How to Use Fragments to Tell Your Story

There are so many different ways to write memoir. In this CNF Craft Classic, we see how nine writers approach form in untraditional ways—and how this enables them to get to the core of their truths.

Illustration by Anna Hall/Creative Nonfiction archive

We recently read this Craft Classic from Creative Nonfiction by Beth Kephart for the first time, and it was just what we needed at this moment. Hope many of you feel the same!

---

The past is present, and the present isn’t yet. We are what we remember plus the current circumstance. Time hurtles forward, but look at us contradicting ourselves as we zig and we zag all over the place.

Those of us who wish to write memoir—to engage with the facts and confessingly subvert them, to measure the actual scene against the aspiration—have a challenge. We forget too much, and we’re overwhelmed by what we remember. We work so very hard to hold our storytelling frames, but paradoxically our experiences can seem less true when we present them as one breathless continuum.

But what if we allow our writing to reflect the fragmented nature of life itself? What if we rely on white space and seams, celebrate explicit contradictions, make more room for the tangent and the metaphor and the sideways glance? What if we decide that the whole is not just bigger than the parts, but also that it may be more finally true for having been assembled in pieces?

Lately, I’ve been reading some exquisite books that show how powerful this approach can be.

When Sonja Livingston began to write about her life with an itinerant mother and six siblings in the raw corners of western New York, she wrote, she says, in snatches. “I wrote of living in apartments and tents and motel rooms. Of places where corn and cabbage grew in great swaths. Of the Iroquois on their reservation outside of Buffalo.”

But when Livingston tried to connect these fragments into a memoir, she told Bookslut interviewer Elizabeth Hildreth in March 2010, she ran into a problem:

I tried to connect them in [a] way that was more typical in terms of a traditional narrative. At one point, I think I had twelve long chapters. But it felt all wrong. . . . So I returned to the manuscript, and began structuring it the way the memories had come to me, in distinctive snapshots, and ended up with 122 little chapters.

The book, Ghostbread, became a kind of memoir-in-essays—a poeticized true story in which all the unnecessary things are absent from the pages. There are, indeed, 122 small chapters, plus an epilogue—some chapters no more than a paragraph long, most stretching over two to three pages. There are no forced transitions between these chapters, but there is the continuity of chronology, with the book beginning with the author’s lineage and birth and ending (just ahead of the epilogue) with her graduation from high school. Livingston never pretends, in Ghostbread, that memory unfurls like some single silk ribbon. She upholds the integrity of each “distinctive snapshot.” Singularly, these elements seduce us. Together, they relate a life.

In The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, Megan Stielstra also relies on distinct, self-contained pieces to present a sustaining view of the life she has lived. Like Livingston, Stielstra works chronologically, presenting her life in four primary sections, each pertaining to a decade lived—ten, twenty, thirty, forty. Unlike Livingston, however, Stielstra chooses to explore and present her life through longer essays (four per section) that consistently spring from her stated determination to “look at the fear.” Stielstra’s fear of being stuck. Her fear of dogs. Her fear of losing her father. Her fear of depression. Her fear of the possible outcome for a child sick with cancer. If chronology dictates the placement of the pieces, fear provides the thematic adhesive.