Memory Book

BACKGROUND Helen Garner’s journals and the surrealist micro-fiction of Diane Williams shape the tone and structure of “Memory Book” as short memoir. A study of dementia in fragments, its subject matter responds to the psychoanalytic life writing of Nicola Redhouse and clinical neurological sources by Mark Solms and Bessel Van Der Kolk. “Memory Book” represents the uncomfortable territory of depleted cognitive function in a family and the way it appears in language, symbology and gender. CONTRIBUTION This is a memoir in flash narratives, a series of micro vignettes influenced by Garner’s use of the fragmentary journal entry to build a linear but broken memoir. I have drawn on my own published record in the form of prose poetry and creative nonfiction to inform this mode. Garner’s unique life writing tone – wry, dry and yet poignant – was what I sought to emulate as a technique to address highly emotive experience with a sense of clinical curiosity. “Memory Book” develops some of the questions about intergenerational forgetting raised in my book, “Monument”, which is forthcoming in October 2023. SIGNIFICANCE “Memory Book” is published in HEAT, a landmark journal of new literary work and an imprint of Australia’s premier literary publisher, Giramondo. Since publication the piece has been picked up for republication by Harper’s, one of the most prestigious literary magazines in the USA.