Reviewed by Angele Ellis
Editor’s Note: This review appeared originally in Vox Populi Sphere and is reprinted in Wordgathering with permission.
“[W]hile literature often relies on disability’s transgressive potential, disabled people have been sequestered, excluded, exploited, and obliterated on the very basis of which their literary representation so often rests.” So David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder asserted in Narrative Prosthesis, their foundational critique of the ways that disability is portrayed in books and film. Mitchell and Snyder define “narrative prosthesis” as a metaphorical “crutch,” a device used to drive plot that in the control of able-bodied writers, bears little relationship to the lived experience of people with disabilities. Twenty-six years on, memoirs by writers with disabilities are still relatively rare. (Goodreads, to give one example, lists 46, as opposed to 211 memoirs by people who have served in the military.)
What forms can “transgressive potential”—pushing boundaries, questioning accepted ideas, and creating change—take? The title of Jason Irwin’s memoir These Fragments I Have Shored is from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” a poem written in the wake of the shattering losses of the First World War. Eliot employs a mind-bending, stream of consciousness technique that mixes not only memory and desire, but references from popular culture, literature, and religion in order to reflect and refract experience. Irwin, himself a poet of note, affirms Eliot’s message that memory is fragmented—as art can be fragmented, as any human life can be fragmented.
Perhaps all memoirs are war memoirs.
These Fragments I Have Shored begins with a bang, not a whimper. Irwin’s mother, Audrey, terminally ill with cancer, has come to Pittsburgh to spend her final days with Irwin and his wife, the poet Jen Ashburn. “You better get this body out of here,” Audrey “command[s]” Irwin, who has run to her room on hearing her call his name. “I died an hour ago.” She insists that Irwin take her pulse; when he admits he can’t find it, she gives him “a look she’d given on nights in my twenties when I’d come home drunk, insisting I’d only had a beer or two.”
Many writers struggle to write about their parents as people, without the weight of injury, bitterness, and failed expectations—or conversely, sentimentality. Irwin’s portrayal of Audrey Rhoda Irwin is remarkable both in detail and compassion, as if he were describing a beloved if sometimes exasperating friend. This book is as much a tribute to his mother (shown at Irwin’s side, although slightly out of frame, in the childhood photo on the book’s cover) as it is autobiography.
Irwin waits until Page 9 to bring his disabilities into the narrative, using the format of a wryly skewed birth announcement:
My parents had been married for two years, eight months, and twenty-eight
days when I arrived at 8:49 p.m. on a Saturday in July 1971. I had blue eyes,
curly red hair, and numerous, life-threatening birth defects. At full term,
I weighed just three pounds, eleven ounces—about the weight of ten
avocados, or your average ring-tailed lemur.
…
It was as if construction workers assigned to building the infrastructure
of my body during gestation just up and left one day, leaving me
incomplete. Even my heart was on the wrong side.
By leavening precise, deadpan prose with poetic metaphors that dazzle, shock, or provoke laughter, Irwin pushes boundaries. He delivers the “transgressive potential” of disability referenced by Mitchell and Snyder—transformed, because the author is not wielding a “narrative prosthesis,” but after a lifetime of surgeries, the genuine article:
It looked real, and it became a prop of sorts, a shield that protected me, deflecting attention away from my other deformities, like my ostomies. Once, at a party, after having too much to drink, I took a butcher knife and started hacking at my prosthetic leg, as those around me gaped in wondrous horror. I was still playing the role of clown, yet somehow, having a prosthetic leg, I felt more normal than I had in years.
These Fragments I Have Shored could be described as memoir noir, a descendant of the gritty yet tender works of such writes as Raymond Chandler and James L. Cain, suffused with cigarette smoke and alcohol, dreams and regrets, while in the background a soundtrack of popular music plays. Irwin’s story moves from a present in which Audrey, irrepressible and irreplaceable, is dying to a roughly chronological, episodic past that encompasses reality and fantasy, flashback within flashback: “like watching the trailer to a movie about someone else’s life,” as Irwin says about his reaction to his parents’ separation, which happened when he was eight years old.
Yet this book is essentially a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale whose protagonist—like Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—struggles with the forces of religion, family, and conventional values, as well as his disabilities, in order to achieve a destiny in which exile is a condition of freedom. Irwin notes that he identifies strongly with Dedalus; this identification became an impetus for a solo trip to Ireland that he made in his mid-twenties, and a wellspring of his work as a writer.
Irwin’s hometown of Dunkirk, New York is the place he must learn to escape, but can never really leave behind. A former industrial center on the shore of Lake Erie, where the land turns flat and the accents twangy, Dunkirk is many things to Irwin. He recalls his first childhood home as having “a backyard with a maple tree and room for a swing set, a vegetable garden, and a clubhouse, which my father would build out of two-by-fours and plywood…From the outside looking in, life was good, or nearly so.”
But Dunkirk, like James Joyce’s Dublin, is a place of ghosts. Audrey’s Italian great-aunt Rose is renowned for banishing il malocchio—the evil eye—with prayers and applications of olive oil; decades later, Rose appears to Audrey to cure her of migraine headaches. Audrey, in psychic terms a sensitive—perceiving what exists beyond the tangible world—senses many ghosts, both malignant and benign. Some may be emanations of her abusive childhood: “Father Dennis…told my mother that the person she heard running up the stairs was her younger self. ‘It’s you and you’re still running,’ he said. Before leaving, Father Dennis told my mother that she had to not only forgive her mother, but herself as well.”
Irwin must undergo a parallel journey. Having walked through the shadow of the valley of death during his own growing up (despite this, he is almost as stunned as the reader when he reviews the extensive records that the dedicated Audrey kept of his medical treatments), Irwin is haunted by loss, including the losses of friends who lacked the love and lucky breaks that he received. There is JoJo, close as a brother, who “threaten[ed] to kill anyone who made fun of my brace, the way I walked, or questioned why, at age twelve, my bicycle still had training wheels,” last seen by Irwin in an Oklahoma prison, serving time for possession and sale of crack cocaine. And Todd, who “always needed to be the life of the party…as if his life depended on it,” fatally wrecked in a stolen car during a high-speed police chase, before he had the chance to turn thirty.
Memoirs are written not by the victors, as in the oft-quoted saying about history, but by the survivors. Months after Audrey’s surprisingly quiet death—“like driving through some tiny town with only one traffic light”—Irwin listens to a voicemail that she left him a year earlier.
It’s about quarter to eight, just wondering how far away you are.
I hope the weather’s alright for youse. Alright, bye.
Title: These Fragments I Have Shored: A Memoir
Author: Jason Irwin
Publisher: Apprentice House Press: Loyola University, Maryland
Year: 2026
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About the Reviewer
Angele Ellis is an Autistic and Mad writer, editor, and community activist who makes her home in Pittsburgh. She is the author of four books, including Dealing With Differences: Taking Action on Class, Race, Gender, and Disability (Corwin Press). Her poetry and prose have appeared in eighteen anthologies, over 90 journals, and on the marquee of Pittsburgh’s Harris Theatre (after winning Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ G-20 Haiku Contest).