{900 words — 3-minute read}

The most obvious inspiration for my memoir, A MEMORY MOSAIC, was the metaphor of the mosaic — taking many pieces, big and small, and fitting them together into a bigger picture. (There’s a lot more I can say to elaborate and embellish the mosaic metaphor, but I’ll leave that for another time.)

I also took inspiration from an unusual source, from architecture, in constructing my memoir: the Pompidou Center, the national center of art and culture in Paris.

This famous building in Paris was built not long before I lived there for the year in the mid-80s (briefly mentioned in my memoir). It was a groundbreaking piece of architecture — ultramodern in a city filled with historic buildings built in numerous centuries. And it presented a crazy new idea for how to present a building. Most buildings create an interior, then clothe it with an exterior facade. Not the Pompidou Center.

As the Wikipedia article on the building notes, “It was the first major example of an ‘inside-out’ building with its structural system, mechanical systems, and circulation exposed on the exterior of the building.” I thought about this building often once I came to the conclusion that I would keep my book’s “systems” exposed.

What would you do, as a memoir writer. You have many pieces. Some can be assembled into a linear narrative of events in your life. But other pieces are side stories, backstory and observations. Do you fold all or some of these pieces into that main linear narrative? Which ones might you lay aside, keeping them as writing that has helped inform you, motivate you or mean something personal to you. but can or even should be kept to yourself? Many writers draft a great deal of content that serves some important purpose but does not appear in the end in print.

This is where I realize the mosaic model can be a writing method for developing a memoir, but it may be an interim step toward the final product. At this point, the memoirist has a choice:

• Keep it in that more raw, exposed state;
• Assemble the pieces partially to give more obvious coherence to the structure, but leaving it nonlinear; or
• Assemble the pieces into a single, smooth, start-to-finish, whole picture.

I decided to go with the first choice — not to smooth over — because I wanted my work to serve as an example. To use a different metaphor, instead of covering over the rooms of a house with dry wall and molding, and painting it all pretty, I’ve left it exposed for the reader to see the rougher beauty of the structure forming the house — the beams, the nails, etc. Sometimes it’s hard to see how a house is constructed because all the tough edges and the underlying structure itself have been covered over and hidden away.

Plus, I wanted all that fragmentation to contribute to my thoughts about the nature of time and memory and how they interact with memoir.

Let’s return to the mosaic metaphor. A mosaic by its nature presents all the pieces, large and small. The observer is seeing the “inner workings.” The mosaic artist assembles them into one larger picture. And then, they add the grout that keeps that assembled picture in place. The observer should note that the grout between the pieces may be minimal or substantial, depending on how closely the pieces fit one another.

When minimal, the pieces seem to fit together almost perfectly, with the observer having to fill in few gaps. Indeed, another architectural example from a far more distant time comes to mind — Machu Picchu, where the thousands of huge stones fit together so well and have stayed together for 600 years without any cement or grout to fill in the gaps . . . because there are no gaps.

When substantial — the cover of my memoir being an example — the individual pieces may seem random and at times unrelated to one another. With so much space between the glass pieces, the observer must do some of the work to draw everything they see together into one coherent whole in their mind.

This mosaic concept of storytelling was, in fact, something I employed in my first novel, INCOGNITO, written in the 1980s. The book comprises nearly 90 chapters as well as dozens of “sightings” by the protagonist, seeing what he thinks is his nemesis in a multitude of guises, these sightings being from a sentence to a few paragraphs in length (with hundreds of other sightings inferred). On the back cover of the book, I describe the story as “a kaleidoscopic, quixotic story — perhaps one tale, perhaps 1,001.” In other words, it is up to the reader to decide; “Do I believe these hundreds of pieces, big and small, coalesce into one big, coherent story? or are they 1,001, or some number of stories between 1 and 1,001? And are they related by a narrator who I can rely on? or an unreliable narrator? or a complete madman?”

Curiously, I did not fully recognize the close connection in the organizing principles of my early novel and my memoir, 4 decades later, until I was mostly done writing my memoir. The memoir-writing process brought out the connection for me to see and understand. This sense of connections across the decades of one’s life is an idea I discuss in A MEMORY MOSAIC.