Brain Food #776: Stories in fragments
Stories do not always have to come in a narrative format
Thoughts of the day
Good morning.
Storytelling has existed since the beginning of mankind. From the Odyssey (perhaps the world’s first crowdsourced story) to hieroglyphics, even to the more modern versions on social media, telling stories is part of human nature.
I recently wrote about the importance of telling and retelling our stories. But what is easy to forget is that stories do not always have to come in a linear, narrative format. Perhaps it is so because life comes in fragments. Our memories can trick us. According to researchers, around four out of every ten people have made up their first memory, and every time we retell a memory, we change it.
Turning our lives into stories is an act of making sense of the non-sensical, and the non-linear.
Maybe that is why so many writers turn to ‘autofiction’, or autobiographical fiction, a blend of real and fictional events with a character that uncannily resembles the writers themselves as the protagonist.
Sheila Heti wrote Alphabetical Diaries, a diary with its sentences rearranged in alphabetical order. Autoportrait by Edouard Levé is the portrait of a man in words, told through sentences without a cohesive narrative. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Argonauts are masterful examples of poetic memoirs.
If narrative memory is an illusion, Joan Didion’s “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” takes on a whole new meaning. Because stories are what we make up to survive, to remain whole. Even if the fragments do not come in a linear manner, it all comes together in the end.
In her fictional self-portraits, Cindy Sherman tells the stories of others through herself. Her works are often simply called Untitled, leaving much of the interpretation to the viewer. In the progression of photographs in Untitled #479, she changes both appearance and persona, while adding to the story. One can only imagine the in-between moments.
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Loved this one!!