The Pictures, by Caille Millner:

There's only one big piece of unfinished business I have with my memoir: I wish I had come up with a way to include visuals.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do it. Visuals are important to me -- many of the stories I've written started with an image or a picture or a scene I glimpsed on the street. Some of my favorite authors (W.G. Sebald, John Berger when he's writing about art) use visuals in their personal pieces so powerfully that the bare text looks weak in comparison.

I struggled with it, but in the end I decided it was too difficult -- most people in this book are still alive; I changed a lot of names; I didn't know how to illustrate their stories without using their faces. It doesn't help that I'm not great at actually capturing moments on film, either. I tend to freeze images in my mind; by the time I think to grab a camera, they're gone. My photo collection is thin. I don't know that I'd have had as many images to choose from as I would've liked.

Perfection, of course, is the enemy, so all I can say is that I'll tackle it next time. Hopefully I'll figure out a way to use other people's shots and not my own.This may be easier with fiction -- which contrary to popular belief, can be serious and also include pictures. In fact there are a number of "serious" novels that may have been enriched by their inclusion.

View more information on Caille Millner's The Golden Road.

Caille Millner

The Golden Road

memoir

race

Latino

African American

Penguin Books

books