When Erin Vincent was 14 her parents were hit by a speeding tow truck as they crossed the road. Her mother died instantly, her father a month later. This tragedy and its aftermath is one of the subjects of Vincent’s audacious, poetic memoir, Fourteen Ways of Looking. Her project here, though, is not to represent the events, but to grapple with grief and to capture the relentless, circular and repetitious sense-making that trauma demands.
And anyway, Vincent has already told her story straight. Her acclaimed 2007 memoir, Grief Girl, is narrated in the voice of a 14-year-old Vincent, who tells us what is unfolding in her life in the present tense. “It’s weird getting dressed for your mother’s funeral,” she writes.
Fourteen Ways of Looking is an entirely different book. The sturdy paragraphs of the memoirist give way to a succession of fragments, most of them only a sentence or two long. The word fourteen appears in almost every one of these.
In adulthood Vincent found herself preoccupied with the word. “This all started innocently enough. One day I noticed the word fourteen in a novel I was reading. The next day it happened again … Now I can’t look away.”
What does the word mean? What does it mean to have once been 14 years old? What does it mean to have lost both parents suddenly at the age of 14? Can such a person ever be anything but 14? Vincent’s achievement in Fourteen Ways of Looking is to turn this litany of questions into an organising principle.
This is a work that loops and repeats itself as Vincent seeks first to locate her subject and then to exhaust it. In this she takes her cue from Georges Perec, another writer orphaned as a child, whose works adhere to formal constraints. She recalls Perec’s aspiration to write to exhaustion about “a constituted fragment of the world”, and asks, “I wonder if I can do the same?”
The refrains “at fourteen” and “when I was fourteen” introduce slivers of memoir, some of them banal, some deeply shocking. These are interrupted by a series of quotations, aphorisms and other stranded texts that first appear to have no relation to each other bar the repetition of the word: “It is advised that sutures be removed within fourteen days”; “In the list of permission credits for The Penguin Book of Oulipo the number 14 is missing”; “At fourteen I decided I would be hard as a stone and burn bright as the sun.”
The raw stuff of life that constituted Grief Girl is shattered; Vincent and the reader must put the pieces together: “As I try to put this book together I am in a jumble; I can’t keep my thoughts straight. It’s as though someone has thrown an old, faded 5,000-piece puzzle on the floor and told me to solve it without seeing the picture on the box.”
Completing a jigsaw puzzle is a form of creative play and so too is the assembly of this book. Patterns and motifs surface from the chaos of fragments; new images emerge. This is a method that allows Vincent once more to take a “tiger’s leap into the past” and to salvage what she can from the scene of trauma. (That phrase, incidentally, is one she gleaned from the 14th fragment of Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History.) It’s exhilarating and surprising to keep pace as Vincent sorts and turns her pieces, laying out dazzling chains of associations, shifting register and tone.
Vincent is an exponent of a variety of literary minimalism familiar to readers of Jenny Offill, Kate Zambreno, Maggie Nelson and Patricia Lockwood, whose novels and autofictions are also assemblages of found texts and language. And yet through her omnivorous practice of quotation and allusion, Vincent acknowledges the influence of a broader lineage of modernist experimental practice, from Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin to Oulipo and Samuel Beckett, to Andy Warhol and David Wojnarowicz, and WG Sebald. As in the work of all these writers, the white space of the page that surrounds Vincent’s shards of text signifies what is absent, unsayable and forever lost.
“Sometimes I imagine what it would look like if I could cut the number fourteen from my life and create a whole new story,” Vincent writes. I read this sentence several times, turning over its subtleties. The wish to excise a traumatic event from memory is a form of denial; the child yearns for the trauma never to have happened, the adult to forget it.
And yet here Vincent transforms these desires into a generous artistic credo. In Fourteen Ways of Looking she has cut “fourteen” from her life, snipping it from texts and memory, splicing the pieces together. And in doing so, she has created a whole new story, one in which a mature artist confronts trauma. The result is not a narrative of smooth redemption but a wrenching and true reckoning with the lifelong work of grief.
Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent is published by Upswell ($32.99)
