There is an ancient Japanese art called kintsugi. In this, shards of broken pottery are carefully pieced back together, and their cracks filled with gold. In the process, what might otherwise have been drab, mundane, simply discarded and ignored, becomes a thing of beauty. Its very flaws the source of its value.
When we look back at our lives, and try to make sense of our memories, we engage in an activity not dissimilar to that of these Japanese artisans. We piece back together our fragmented identities, looking to make something whole from the shattered pieces. Creating a story out of that which is broken. And it is in the gaps, the joins into which we pore meaning, the act of restoring in such a way as to highlight the flaws that give us our individuality, that our lives can be presented as unique.
This is what Lisa St Aubin de Terán sets out to do in her recent memoir, Better Broken Than New. It is explicitly and intentionally fragmented. She recognises that we don’t remember our lives as linear narratives, but in a piecemeal, broken way. Starting from where we are now (which in Lisa’s case is a village in northern Mozambique), the sights and sounds, tastes and smells, that we experience bring memories back to us in no particular order. We gain a view of our life as a pile of pottery shards. Then, like in kintsugi, we try to work out how it all fits back together again.
Personally I find this to be a very compelling way of telling a life story. Of allowing it to emerge from the shattered memories, rather than through a simple chronological progression. Maybe for me this is particularly appealing, as I have always had a love of jigsaws, and of puzzling out what the meaning of my own life might be – made up as it is of fragmented identities and non-linear recollections. So I find it strange that some critics of Lisa’s new book have chosen to criticise it for what is its strength and originality. Would they dismiss the kintsugi pot as broken crockery?
In Better Broken Than New, Lisa shares with us intimate details of a life made up of many pieces. And her narrative gift provides the gold that joins it all together.
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