Fragmented Narratives Are Broken, Independent, and Honest

Before I was a writer, before I stared at an unfonted screen, before I grew to like/then hate/then like again the blue bubbles of track changes, before I became an expert in online faffing when I had two hours to write before collecting my children, before I talked about writing but didn’t write and felt the words slipping away from me… Before all that, I interviewed an acclaimed writer who declared: “Writing a full-length book is like pushing a fucking boulder up a hill.”

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I thought of these words whenever I managed to grab an hour to write essays that felt like small, standalone rocks, not the boulder of a book. 

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When I had three or four of these tiny boulders, I was shortlisted for a work-in-progress prize and signed by an agent. He didn’t try to tell me what to write, or what shape the book should be (“shape” is a word obsessively used about essay collections, I’ve discovered) and left me alone to chisel my way in. I didn’t think about the shape of the book, but I was interested in the shape of the individual pieces. Some stories couldn’t be told in an amorphous chunk of text. It just didn’t work for what I wanted to say.

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Sometimes the world steers you towards the broken apart, the work that refuses to be glued together, that basks in its un-ness. Often its via other writers—the quasi-religious ecstasy of Maggie Nelson’s brilliant Bluets. If one talks of a color (“Suppose I were to tell you I fell in love with a color?” she begins), there is no singular version of a color. Just as Bluets is, and isn’t, a book about the color blue. To talk about the multiplicity of her focus, her myriad subjects—love, death, sex—Nelson requires another form. Perhaps there’s a feint line in each of her fragments, invisible under the text, of a different shade of blue for each of the 240 fragments.

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I wrote on trains, on my phone in hospital waiting rooms, in the time before my children woke, before the world burrowed into my brain for the day and creativity was postponed for another 24 hours. This book was born out of fragments of time, so its methodology mimics the way it was written: fitfully, out-of-synch, in snatched scraps. The shape (there’s that word again) made sense to me only when I’d finished it.

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Outside of writing, a fragment suggests that it’s part of something else. A remnant on the end of a roll of fabric, a shard, a thing that only exists as a component of another object. But on the page, the fragment is standalone. It is its own atomic being. A just-born republic, gleefully declaring its independence.

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With micro essays, you can—as short story writers are always told—go in fast. Form is content, content is form.

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Composer Stephen Shannon has written music for some of these essays, and I think about notes as fragments, and how sentences should have their own musicality.

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I don’t subscribe to the idea that a piece of writing that is in fragments is like tiles without grout. As if the white space is a problem. If anything, I’m like “fuck the grout! More grout gaps! Less tiles!”

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The fragment is often guilty of wallowing in its own existentialism. “Look at me! All out here all on my own!”, it shouts. We do not judge it, but encourage said fragment to stop dancing on the table at 2 a.m.

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A collection of essays is by its nature, already in fragments. Each piece is discrete and self-contained. There is overlap, sometimes so unconsciously that you don’t see it until you’ve finished writing it, as you flip through the flimsy-spined galley. You can pick up an essay collection, read one, and then ditch the whole thing. It can be read in any order, anti-chronologically, and still fit together. The book’s title—Constellations—happened for a couple of reasons. I began thinking of objects that are whole but comprised of several distinct things. Each essay is a unit. They are autonomous entities in their own right, but are part of a larger framework. A constellation seemed like an obvious choice—especially because I loved astronomy as a kid, and spent a lot of timing seeking out Orion, Cassiopeia, The Big Dipper.

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Chronology doesn’t interest me. I don’t like its linear map. I avoid its signposts.                                                

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It made no sense to me to write a memoir. Memoirs feel completist. My book is not just about me: there’s art, blood, politics, ghosts, class, history… A memoir feels like a finish line, and my life is still a kinetic thing. It made even less sense to try and write about a life, in one whole cohesive whoosh. What is a life but a series of fragments?

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It’s not just non-fiction. Essays don’t get to own the fragment. The End We Start From by Megan Hunger is an atmospheric novel in fragments about a catastrophic flood (it feels very timely at the moment) that totals just 17,000 words. Hunter is also a poet, which may partly explain the effect of this impressive act of dilution.

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Because I am a woman, I seem to spend more time answering questions about the content of the book than I do about craft. I would like to talk about fragments as much as I’d like to talk about mortality.

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I leave you with a final fragment, a meta-fragment if you like, uttered by the narrator in Donald Barthelme’s short story “See the Moon”: “Fragments are the only forms I trust.” It’s hard not to argue with that. Their self-containedness makes them arrows of truth, unreliant on other paragraphs to illuminate a bigger story. Not boulders, but a collection of meteorites…

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Sinéad Gleeson’s essay collection Constellations is available now.