Broken Fiction

A moving collision of memory, storying, and loss or grief.

BROKEN FICTION is a collection of short autofictional stories and poems that both offer solace and depict anguish at the collision of memory, loss, and grief. This kind of story-making negotiates a recognition and acceptance of hard truths without resorting to easy resolution.

The pieces in this volume are playful and fierce. The narrator's willingness to give attention to where love works or goes wrong, or to the moments when suffering cannot be veiled by a positive attitude--even as the comic or absurd overwhelms the tragic and humiliating--takes us to places that inhabit both memory and fiction. Photographs break the fiction and pull the reader into the inevitable forces of time and loss and death.

BROKEN FICTION invites readers to consider a way through--and sometimes around--illness and love, pain and joy, and gives a droplet of hope in nature's comedy of errors and coincidence.

"This is a quirky and powerful book, original, heartbreaking, clever, enigmatic, oh so intelligent, sometimes angry, and more often humorous in a sly way. This is prose that slips into poetry. This is snatches of memory, a glimpse of family history, a dream journal, and a series of love letters. This is what the title says it is, broken fiction. It is autobiographical in some parts, not in others, except in the sense that authors always leave traces of themselves behind."--Jan Rehner, author of The House of Izieu and Almost True

"In what is perhaps best described as a series of meditations, at once intimate and philosophical, Marlene Kadar writes of illness and treatment, family members both living and dead, her own memories and history's ëfacts.' Part journal, part fiction, BROKEN FICTION refuses to be one kind of book. It encompasses moments of sadness and grief with sharp insight and humour to find delight and certainly love."--Linda Warley, Associate Professor Emerita of English, University of Waterloo

Fiction.