Confession time. I am so indoctrinated into the Western way of storytelling with its Aristotelian plot arc that I forget I’m always looking for the next conflict and how that will get resolved. So when a book comes up that makes me fundamentally rethink that form AND it’s superbly written… well, let’s just say that reading The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir by Jami Nakamura Lin was a deeply pleasurable education. To say that the memoir envelops stories about bipolar disorder, childbearing, and losing a parent to cancer feels reductive, because the book is so much more expansive than any other memoir I’ve read on any of these subjects. It’s a beautiful book that’s been upending my thinking ever since I first opened it last weekend.
Subverting the Expectations of Form
“I choose kishōtenketsu, the Japanese version of the four-part narrative structure that flows from Chinese poetry. I need something. I have too much story and not enough shape. I overflow my banks.” – Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade
Throwing a literary form on a writing project can be a good way for a writer to organize themself and to kick-start their thinking. To see what is and is not working. It can also turn into a gimmick where they’re shaping the work to fit the form rather than finding the right form for the work. Instead, Lin wields form in The Night Parade as a tool to both unlock the narrative and to rethink assumptions.
I can’t speak to the kishōtenketsu form Lin uses (which I have no experience with), but I can tell you that the way she applies this structure feels natural and compelling. Which is to say the form definitely supports the work rather than the other way around. Lin explains each of the four parts as we encounter them in the book (in a similar gentle way to the quote above) which gives entry to those of us with little experience with Japanese literature. What worked best about this for me (among many things) was that she immediately subverted my expectations—I didn’t realize the weight that expecting the next conflict (as in the Aristotelian model) carries. Because I knew from the outset that this book is different, I was free to float along on the journey Lin is taking us on.
I wrote to a friend this weekend that, for a reality TV aficionado, The Night Parade is to the Great British Bake-off what most books are to Making the Cut. That itself is reductive, but it starts to hint at the gentle layers one can enjoy in a story when unnecessary drama is stripped away.
When the Art of Storytelling is the Story
“Each time you tell a story, you can manage the tale to fit your needs. You can gauge the audience’s reactions, alter the form or the tense or the point of view. With a little maneuvering, a little emphasis here and a little de-emphasis there, you can make an ending seem happier.” – Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade
Lin is not only a master storyteller, the fact that she’s telling a story also becomes an important part of the writing. Throughout the book she inserts small breaks with the fourth wall, pulling back from the narrative enough to remind us that she is structuring this story and how. In lesser hands this could feel jarring. In The Night Parade it feels honest, like Lin is acknowledging how artificial our constructs are and bringing us in on the making so that we can see the nuances in the choices she’s making.
For a writer, this book is pure heaven because those moments are like the best conversations you’ve ever had with a really great editor. If you are a reader who doesn’t write, I think you will also enjoy these opportunities to learn more about the art of storytelling.
“She: a distancing. She: a way to get close. I’ve tried to tell this story so many times, but when I use I—when the girl is me—the story sputters in my mouth. Becomes too big or to small or too askew. It is wrong. I promise I am not telling this story like this to keep you away. I want to invite you in, the only way I know how.” – Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade
The Mythologies We Inhabit
Lin bases each chapter of The Night Parade around a character from Japanese, Okinawan, or Taiwanese (the three strands of her geneology) folklore and then gently weaves the story around these tropes, forming juxtapositions it could take many re-readings to fully unpack.
“You are drawn to these myths because they change. Unlike static texts, folklore, legends, and oral histories are living tales that transmogrify with each subsequent retelling. We understand and understand again based on contemporary lenses and frameworks.” – Jami Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade
I loved that these mythologies existed fully enough in each section to function as their own stories. I imagine this is because Lin was learning them as she was writing and researching this book, but it also helped this reader more fully see the parallels between the mythologies and the family stories. I loved learning more about each of these characters and there were times I felt glimmers of understanding bits of what I had missed in reading about characters like these in the works of Sayaka Murata and Isabel Yap.
Humility is Underrated
Maybe it’s the gentleness of the form, the way that it made conflict feel secondary to experience, but The Night Parade felt like a deeply humble book. Don’t get me wrong, it takes a certain amount of ego for any writer to sit down and decide that their work belongs on the page, let alone that their life story is a story worthy of sharing. But “ego” doesn’t have to be pejorative. While this is Lin’s story and she fully embodies the narrative with her experiences an her analysis, she has also very carefully worked beyond herself to tell a larger story.
For example, Lin recounts the night of a teenage suicide attempt that got her hospitalized (one of the few times she goes deep into the more dramatic side of being bipolar) but she also includes nods to what the night may have done to her younger sisters. Rather than a blood-on-the-page recounting of individual trauma, Lin’s stories always exist in context—in the context of the reader, the context of her family, and the context of a world that is, in general, larger than each of us individuals.
I want to spend thousands of words describing the threads of this book to you—the strands of miscarriage, pregnancy, parenthood, childhood, a dying parent, exploring your roots in a culture that wants us all to blend—but I wouldn’t do as good of a job as Lin does and if you thought I was, you’d be robbed of the true beauty of reading this book for yourself. Trust me. When I tried to explain to my husband how much I loved this book I just cried all over our couch.
The Night Parade isn’t released until October, but you can pre-order it now. Meanwhile, I’ll be looking around for other things Lin has written, because I want more of her voice in my life.
Before I get into this excellent book, I want to share with you why the title makes me giggle happily. When my son was in preschool, he came home with the words “my body” to express his personhood. If he didn’t want to be touched or touched in a certain way, “my body” implied his ownership of himself. If he wanted to show off, he could say “my body” and smile and I’d smile right back at this most beautiful creature. My husband and I have carried the phrase forward as a loving goof about that second use case but it also serves as a reminder to us that he does own that little body. And we own ours, even if we never had the same language to express it. We’re in awe of that kid and in awe of this age of talking more clearly about our bodies in the world.
The Poetics of Wrongness by Rachel Zucker was referenced over and over at AWP this year, so I ordered it and added to the to-read pile in the middle of my office floor. But something called to me about this book so I lifted it from that messy stack of somedays just after finishing My Body. The title essay is incredibly good—another instance of layered, nuanced thought that is worth reading and reading and reading. But what I loved most about this book was reading”Why She Could Not Write a Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood,” especially since I read it in the wee hours of Mother’s Day as I was hoping my son would not wake up quite yet.
This interrupted, all-over-the-place essay is of course very artfully structured to achieve this feeling, and there are nuggets of information in it about specific poets and their experiences as mothers. But most of all this piece is incredibly effective. At the end I felt seen and also wondered how mothers (or involved parents of any gender) manage to create anything at all for about two decades in the middle of their “most productive” years. I read whole sections of it to my husband that morning because he’s also an artist serving as a caregiver (and felt myself growing increasingly manic as the work piled up). The essay made me think about the choices we’re making and the choices that are being made for us. It made me remember that part of the reason I felt like I could write at all during my cherished Saturday morning writing time this weekend was because I had spent many hours during the week reading and lying in the grass staring up at the chestnut leaves expanding over my head.
Fantasy has never been my go-to genre. While I deeply respect the massive creativity that goes into building a strong fantasy world, my own brain doesn’t work that way and I often find fantastic novels hard to engage with—to surrender to. So when I say that I loved Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse with my whole heart, I mean this book leapt over all my fences, grabbed me by the hand, and dragged me (wonderfully) into a richly-imagined world I could not get enough of.
I’m slow to adopt new ideas so when I started reading about autofiction (telling a story that is close to your real life using fictionalized details) I mashed it together with metafiction in my head and moved on because it just didn’t feel like where my creative energy was at. But reading Hunger Heart definitely opened my eyes to what autofiction can do. Fastrup uses a “fictional” character to delve into a period of her life when she was in and out of mental institutions with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. The book is interesting (not just because the Danish health system is so much more humane than the American one) and well written and I can see how allowing herself to tell what is essentially a memoir in a fictional way really freed her as a storyteller. She always had the option, of course, of telling the true details about her life in her book, but autofiction lets her streamline events and change the surrounding characters enough so that the book flows well and so that she’s putting the (interesting and sometimes uncomfortable) spotlight on herself rather than her then boyfriend or kids.
All the blurbs on Vikram Paralkar’s The Afflictions reference Borges because, I think, the story takes place in a library where a librarian is introducing a visitor to a series of tomes on (imagined) afflictions. In truth, though, the book has a lot more in common with Calvino’s 
I’d actually been saving back I Have Some Questions for You because I love Makkai’s work and I wanted to give myself time to really enjoy the book. But we went away to Whidbey Island last week and it was the most compelling read I could take with me (and I ate it all up). This book is what prompted this blog post, honestly, because there was a lot I learned from this book. Set just before and during the pandemic, the action also includes significant portions of memory as the narrator, Bodie, reflects on the murder of her roommate while they were at boarding school in the 1990s. Bodie is revisiting that school as a teacher and reconsidering what may have actually happened. 
I randomly picked The Swimmers from my to-read pile after I Have Some Questions for You because I’ve loved Otsuka’s other books. What I did not know was that she was working directly with something I’ve been experimenting with for this book (despite great fear)—the choral voice. The Swimmers explores the collective experience of a group of swimmers at a public pool from a “we” point of view. 
I firmly believe that art and artists have the power to save us—the power to see the future and contextualize the now in ways that help us to survive and even to live our best lives. Nikki Kallio is definitely blessed with this insight and reading her new book Finding the Bones shook something loose for me in the very best of ways. This collection of stories and a novella is both wildly creative and also carefully attuned to the dangers of now. It’s also downright spooky at times, in the best of ways.