Trauma: The Splintered Narrative

When the story breaks: writing the shape of truth

People who have experienced trauma tend to shape their narratives in a more fragmentary, less cohesive way.

That was a fascinating revelation for me when I heard Adam Johnson (he of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award) do a brilliant talk on the subject of trauma and writing 10 or so years ago.

I’ve been thinking about that talk ever since.

Last week, I interviewed Siri Hustvedt about her new memoir, Ghost Stories, which is largely about her grief after her husband, the writer Paul Auster, died. Siri called her grief a state of “cognitive splintering,” a phrase she came up with as a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College where she gives a seminar in Narrative Psychiatry to psychiatric residents and junior faculty.

Siri said that grief can be a form of trauma, which was another revelation for me. I’d never thought of grief as trauma. I know that when I have experienced deep grief, I’ve been smothered in a type of spiraling darkness, unable to function normally, but I didn’t think to put my grief in the category of trauma.

Bessel Van der Kolk’s research on trauma showed that traumatic memory is stored differently than ordinary memory. It isn’t processed through the hippocampus in the normal story-organizing way, but instead lives in fragmented sensory impressions: images, smells, physical sensations, emotional flashes.

Trauma memory is, at its neurological root, non-narrative. It resists the linear cause-and-effect structure that normal autobiographical memory produces.

As van der Kolk observed: “Trauma comes back as a reaction, not a memory.”

The grammar of trauma

The reason I’m especially interested in this is because for writers it means that when you try to write about trauma honestly, the conventional sentence, with its subject, verb, object—its implication of agency and sequence—may actually be an inadequate container.

The grammar of trauma is different from the grammar of ordinary experience. Trauma memory doesn’t necessarily find a home in sentences. It splits into shards.

Judith Herman adds another layer: trauma disrupts what she calls the “story” a person tells about themselves. Identity is built on narrative continuity—the sense that the self persists through time, that the past leads to the present which leads to the future.

Trauma shatters that continuity. The “before” and “after” of a traumatic event can feel like two completely different lives, inhabited by two different selves.

I think back to our interview with Amanda Knox on the Memoir Nation podcast. “A definition of trauma is being trapped in another person’s story of you,” she said.

Amanda said she lost the sense of herself as a protagonist in her story because she was literally imprisoned by the global circus spawned from the false accusations against her for the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher, a fellow exchange student with whom Amanda shared an apartment in Perugia, Italy.

She had to reclaim her story, make it hers, in order to heal.

The grammar of trauma is different from the grammar of ordinary experience—and for writers who have survived extreme experiences, it becomes one of the most disorienting and generative discoveries of their creative lives: that the wound doesn’t just change what they have to say, but how language itself behaves in their hands.

• Syntax breaks down. Sentences become shorter, more halting. The causal connective tissue—the “therefore,” the “as a result,” the “which led to”—disappears, because causality itself feels unavailable or false.

• The passive voice intrudes. Writers describing trauma often unconsciously reach for passive constructions—“it happened,” “I was taken,” “things were done”— because agency feels impossible to assign. The passive voice is the grammatical expression of helplessness and confusion about causality.

• Tense collapses. Trauma lives in an eternal present—the flashback, the intrusive memory, the moment that won’t stay in the past. Writers often find themselves switching unexpectedly from past to present tense when approaching the traumatic core of a piece. The wound is still happening.

The edge of language

At the furthest extreme, trauma doesn’t just reshape language—it shatters it.

Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain argued that extreme physical and psychological suffering actively dismantles the capacity for expression.

As Scarry wrote, “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language.” She invoked Virginia Woolf’s famous observation that English, which can articulate the tragedies of Hamlet and Lear, has no adequate words for a headache.

This is why the most honest trauma writing often reaches for silence: the white space, the dash, the sentence that stops short of its own completion. These are not decorative choices. The dash says: language broke here. The blank space says: what happened next cannot be held in a sentence.

Rather than a linear arc with a beginning, middle, and end, trauma narrative often moves associatively—by image, by emotional resonance, by the logic of the body rather than the logic of chronology.

Think of the structure of The Bluets, by Maggie Nelson, or Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, or Anne Carson’s Nox—works built in fragments, in white space, in the gaps between things.

Writers approaching trauma rarely go straight at it. They orbit it, approach it obliquely, retreat, approach again from a different angle. This produces a characteristic narrative shape: not an arrow but a spiral.

Writers who experienced dissociation during trauma sometimes reproduce it structurally—shifting into third person to describe themselves, referring to “her” or “the girl” instead of “I.” Siri does this in Ghost Stories—she shifts to the third person and observes herself. There isn’t a stable “I.”

But narrative cohesion can be a healing act

The irony is that this meaning-making is both a craft choice and a psychological one. Judith Herman actually argues that narrative reconstruction—putting the shattered pieces into a sequence that can be told—is central to trauma recovery.

So there’s a question for a writer—to seek to mimetically represent an experience in its highest truth or to seek personal healing from writing. I personally like to think you can do both.

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Because a quote or two or three

“Linear narrative is a construct that serves people whose lives have been allowed to make sense. For the rest of us, fragments are more honest.”

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“I want to write from the place where the wound is—not after it’s healed, not once I’ve packaged it into meaning, but from inside it. Because that’s where the truth lives.”

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“Writing saved my life—not because it fixed anything, but because it gave me a place to put the chaos. Not to resolve it. To witness it.”

—All quotes from Lidia Yuknavitch

Wine and Storytelling—and More Wine and Storytelling!

My friend Elizabeth Rosner and I are going to host an event where you will taste wine and tell stories in new, fun, different, scintillating, sensual ways. We’re teaming with Saintsbury Winery at Jered’s Pottery Studio to host a fundraiser for the ultimate rollicking literary festival in the world, our very own Litquake.

Join us for a night of revelry and revelrying!

Because a photo

I love this photo. There’s so much happening all at the same time. It’s the kind of photo that invites you to wonder about the stories of each person in it. It’s the kind of photo that makes you fill in the story beyond the frame. What happened before this shot? What happened afterward?

The photo is part of Marya Hornbacher’s reflections on her past year on the road. Her Substack, Going Solo at the End of the World, is one of my favorites for several reasons, but perhaps mostly because it lives up to its title. Check it out.