Memoir.

“Everything proceeds from losing our place”

I stumbled upon this quote while reading Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and I found myself compelled to scrawl it on top of a blank page in my notebook. I was struggling to put to words what I’d done with my memoir, and though it felt like something I might have already known intuitively, the notion that a story begins with disruption, with the whiplash of a striking moment, hit me with sudden clarity.

The funny thing is, you get to a certain age, and you realize that disruption is not unique at all. That’s why the sad stories are always the best, and why not a single happy book is taught in a literature class. And the irony in the cliché line “the funny thing is” is that the only cure for grief is hilarity. Funerals can inspire the most hideous belly clutching laughter.

My work is located in a hard to reach place between hilarity and disaster in some sticky time warp where memories live in quantum flux. You are driving down the highway one minute, and then a song comes on the radio and transports you to that time you fought with your father before he died. The notes spiral into another memory, and you are at the beach, in the tub covered in bubbles, or dancing on the couch. Each memory blends into one another until you no longer know where you are.

Here you will be torn from your reality, biting down into the skin around your fingernail to find yourself again, to find comfort eating yourself whole.

Reading a good memoir helps you find comfort in disruption, and I hope mine also achieves this.