A moving collision of memory, storying, and loss or grief.

Broken Fiction is a collection of short auto/fictional pieces that move in between the force of memory and the force of loss. The collision of memory or storying, and loss or grief is where the author finds both solace and anguish and tries to negotiate a recognition or a moment without resorting to easy resolution. In each recognition there is an acceptance of the details of life gone off the rails in some worlds, but a life that is normal in other worlds--and not necessarily tragic but often heartbreaking, sometimes funny and always in an in-between orbit of love or love gone wrong, anger or anger misplaced, joy or joy's many faces, cultural memories that are translated into new-world talk or translated not at all. On occasion language invites a giggle especially when "real" objects assume a hyper-fictional grace--as a way to travel quickly over decades or refer back to old wounds that shape new ones, and yet are attached to simple joys. Not all of these stories are fully true, but the fiction is also cracked or broken by photographic "evidence" of the forceful memory and the narrator's sense of loss at the same time as she plays with the fact of life's natural journey into its natural denouement and death. Can this fact find its difficult resolution and its difficult knowledge in a more neutral interpretation without giving into full-on sorrow or self-pity, or its many opposites, such as the force of forced optimism?

"This is a quirky and powerful book, original, heartbreaking, clever, enigmatic, oh so intelligent, sometimes angry, and more often humorous in a sly way. This is prose that slips into poetry. This is snatches of memory, a glimpse of family history, a dream journal, and a series of love letters. This is what the title says it is, broken fiction. It is autobiographical in some parts, not in others, except in the sense that authors always leave traces of themselves behind."--Jan Rehner, author of The House of Izieu and Almost True

Fiction.

Broken Fiction - pokkari, Englanti, 2023