “rules.” Here are things that follow the rules and are wonderful. Here are things that don’t, things that were a deviation and a surprise and yet, are equally or even more wonderful. What’s better than stumbling upon a new, unpredicted path? Writers have always pushed against constraints; form experimentation is nothing new. But flexing your creative muscles with new types of training is always a good idea and form is a good place to start.

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