We compulsively revisit an episode that shattered a life, or pick at a shard of memory that demands to be prized out of the bedrock of our souls.
As she makes clear, no one is harder on the parents of a lost child than the parents themselves, who, with the hindsight bequeathed by their predicament, compulsively review every decision, second-guess every turn, pick through every shard of memory, looking for a clue: Why has this happened?
There are often shards of memory buried in my fiction, but I write more from imagined incidents.
There are fewer countdown-to-9/11 narratives: with shards of memory, friends and relatives are piecing together a whole life.
It, too, through its tumbled shards of memory and observation, its layers of physical ritual and speech, aims to trace the fates and desires of men and women.
"Writers inevitably return to their childhoods," she remarks in "Nulle Part" ("Nowhere"), an autobiography composed in 2005 from vivid shards of memory and sensation.
Its hallmarks include discontinuous chronology, in which fragments of narrative glint like shards of memory; the mutable identities of people and places; and the eminently reasonable presence of ghosts.
But just as Shirin's friend chooses to save her because of the pleasure of their play, the novel repeatedly suggests that life's significance derives less from ideas than from the most basic, the most concrete shards of memory.
In Stevenson's hands this suggests that Winnie, as she relies on shards of memory and half-recollected lines of verse, is heading towards extinction in a state of painfully acquired self-knowledge.
As his weeks in captivity stretch into months, he tries to pass the time by rerunning novels like "Great Expectations" in his head, and trying to reconstitute his former life with mosaic shards of memory and dreams.
Many of them are central European Jewish émigrés, as in Shards of Memory (1995) and In Search of Love and Beauty (1983), which Updike compared to Proust in its "interest in Jewishness and homosexuality as modes of estrangement; and its insistent moral that human love will always find an unworthy object".
