I have been spending a lot of time in a house I haven’t lived in for decades.
The house is on Fairview Avenue in Greenville. My brother is somewhere nearby, probably doing something I want to be included in. Mom is making something beautiful or telling us not to destroy something she has already made beautiful. Dad is coming home.
I am trying to remember where everybody was.
That is where this project begins.
Fragments of a Life is the name of the larger series I am building from memories, photographs, letters, old writing, and conversations with people who were there. The first volume focuses on childhood. Later books will move through adolescence, college, and adulthood, returning to some of the same people and questions as my understanding of them changes.
The blog will be part of that work. I’ll share pieces of the books here, along with writing that takes the conversation beyond the scene.
Some of it will be funny. Some will be difficult. There will be music, television, family, friendship, Greenville, and an unreasonable amount of time spent trying to understand things I apparently could not just leave alone.
Beginning with childhood
The childhood book starts close to home: the house, the yard, my room, the fort, and the people who made up my first understanding of the world.
There are bike rides and sleepovers. School mornings I did not want to face. Books I stayed awake reading. The lake house, the beach, summer camp, and the considerable importance of whatever was on television.
There is my older brother Gregg, who could make things, fix things, frighten me, and make me want to be wherever he was. There are my parents as I experienced them then and as I am coming to understand them now.
Adoption runs through the story, along with belonging, comparison, secrecy, affection, and the rules I learned without anyone necessarily sitting me down to explain them. There is bullying and the desire to be chosen. There are moments when I was hurt and moments when I hurt somebody else.
There is also a great deal of ordinary pleasure. I want you to know what we enjoyed, what made us laugh, and what we kept doing because we wanted to do it again.
The people in these pages had lives before I understood what those lives involved. I am trying to give them room to be people, even when I am telling you about something painful.
Why fragments?
Much of what I remember arrives in pieces.
I can picture a room and not place the year. I can remember the feeling of a conversation without remembering its words. Sometimes Mom supplies the person or place I was missing. Sometimes a photograph corrects me. Sometimes we remember things differently and that is as far as we get.
The short chapters give me somewhere to hold those pieces without inventing everything between them.
As they accumulate, I hope you begin to recognize the people: their habits, their humor, the ways they could surprise you. A later scene may change how you read an earlier one. That happens to me while writing.
This is not a claim that fragments are automatically more honest than a continuous narrative. It is the form that fits much of the material I have.
There will still be movement through the years. I just do not want to give every afternoon a lesson or make every childhood difficulty point toward an ending nobody could see at the time.
The story then, the questions now
The foundation of the blog will be a pairing: a piece of the story, followed by an adult companion piece.
One might stay close to what I knew as a child. The other might explore what I learned later, what somebody else remembers, or what I now find myself questioning.
There are two kinds of time in this project: when something happened and when I learned about it.
A letter written on the night of my birth belongs to that night. Receiving it decades later belongs to another part of my life. Both are part of the story. The child, however, did not have the letter.
That distinction gives the companion pieces their purpose. They let me return with later knowledge without handing it to the boy before he had it.
A childhood scene about fairness between brothers might lead to an adult piece about how differently we experienced the same family. A scene involving fear or silence might open a conversation about what could be said in our house and what could not. Another post might begin with a correction from Mom.
The adult piece does not have to settle the childhood one. Sometimes it will complicate it.
The world around the memories
There will be other strands alongside those pairings.
Seen / Unseen Greenville will look at the city around the childhood: the neighborhoods, roads, schools, businesses, and gathering places I knew, along with histories I did not understand or even know to ask about.
My experience of Greenville was one experience of it. Looking back means asking what was outside my view—whose work, whose neighborhoods, whose opportunities, whose losses. Some of these pieces will connect directly to the memoir. Others will follow the city’s history on its own terms.
There will also be entertainment posts about the music, television, movies, books, and games that appear in the chapters.
Those things occupied real space in our lives. Waiting for a song on the radio, finding a book I could disappear into, watching something with Gregg, or playing a game with a friend can tell you something about an afternoon that a list of major life events never would.
And there will be writing connected to what I am learning as a marriage and family therapy student: questions about relationships, silence, conflict, repair, and the ways people respond to one another.
I am writing those pieces as someone learning, not as someone who has finished figuring people out. My family does not need to become a case study, and every memory does not need a theory attached to it.
These strands give the blog room for variety. They are not a promise to turn every chapter into five assignments.
Beyond childhood
The larger series will move into changing friendships, music and bands, school, college, relationships, work, and becoming a father. It will also make room for mental health, addiction, illness, grief, and the versions of myself I have already tried to explain in earlier books.
The 2003 notebook will have a fuller place in that work through Another Day in Bullshit City. I want to spend more time with what I actually wrote then, including the places where the page disagrees with the story I now tell about myself.
I have published accounts of parts of my life before. They preserve what I could see when I wrote them. Returning to those years gives me a chance to notice what I hurried past, what I misunderstood, and what I still want to ask.
The project will grow in installments. That gives each period room without requiring me to pretend I have reached a final understanding of the whole life.
Following along
The rhythm I am working toward is a childhood piece and an adult companion each week, with Greenville, entertainment, and other essays joining them as they develop. I’ll share the publication schedule when it is settled.
You will be able to read the books without doing homework on the blog. You can also follow a particular strand here because you care about Greenville, remember the same music, or recognize a question from your own family.
I am still asking questions, finding material, and checking what I thought I knew. I want to be clear about what comes from memory, what comes from a record, and what is an interpretation I am making now.
I do not have every year or every conversation.
I do have enough to begin with a house, a family, and a boy who wants to know where his brother has gone.
We’ll start there.
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