Where we're kept: Some consequences of writing sudden memoir

In this paper I have cut up and rearranged stories from my first attempt at writing and theorising sudden memoir. Here I discuss the ways that writing sudden memoir blurred the lines between how things were and how they became once they were forced into sentences. To do this I thread excerpts from those sudden memoirs in amongst the ideas of theorists I was reading at the time and my current thinking around nonfiction practice. The construction of this paper involved salvaging small fragments from the stories I wrote last year. In this work I trace the disintegration of my relationship with the person whose life was most tangled up in my writing. Here I have made new the writing that gave away too much. In the place of those short stories, I have sewn together a broken narrative which reflects the fragmentation I have experience in my writing practice. The argument is accumulative, it is just a shift, a twist in perception over time.