IJ study archive

Young Jim, his father, and the mattress — "He said ‘Fuck it’ again, and…"

quote

He said ‘Fuck it’ again, and I remember not being clear about what he was referring to.

Context

The memoir keeps auditing its own faculty, and the audit reveals its shape: the boy's incomprehension of the father is preserved verbatim, while the mother simply drops out of the record at the scene's stillest moment — in a memoir about the parents' bed. The gaps are as composed as the retentions.

In anthology