The array of these branches could potentially be in any order, and yet together build into something as vivid as it is unpredictable, almost like an actual person.Īlette in The Descent of Alette, by Alice Notley Breton notates her days in fragments regarding love, art, consumption, memory, and music, and each new branch we are made part of builds into a comb of never-resolving fragments of some self. Nothing quite happens, and nothing needs to, as it is in Breton’s logic that the character emerges-how she builds her life from what goes on. ‘Well shit, man,’ I say in the dream.” Such fragmentary, odd quips make up the intuitive spew that is the voice of Money Breton, a character as wry, unpredictable, and confusingly electric as her name portends, and one that grows the longer you spend inside her frames, never quite sure what kind of observation will come next. The book begins with the image of a lock being opened to spew forth its contents under a mesmerized constraint: “I have a dream of working a combination lock that is engraved on its back with the combination. Money Breton in Why Did I Ever, by Mary RobisonĮasily years ahead of its time, as Robison seems to frequently be, Why Did I Ever is kind of a portrait of the brain as a Magic Eye puzzle-it is told in 536 tiny segments, each usually no longer than a handful of lines.

Female narrators in movies