Micro memoirs: Five Life Moments in 100 Words

We have one life to live, but the story of our life can be told in many different ways. Maybe the more often we tell it, the better we understand it...

Many writers spend years crafting their story into a full-length book with all the challenges that form brings with it — theme, focus, story arc, character development, dialogue, accuracy of memory over the long term, etc. My chosen form bypasses some of those challenges but has others. I write short-form creative nonfiction, often shorter than 1,000 words and frequently much shorter. I especially enjoy the challenge of the micro length memoir — a life or a life moment in just 100 words. The story matters but the constraint requires particular focus on the craft of writing and on specific word choice; for me, those constraints are fun to work with.  

Below are five such micro memoirs. Two I've shared before, three are new. At its best, a micro memoir paints a vivid picture of a specific moment or experience for a specific person that launches the reader on their own journey into similar or related memories — the personal sparking the universal. 

What do my pieces below spark in you? I invite you to take the 100-word micro memoir challenge and write your own. 

from early childhood

Surprise exit

At the supper table, three kids, one mother; father away on work. The mood was fractious, the behaviour bad: complaints about the meal (“corned beef YUCK”), snipes at each other (“don’t chew so LOUD”). I didn’t notice Mum’s own mood until she snapped, “If you three don’t behave better, I shall leave this house and move into an apartment with my parrot.” I knew she couldn’t do that; she didn’t have a parrot. But she did. Leave. Went away, slammed the door. Left us slack jawed at that supper table. Until she returned a while later, point made, authority confirmed.

from young adulthood

Powdered luck

She was my favourite summer-job friend, with an easy laugh, irreverent attitude towards the boss, and an older boyfriend. The evening we went out for drinks ended at their place. When the boyfriend pulled out the powder and the mirror, I didn’t know what was happening. Then, he rolled up a 100-dollar bill and demonstrated, snorting the powder in its neat line. Naive, I followed his lead. When I awoke the next morning in my own bed, I was relieved. I had gotten away with it: my first hard-drug experience. My only one. My life stretched ahead of me, unimpaired.

from later adulthood

Spooning my dad

Dad’s death was a merciful release, so my family was more relieved than bereft, but now the urn I had brought needed filling — my job alone to do, so I left the memorial gathering, found a spoon and kneeled in the corner with the big box of ashes and my keepsake urn, breathed in deep and hunkered down, stopped thinking about my father in the box, collected myself and spooned out once, then once again, some ashes for me to keep, then breathed out, closed the lid, and returned to the gathering as if I knew what I was doing.

from recent adulthood

Holding my mother

She wanted me there, my sister, too. Mum wanted touch, connection, and company as she left this world. Even while wanting to leave, she needed to hold the hands of her two daughters. I held her left hand. Warm, alive. Until she wasn’t. The moment of passing was quiet, peaceful, gentle. Everything Mum wanted. Everything I wanted, too. For if my mother couldn’t live fully according to her own needs, then I wanted this death for her — chosen for dignity, elected with agency. To live means also to die. May I meet my own death as my mother did hers.

ongoing adulthood

The stitch of kindness

As my mother's end approached, it was the milk of human kindness that undid me. Yet, in all its forms, it also held me together. Offers of coffee, cake and conversation; the giving of hugs and sharing of thoughts. When death is the final cut, the kindnesses that come before stitch close the gap between the here and now and the endless tomorrows stretching ahead. Body now gone, but spirit remains — in the ether, in my heart, in my head. My own body carries the love, my own heart the beat of that primal bond not even death can sunder.

Maybe, one day, I'll string together all my micro-memoirs and see what tapestry — what larger (longer) story — they weave as a whole...

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Parrot photo by Yorman Tamayo on Unsplash 
Spoon photo by Raul Angel on Unsplash

Coffee & cake photo by Yulia Khlebnikova on Unsplash