When Erin Vincent was 14 her parents were hit by a speeding tow truck as they crossed the road. Her mother died instantly, her father a month later. This tragedy and its aftermath is one of the subjects of Vincent’s audacious, poetic memoir, Fourteen Ways of Looking. Her project here, though, is not to represent the events, but to grapple with grief and to capture the relentless, circular and repetitious sense-making that trauma demands.
And anyway, Vincent has already told her story straight. Her acclaimed 2007 memoir, Grief Girl, is narrated in the voice of a 14-year-old Vincent, who tells us what is unfolding in her life in the present tense. “It’s weird getting dressed for your mother’s funeral,” she writes.
