During a short-lived stint when I tried to revive my journaling practice, I kept a journal where I recorded one instance of beauty every day. The goal was to get away from using my journal as a dump site for my misgivings. I wanted to let go of my tendency to narrativize, to see my experiences for what they truly were instead of labeling them as good or bad. I thought of beauty in a broad sense: It could be a conversation, a dream, a hypothetical situation, a line from something I read, etc. By the end of the summer, I had a sequence of fragments that were glimpses into a greater expanse. I liked how this practice made me think of the day as a microcosm, training my attention on one particular image, allowing that image to unfold into a landscape.
Rachel Khong’s novel Goodbye, Vitamin tells a story about a daughter, Ruth, living at home for a year as her father, Howard, descends slowly into Alzheimer’s disease. The novel is written in the form of journal entries, fragments, daily documentation of his disease as it progresses over the course of a year. Some of Ruth’s entries are no longer than a page, and some entries are only a sentence. There are bad days: “We’ve locked away the scissors and the knives using one of those plastic childproof locks.” There are better days: “Today you washed your shoelaces. Today you spoon-fed the neighbor’s cat tuna from a can.” There are days when nothing seems to happen: “I chip out a tile in the bathroom. I start to pull on the caulk, and it comes out in one long strip, like it’s the tub’s hangnail.” These domestic scenes fluctuate between humor and devastation, playfulness and sincerity. The diary becomes a discursive container that allows Ruth to experience her full emotional range as she grieves the slow decline of her father’s memory.
When we read a novel, we usually expect a linear progression from exposition to rising action to climax to denouement. What I like about the fragment is that it allows space for digressions, forming a constellation that preserves many potential wholes. Ruth’s discursive reflections remind me that life has no narrative and memory is our process of injecting narrative into the past. These diary entries show us a memory field that is always in flux, resisting the idea that our realities accumulate in a linear fashion. Ruth’s fragments force the reader to question the nature of memory and experiential time. Some days run at warp speed, but entire days also pass without any significant change. Ruth asks herself, “What do I do all day? I don’t even know.”
While Khong uses the fragment as a form of containment for the multiplicity of Ruth’s experiences, there are moments when its conventions break down. Howard’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic over the course of the novel; he strews clothes in the trees and forgets basic vocabulary. The sparse minimalism of the prose demonstrates Ruth’s impulse to cut away this noise, to condense until all she has left are the crystals of meaning. But there is tension between the cleanness of her fragments and the messiness of her father’s devolution, precipitated by her father’s discovery that Ruth and his students have been conspiring against him. The tension is finally resolved when Ruth enters a long-form, lyrical mode: “The mind tells you what or whom to love, and then you do it, but sometimes it doesn’t: sometimes the mind plays tricks, and sometimes the mind is the worst. But I’m trying—I really am—not to think about those things.” Ruth uses the direct-address “you” to speak to her father, questioning who “you” are if you forget everything you are composed of.
When I read over my journal, I feel confronted by the white space between entries. In the white space, I walked to the bodega in the rain to buy garlic. I forgot my wallet and had to turn back. They didn’t have garlic, so I bought some gum and a lighter. Instances that seemed too anti-narrative to report now seem critical for establishing the normalcy from which imminent beauty arises. Los Angeles writer Ben Segal defines fragments as “small shards of free-floating text...defined by their singularity, by the white space that encases them on a page.” Instead of building toward a unitary meaning, Goodbye, Vitamin gives us a field of interconnected forces. Meaning is made from an interstitial set of relations, every feeling eclipsing another. Khong’s fragments are a form of trust in her reader. She lets us fill in the white space, giving us liberty to imagine what is contained in her silence.•
Join us on December 12 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Khong will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Mimi Lok to discuss Goodbye, Vitamin. Please note that this event is on the second Thursday of the month. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
