Two Memoirs With Interludes Titled with Empty Square Brackets
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When I think of brackets, March madness, taxes, or PEMDAS come to mind. If I’m near my bookshelves, maybe the metal hardware holding up my books will come to mind too. But lately, it’s memoirs that brackets make think of.
That’s because Natasha Tretheway and Debra Jackson Taffa both use empty brackets as chapter titles in their respective memoirs Memorial Drive and Whiskey Tender. The brackets, with nothing inside, mark a series of short italicized sections that feel like interludes within the greater narratives of each memoir. Memorial Drive uses five “[ ]” to title interludes and Whiskey Tender uses four “[ ]” to title interludes.
Natasha Tretheway has offered insight about her use of brackets as titles and what they mean within Memorial Drive. She mentions bracketing twice in the book itself, something she discusses in a 2021 Interview with Monika Dziamka in the The Southern Review of Books. Talking with Dziamka, Tretheway explains that her five empty brackets serve two creative purposes. First, they are a visual representations of the “bookends” and “bracketing” that she writes about in the memoir.1 Below are the two moments from the Memorial Drive with “bookends” and “bracketing:”
Chapter 2: Terminus: “Those two years would be like the set of bookends I’d kept on my desk back then: two small globes, imprinted with a sepia map of the world, bracketing a few favorite volumes—Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, Light in August. In my attempt at willed forgetting, I would collapse the distance between bookends, the year that ended the world of my happy early childhood pressing right up against the new world I’d entered suddenly as a motherless child. The years 1973 and 1985, side by side, with no books between them, no pages upon which the story I could not bear to remember had been written. But there is a danger in willed forgetting; too much can be lost. It’s been harder for me to call back my mother when I have needed to most.”
from Memorial Drive by Natasha Tretheway, p 51-52
Chapter 18: Before Knowing Remembers: “Memory believes before knowing remembers,” William Faulkner wrote. Over the years, as I applied the dream again and again to the ongoing narrative of my life, I began to see it as a bookend to my earliest memory of trauma—as if my earliest memory had indeed provided the framework of the dream, bracketing the before and after of my life in relation to my mother’s death.”
from Memorial Drive by Natasha Tretheway, p 211.
In addition to paying homage to physical bookends, Tretheway explains in the same interview with The Souther Review of Books that the brackets are also a marker of her “meta-narrative” moments, stories that only emerged during her writing process.
“Those brackets for me represent what feels like the meta-narrative, the things that were sort of happening to me as I was trying to write [the book].
So far, in my reading life, Memorial Drive and Whiskey Tender are the only two books I have ever encountered that use empty brackets as titles. I have a few theories about the brackets:
First, I. wondered if Taffa’s brackets were an allusion to Tretheway’s, a way of linking her memoir with Tretheway’s.
Second, I wondered, since both authors speak of dreams in their bracket-title sections, if maybe these empty brackets are a natural choice for marking writing that comes from dream spaces.
Lastly, what if the empty brackets are an emerging style from the same publishing house, since both memoirs are published by Harper Collins?
No matter how any of these theories pan out, I’ll be on the lookout for more empty-bracket-title styles in my future reads. If you have encountered any books or poetry with empty brackets as titles, please let me know in the comments!
“The other thing that made me want to use brackets is the part in one of the chapters where I describe the set of bookends I used to have on my table, these two little globes. I was sort of imagining my life before we moved to Atlanta and then my life after my mother’s death. And everything in between those brackets were the things that I was trying to forget.” – Natasha Tretheway in an interview with The Southern Review of Books https://southernreviewofbooks.com/2021/06/01/memorial-drive-natasha-trethewey-interview/↩︎
