Frame Narrative

Example 1

I arrived in Mosul in March, four months after liberation. The buildings were still standing, mostly, but the windows were all gone and the streets had that particular emptiness that means people are alive but not outside. I sat in a tea shop with a man named Haider who had stayed through the occupation. "You want to know what it was like," he said. It wasn't a question. He told me about the day ISIS came — not the battle, but the quiet part before it, when his neighbor packed a suitcase and his wife made lunch as if nothing was happening. He told me about the rules: no smoking, no music, no leaving. He told me about his son, who was thirteen and curious, and who learned very quickly not to be. I recorded everything. I wrote it down that night in my hotel room in Erbil, eighty miles away, where there were windows and music and cigarettes. The distance between Haider's story and my hotel room was the distance between experience and reporting. I am not sure reporting closes it.

Example 2

"Open to chapter three." Twenty-four students, a seminar table, a November afternoon. "What does Gatsby want?" A hand: "Daisy." Another: "The past." Another: "To be worthy." A student from East St. Louis, first in his family at this college: "He wants to be somebody who doesn't need to want things." A student whose father is an investment banker: "He wants money, obviously. Everything else is rationalization." I watch them argue. They are both reading the same book. They are not reading the same book at all. Each of them has brought a life to the text, and the text has given it back transformed. Is either reading authoritative? Is mine? I have taught this novel for fifteen years and I am less certain of what it means than I was the first time I read it. That may be the point.

Example 3

I found the letters in a shoebox in my grandmother's attic in June, after she died. They were written between 1943 and 1945, from a man named Edward to a woman named Rose. My grandmother's name was Rose. Edward was not my grandfather's name. "My darling, I think of you in the mornings especially, when the light is the color of the dress you wore to the dance at Fort Bragg." "My darling, I cannot write about what happened this week, but I can write about what I will do when I come home, which is: everything with you." "My darling, they are sending us somewhere I cannot say. If I don't come back, know that you were the truest thing." There are forty-one letters. Edward did not come back. My grandmother married my grandfather in 1947. She never mentioned Edward. She kept his letters for sixty years, in a shoebox, in an attic, where no one would find them until she was gone and couldn't be asked.