Meaning-Making Through Fragmentation in Creative Nonfiction
I’ve written two memoirs and countless personal essays and not one of them proceeds chronologically. My most recent book, Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief, for example, begins where the book ends—in the early days of the pandemic—bookended by a moment of high stakes, physically and emotionally. In between, the essays ping pong back and forth in time, creating a kind of kaleidoscopic portrait rather than a linear one. Events are fractured and reconstructed like a shattered mirror, and in the interstices are research, meditation, flash forwards, or flashbacks, an associative development through ideas geared towards meaning-making, not an arbitrary chronology.
(6 Types of Creative Nonfiction Personal Essays to Try.)
In part, I work this way because memory works this way. Memories aren’t stored as if on a hard drive in the brain, just waiting to be opened. They aren’t preserved in paraffin like the useless organs of long-dead primates. Memories are mutable, science tells us, an act of creation, infused with imagination, and viewed through an ever-changing set of lenses. Each time we call upon a certain memory we are re-inventing it anew.
Furthermore, the more often we call upon a certain memory, the more it changes. We recreate our memory to fit our sense of self, the world as we see it now…and now…and now. We humans are not merely a sum of our memories, the way many of us have come to understand our identity, but instead we are, each of us, artists, forever in the process of recreating our identity anew.
Then there’s the trouble with how we perceive time and what that implies about verisimilitude on the page, how we replicate our perceptions of time instead of a falsely chronological time. “We will never have total control over this extraordinary dimension. Time will warp and confuse and baffle and entertain however much we learn about its capacities” says Claudia Hammond, author of Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception, “But the more we learn, the more we can shape [time] to our will and destiny.”
And the page is one place where we shape time, and not the other way around. Like memory, time is a baffling, elastic, and slippery construct. It plays loose and fast with our memories and it negates the idea of an absolute truth. But that’s okay, because the truths we are after in creative nonfiction are not of the absolute variety, or at least they shouldn’t be. Maybe we call them “emotional truths.” Or, “higher truths.” Maybe we aren’t hunting down capital T-truth like some love-starved teenager. Maybe we’re more interested in essaying: “essay” coming from the Latin word exagium, or the French word essai, meaning “to examine,” “to try,” “an attempt.”
How we reconstruct time on the page should depend on our goals in writing. My primary goal when I write creative nonfiction is to narrow the gap between writer and reader, to create connections between my experiences, ideas, and emotions and those of my readers. This is why we read, after all, to feel less alone. It should follow then that the replication of time on the page should represent the perception of time employed by the remembering self: that messy, slippery, inchoate, rebellious sense of time.
Check out Jessica Hendry Nelson’s Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief here:
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Heidegger believed that more fundamental to our sense of being-in-the-world than chronology, indeed than anything else, is what we care about and how our care is manifested. What we care about dictates a great deal of what we deem novel or problematic, that which rouses us to awareness and “parts the cotton wool,” as Virginia Woolf describes it, and therefore most worthy of our attention on the page.
So why do so many memoirs take such a traditional approach to dealings with time? I was born, I lived, and eventually I will die. The memoirs I love best do not proceed chronologically, but instead leap across expanses of time, forward and back, to build narrative from an emotional logic rather than some misperceived contract with the clock. I am thinking of Lidia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, and Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries. These books show us that time is a tenuous master, impervious to how we remember and, in the ways that matter, how we live.
Lidia Yuknavitch writes, “I thought about starting [Chronology of Water] with my childhood, the beginning of my life. But that’s not how I remember it. I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.”
Our stories are often better served if they are allowed to develop on the page in fragments, more organically to the ways in which we remember them—which is to say in fits and starts, slowly and then all at once, quietly and alone, or loudly and in scene. Scenes might be slivered through with research, or digressions, or poetry even. Instead of chronology, we create associative movements on the page, which generate energy not by “what will happen next,” but the deeper suspense of “what it all means. “My truth doesn’t travel in a straight line,” argues Abigail Thomas, author of many memoirs, including Safekeeping, “it zigzags, detours, doubles back. Most truths I have to learn over and over again.” Thomas understands time spatially. Her memoir is structured instead like a house of many rooms, some large, some small, some like mirrored funhouses reflecting infinitely.
By bringing together various ideas, images, or scenes based on how they are associated, meditation and meaning is sparked by the juxtapositions. These associative movements proceed from emotional or intellectual resonances, rather than some contract with the clock. Like complementary colors, these resonances are tuned to higher or lower decibels depending on what surrounds them. The placement of scenes drastically changes the way a reader understands them.
Simple transitional phrases allow writers to leap across time and space without losing the reader: “A week later,…” or “Once, when I was twelve and we were living in Texas,…” or “Yesterday,…” or “Once, I read a book about time travel…”. Or instead, we might simply let our white space suggest meaning by creating a third space into which the reader infuses their own experiences. Here’s an example from Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief, from an essay about storytelling through the lens of my history with a past lover:
The real boy—a man now living in New York City—is not, has never been, who I wanted him to be. Just a character in my story, and me in his, until we found one another again a few years ago and he finally told me what I’d always wanted to hear, inside that dark bar in our old neighborhood—I love you, I’ve always loved you—tall and tattooed and army-strong, and I knew suddenly it was not me he loved but the story of us: childhood sweethearts reunited on the other side of years and war. Broken halves who together make a whole. You were meant to be, the story insists. You were always in the process of becoming.
From the reflection above, I then leap to an image in this same bar 10 years later, wherein my old lover tells me about his mother’s recent death and cremation (“I scattered her ashes into the ocean,” he says, “only to learn later that they were the ashes of a dog”), which then leads to another fragment that draws parallels between the “death” of a love story and the death of a loved one. What directs the movement here is meaning-making, not chronology. This essay is not “about” the lover, but instead interested in a bigger question about the role of storytelling in the difficult choices we make in love.
“My fragments I shore to reveal my ruin,” writes the trailblazing essayist Lia Purpura in her collection On Looking. Revelations from fragments, from ruins, from the spaces between, reveal the power of that which is laid bare, divested of the shackles of chronology, and let simply to mean. Love and story have this in common, after all.