How to create narrative tension when writing a memoir-in-fragments

Lessons from one of my all-time favorite memoirs, Abigail Thomas's SAFEKEEPING

Today, fragmented or mosaic memoirs (or memoir-in-fragments) feel like they’re everywhere. If you’re unfamiliar with this term, here’s a good definition, from an essay by Sonja Livingston:

Written in short, subtitled chapters, the prose moves in loose chronological order as it lays out experience as a series of vibrant vignettes. This structure is sometimes called a mosaic memoir, with each section serving as a “tile” of different color, tone and form. Some people call this a fragmented or episodic form, but whatever you call the structure, it amounts to conveying a larger story as a sequence of full-color snapshots. 

I’ll wrestle with the question of why that might be happening another time. For now let’s say that the requirement that memoirs include a lot of connective tissue and linear plotline doesn’t feel true to the way many people feel like their lives or memory unfolded.

Given the current popularity of fragmented memoir, I thought I’d resurrect parts of a blogpost I wrote awhile back about

Abigail Thomas

and her masterful book Safekeeping.

Published back in 2000, the book feels ahead of its time in the way it uses short, discrete chapters (some no longer than a paragraph), and shifting tenses, rotating points-of-view (first and third), and a jumbled chronology to depict the evolution of a self through three marriages and several decades.

The question that most fascinated me in my original essay was: why does Safekeeping feel like such a cohesive, propulsive read given all these sudden ruptures and shifts?

I came up with four reasons—ones that I think are useful to keep in mind when writing your own fragmented memoir:

Now 81, Abigail Thomas just published a new memoir, The Next Interesting Thing, earlier this year. Photo: Jennifer Waddell

1. Tight thematic control

As students of the genre are often reminded, the secret to a good memoir is some kind of focus—a subject, theme, or era, for example. Here, the narrator is squarely focused on the subject of grief. In a terrific essay called “Getting Started,” Thomas recounts how the book’s experimental form grew out an intense period of reflection:

 When I began writing Safekeeping, which is, for lack of a better word, a sort of memoir, I had no idea in hell what I was doing, all I knew was I couldn’t stop. What were these little pieces I was feverishly scribbling? They had started coming a few weeks after an old friend died, a man I’d been married to once upon a time, someone I’d known half my life. The pages piled up.

 The power of that grief is what pulls things together, giving the book its emotional stake, its sense of urgency.

2. A strong narrative persona

Married for the first time at 18, remarried at 27—Abigail Thomas’s life was full of wrong turns. She’s got a lot of living under her belt. Yet the narrator here keeps things light and crisp, avoiding the trap of becoming overly self-judgmental. Instead, here the persona is vulnerable, startlingly honest, unsentimental, wry, and above all, entertaining.

In The Situation and the Story, Vivian Gornick describes how great memoirs feature a “truth-telling” narrator. We trust the voices of writers like George Orwell or J. R. Ackerley or Annie Dillard because they seem so honest and self-aware. Thomas’s narrator is one of these.

3. Effective use of reflection

By nature, I fall more on the side of meditative essays than memoir. I don’t think in terms of scenes, at least not initially. One thing that’s helped is to understand that reflection is more effective when it arises directly from action in scenes. As in this example, toward the beginning of Safekeeping:

…She looks at her watch. Two-thirty in the morning. She is tired, but nothing is wasted, she uses it to remember the old days. Exhaustion is her servant, where once it was her master. She looks out her window, uptown, at the water towers, at the squares of light in other windows. Where a man she hadn’t met back then, a man she was about to meet, a man whom she would love and hate and love again, a man with whom she would spend the next thirty years, give or take, has died. Died. It seems impossible. She can almost see his windows from her window. She can almost hear his voice. Anything might happen. She doesn’t want to go to bed.

Apart from some breathtaking lines (“Exhaustion is her servant, where once it was her master”), notice how Thomas weaves reflection in and out of specific moments. It’s nearly seamless.

4. Strong endings

Thomas uses the short section or vignette as the basic building-block of her book. But like chapters or scenes in a more conventional memoir, each of these builds toward some epiphany, some moment of resolution. This propels the reader forward. Here’s one example, titled “Something Overheard,” in its entirety:

It was at a party in what was to become SoHo, lots of drinking, lots of smoke, and somebody said something I didn’t catch, and another man replied, one hand on the back of his own head, the other holding a cigarette, both men wearing togas as I recall, ‘Oh honey, any sense of security is a false sense of security.” Everybody laughed, but I didn’t get it. I just didn’t get it. What was so funny? What did it mean?

Now I get it.

Notice how that long sentence at the beginning pushes forward, not just setting the scene but filling in telling details, growing more specific as it tumbles along. That, along with the repetition in the final sentences, sets us up for the narrator’s epiphany.

Thomas is also a master at conveying the multiplicity of time. Phrases like “…where a man she hadn’t met yet” and “what was to become Soho” create a bumping, vertiginous, cinematic rush. Even as we’re pinned to the here and now, memory reaches across many other moments in time.

Thematic control, a truth-telling persona, the effective use of reflection, strong endings. These elements are the building blocks of good memoir writing—no matter what its form.

PS: Parts of this piece were originally published online at Brevity magazine.

PPS: Want to hear more from Abigail Thomas herself? Check out the podcast interview we did together here.