ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
13.1

Janelle Lynch

​
Fragmentation as Necessary Literary Form:
Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter
    To read a fragment is to read the contours of incompleteness (Chang 352).


​Introduction

Prosaic scrapbook, shadow bibliography, postmortem theatre, Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter resists definition. Part memoir, part essay, part archival meditation, it combines fragments of text with photographs and white space and accrues to create a nonlinear literary portrait of Zambreno’s life in relation to herself, her mother, and artists and writers exploring similar themes of trauma, grief, and loss, including Louise Bourgeois. Written intermittently over thirteen years, from 2003-2016, the book mirrors the uneven rhythms of a maternal relationship that it seeks to explore.

​While generally considered a work on grief,  Book of Mutter can also be analyzed as a trauma narrative. The literary device of fragmentation is its necessary form because it formally mirrors trauma’s neurobiological impact—disjointed memory, nonlinear temporality, and fractured sense of self—while also accommodating the paradoxes of the author’s emotional life, particularly the simultaneous attachment to and rupture from her mother. At the same time, its fractured form gestures toward healing by enabling a slow, recursive, reconstruction of the self through the writing and reflection process.


Fragmentation as a Literary Device

Zambreno often employs fragmentation as a literary device  across her oeuvre, including in Drifts, a novel; Heroines, a blend of memoir and literary criticism; and Appendix Project, a collection of talks and essays conceived as an afterward to Book of Mutter. In Book of Mutter, it serves as a psychological, ethical, formal, and aesthetic strategy to reflect trauma, grief, ambivalence, memory, temporality, and to enable intertextuality. Fragments—dialogue, scene, summary, quotes, reflections, archival research, and photographs—interact to produce cumulative meaning. Fragmentation invites the reader to pause to consider each part in relation to the others, to assemble a narrative, and to witness the author’s attempt to do the same through the accumulation of aperçus (Adorno et al. 164). The white space between the fragments functions as a unifying connective tissue akin to the body’s fascia that surrounds and supports each part and the whole. Sometimes, the emotional potency of the fragments requires an entire page, “And what happens afterwards? What happens to the ones she left behind” (Zambreno 169)? Here, the visual absence surrounding the words amplifies the emotional resonance of emptiness. In “Compositional Fragmentation,” Jenny Boully asserts that fragmentation’s incompleteness signals that something is missing, which means a reader must bring wonder into the interpretive process, drawing invisible connections to form a multifaceted symbiotic arrangement (Boully). The fragmented work must let the totality light up” (Adorno et al 164) while acknowledging its incompleteness. That is, its fragments must make a contribution on their own and to the whole constellation. When used deftly as in Book of Mutter, the fragmented form echos its content and vice versa.


Literary History of the Fragment

Zambreno follows a lineage of authors who use the fragmented form to write implicitly or explicitly on trauma. The fragment’s origins as a means to convey the partial, ephemeral, or fraught nature of experience are found in classical antiquity, such as in the remnants of Sappho’s lyric poetry that emphasized same-sex love, marriage, exile, and desire, “someone will remember us / I say / even in another time” (Carson 147). Renaissance writers, including Montaigne, wrote in aphoristic or digressive fragments to explore moral, philosophical, and self-reflective concerns, including traumatic injury, prioritizing meditation over narrative closure (Jetté). The early German Romantic writer Friedrich Schlegel wrote on his melancholy and depression and described a fragment as like a “miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete like a porcupine” (Tanehisa 64).

​Modernist writers, including T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, expanded the fragment into a means of conveying the fractured consciousness of postwar life, juxtaposing historical, literary, and personal remnants to evoke cultural and psychological trauma (Chang 352-253). Contemporary writers such as Zambreno, Boully, Anne Carson, and Maggie Nelson build on this legacy by using the form to employ intertextuality; to subvert expectations of a single, unified story when one is impossible; to articulate feelings of alienation and emotional turmoil; and to reflect the tumult of modern life and personal trauma. In Book of Mutter, fragmentation is, therefore, both a formal inheritance and a device uniquely suited to reflect traumatic content and its neuropsychological aftermath.


Trauma and Neurobiological Disruption

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel von der Kolk explains that because of how trauma effects the brain, specifically the left hemisphere, which recalls facts and the vocabulary of events: “It is enormously difficult to organize one’s traumatic experiences into a coherent account—a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Rather, with that region compromised or deactivated, the right hemisphere, which stores sense memories and emotions they evoke, prevails, thus leaving diminished one’s capacity to organize experience into logical sequences and to translate feelings and perceptions into words” (von der Kolk 45). Zambreno illustrates this in nonlinear fragments that appear as compressed sensory impressions such as, “It is the waiting I remember most, my stomach nervous and cramped” (Zambreno 95); All I’m drawing on, a few sense-memories: / large red hands / my stuck uselessness / stairs” (Zambreno 17); and “Maybe the body remembers what the mind wants to forget” (Zambreno 164). Zambreno’s childhood memories, her mother’s instability, and the history of familial mental illness are evidence of her own and of intergenerational trauma. For example, she references the suicide notes she wrote as a child: This is how I would communicate to her, my mother with her fortress of fierce moods and remove. How old was I? I could not have been more than ten years old.” Separated by white space, as if to offer herself and the reader time to process, to move back and forth in a swing of horror, disbelief, empathy, and tenderness, Zambreno writes, “We never talked about those notes, although I know she read them” (Zambreno 102).

​Then, boldly, on unnumbered pages, as if acknowledging her inability or refusal to create conventional chronology, Zambreno marks the passage of time with the word “TIME” on one page, and “PASSES” on the opposite page. Other threads of thought that begin, stop, and then reappear later include accounts about Zambreno’s mother’s secretive personal history, her first marriage and first-born child—Zambreno’s estranged half-sister who briefly lived with the author and her family: “She came to live with us for a short time when I was eight or nine….So she left and I never saw her again. That’s a lie” (Zambreno 69). The book’s structure mirrors the brain’s traumatized pattern of recall, where memories return cyclically, unpredictably, and in pieces rather than sequences. Across the fragments, however, and by the book’s end, a narrative arc has accumulated and is discerned.


Paradoxical Attachment

In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman observes that a “secure sense of connection with caring people is the foundation of personality development. When this connection is shattered, the traumatized person loses her basic sense of self” (Herman 76). In Book of Mutter, Zambreno recalls family violence framed as play or affection, highlighting the instability that formed her early self-identity: “The women in our family threatening to maim or kill each other, often as a joke or expression of affection. I have inherited their brutal language. My mother: I’m going to take you out back and shoot you Katie. My grandmother: Come over here so I can slap you” (Zambreno 96). During such events, the brain’s primary role shifts to survival, which means that the areas responsible for building coherent, time-coded, and contextualized memory, primarily the hippocampus, posterior medial network, and prefrontal cortex, are temporarily suppressed by stress hormones. Meanwhile, the amygdala, the center for emotional processing and fear, is hyperaroused, creating powerful, visceral, and non-verbal impressions.

Paradoxically, there is also evidence that Zambreno deeply loved her mother: “I cannot interrupt her in her silent statuary. My still-wife. Yet my mother is the love-object, the object of my curiosity and desire” (Zambreno 56); “my mother my sworn enemy my first love…She is whom I write towards. She is whom I must expel from my body. Must resurrect” (Zambreno 89). Paradox is observed in every craft component in Book of Mutter, from the intertextual weavings of quotes from Duras’ The Lover, “the beast, my mother, my love” to Bourgeois’ quotes and lists, “If I talk to you, I may break everything. But, that’s not my fault; I can be very, very sorry afterwards;” and “I do, I undo, I Redo.”

Book of Mutter is modeled after Bourgeois’ Cells, a series of sculptures, including CELL (CHOISY), 1990-93, the book’s cover image. Cells are psychological environments created in spaces enclosed by metal, wire or mess that are filled with personal possessions such as photographs, and found objects that explore themes of entrapment, anguish and fear. Each artifact in the sculpture holds essential significance and is crucial to the whole piece. The paradox of a simultaneous desire for and fear of connection is found in their enclosed, theatrical spaces that are both repellent and attractive. Recent neuroscience offers insight into the paradox.

In “Fear in Love: Attachment, Abuse, and the Developing Brain” neuroscientist Regina Sullivan explains how early attachment, even to abusive caregivers, becomes biologically embedded: “A child attaches to the caregiver regardless of the quality of care received, even if the caregiver is abusive and neglectful” (Sullivan 1) due to attachment circuitry in the brain. Infants and analogous mammalian young are born with a brain circuit wired for attachment. From birth, babies prefer human faces and voices, and soon learn their caregiver’s scent, sounds, and presence. This neural wiring serves survival. Attachment ensures that the infant remains close to the caregiver, which, in evolutionary terms, increased chances of nourishment, protection, and care. Experiments demonstrate that even when a caregiver is abusive, for example, in studies where rat pups receive mild shocks paired with the mother’s odor, the pups still prefer the mother’s presence over avoidance. The fear-learning circuitry is suppressed when the mother is present. This neural wiring explains Zambreno’s continued attachment to her mother.    

​Repeated abuse as Zambreno experienced leads to long-term changes in brain structure, stress response, and attachment patterns. Sullivan concludes that abused children do not simply choose attachment, their survival‑oriented neural systems make it inevitable (Sullivan et al 17). The fragmented form accommodates these paradoxes while intertextuality situates Zambreno with broader literary and artistic traditions.


Healing and Neuroplasticity

While fragmentation enacts trauma, it also facilitates healing through recursive reconstruction. This is possible because of neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to change and adapt throughout life by modifying its structure, functions, or neural pathways. Zambreno acknowledges this effort and desire, “Writing is how I attempt to repair myself, stitching back former selves, sentences. It is a form of survival” (Zambreno 103).

​By revisiting memories, layering reflections, and juxtaposing intertextual elements—a way of being in relation and identifying with a safe other—Zambreno enacts a form of narrative reassembly consistent with trauma-informed approaches to recovery. In Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Susan Brison writes on how sharing traumatic memory has a transformative effect on the memory itself, and on the survivor’s sense of self. It also allows the reintegration into a community, through a process of establishing bonds of trust and faith in others. Piecing together a shattered self requires a process of remembering and working through in which speech and affect converge in a trauma narrative” (Brison xi). This healing effort through writing is a theme of Zambreno’s recurring fragments: “To put these memories in a book, so as to be released from it. These thirteen years of it. Like a sacrificial offering. To bury it in the ground. Writing as a way not to remember but to forget. Or if not to forget, to attempt to leave behind” (Zambreno 49). During the years of rewriting and reframing memories, Zambreno’s perceptions have mutated suggesting that time, reflection, and remembrance can enable self-reconstruction.


​Conclusions

Book of Mutter shows that fragmentation is not merely a stylistic preference but a necessary literary strategy for conveying trauma, contradiction, and ongoing healing. Its fractured structure enacts fractured memory, nonlinear temporality, dissociation, and the simultaneous attachment to and rupture from the mother. Fragmentation models partial, recursive reconstruction of the self, providing an ethical and aesthetic framework for representing trauma that honors incompleteness. By interweaving fragments, reflections, dialogue, archival research, and intertextual references, Zambreno conveys the cognitive and emotional rhythms of trauma while modeling the healing process. Writing becomes a form of carrying on, and a means to reconcile love and loss. Through the act of writing and sharing fragments, Zambreno transforms trauma into an accrued narrative, and shows—like those writers with whom she is in conversation—that literature can both reflect and repair the fractured self.
Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited. ​
Janelle Lynch is an artist and writer based in New York City. Her photographs have been exhibited worldwide and are in museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum; and the Denver Art Museum. She has three monographs by Radius Books, Los Jardines de México; Barcelona, which also features her writing; and Another Way of Looking at Love. Her writing has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and in artists’ monographs and exhibition catalogues. She is faculty at the International Center of Photography and is represented by Flowers Gallery. Lynch holds an MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts and will receive her MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars in 2027.

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