The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications

by Aaron Angello

Overview

A child keeps a pet cloud in a dresser drawer. A man has coffee with his doppelganger. A 20-something stunt double performs pirate swordplay at birthday parties. A schoolkid ponders the absurdity of Hell. A woman sings a Diana Ross song to a stranger across a subway platform. In this genre-defying collection of short prose pieces, Aaron Angello explores the subtleties of recollection, imagination, and the connections, both momentary and long-lasting, between oneself and others. Each piece riffs on a word from Shakespeare's Sonnet 29; over the course of 114 days, Angello woke early, meditated upon a single word from the sonnet, and wrote. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes profound, and sometimes heartbreaking, accumulating into a map of a mind at work, a Gen X coming-of-age of sorts, seamlessly invoking the likes of The Golden Girls, Spinoza, Rick Springfield, and Rimbaud. The Fact of Memory uses its innovative structure to pause and consider how language—and people—can both enthrall and abandon us, how the invincibility of youthful ambition gives way to the nuanced disappointments of aging, how unanswerable philosophical questions can share the page with glimpses of our former selves navigating a fragmented past.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160947587
Publisher:	Rose Metal Press, Inc.
Publication date:	04/21/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Aaron Angello is a poet, playwright, and essayist from the Rocky Mountains who lives and feels remarkably out of place in the charming, but very Eastern, town of Frederick, Maryland. He received his MFA and PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder, and he currently teaches writing and theater at Hood College.

Editorial Reviews

What I love about Aaron Angello's The Fact of Memory is that it is an intentional rejection of traditional literary analysis. Sonnet 29 becomes his practice of dailiness, one word at a time, and every word opens new insight, new possibility, new form, new newness, always surprising, a nostalgia with neither pretention nor sentimentality: a brave deconstruction and a tender reconstruction, scorned.

Early Reader of the Book - Lily Hoang

Peeling back each word individually, Angello rhizomatically maps the memories rooting each term to the cartography of our inner lives. The Fact of Memory shows 'how our bodies continue to extend outward,' the flesh veined through with 'the books and furniture and walls, out along streets and through buildings,' exposing the deep memories, those transcendent moments neglected as the mundane.

Early Reader of the Book - J. Michael Martinez

Mysteriously, from the language of a single Shakespeare sonnet emerges a whole book, a kind of fractal memoir or self-mythology (or perhaps all memoir is mythology), a book about 'the past (memory) and the present (existence),' a book about 'everything really,' the things we keep to tell ourselves the stories of our lives. Aaron Angello's The Fact of Memory reminds me the world is full of other-dimensional meaning, infinite meaning, waiting to bloom.

Early Reader of the Book - Elisa Gabbert

In The Fact of Memory, Angello, with his seemingly infinite imagination, endless flair, and deep compassion, exposes the communitarian and fluid nature of even these most exalted words. Radically open, impeccably written, Angello's paragraphs enter 'the theater of memory' to describe what might just be your memory, or 'very like,' which is to say, uncanny, at once so beautiful and so strange.

Early Reader of the Book - Julie Carr

In The Fact of Memory, we see what happens when a gifted writer challenges himself with a daily practice. With his "imposition of narrative," Angello, the creative nonfictionist, thinks more freely and opens to random ideas that are more relatable than he originally thought possible. In the end, we are reminded that memory is what we make of it.

River Teeth - Cyndie Zikmund