Heather McCalden on Using Fragments to Write About Loss, Viruses, and the Internet

Heather McCalden’s genre-defying fragmentary memoir, The Observable Universe , begins with “this book is an album of grief. Every fragment is like a track on a record, a picture in a yearbook; they build on top of one another until, at the end, they form an experience.” And what an experience it is. When McCalden was a child, she lost both of her parents to the AIDS virus, her father when she was seven and her mother when she was ten. Years later, after becoming a writer and an artist, she noticed that “the internet was doing some really particular things and virality was being discussed constantly.” This led her down a rabbit hole that became The Observable Universe . In her book, McCalden employs a mix of poetic and plain prose to weave together her personal narrative with science and technology to examine our interconnectedness; how “our evolution has thus been driven in part by negotiating with viruses,” both biological and virtual, and how these viruses live in us and change us, as we change them. And yet for McCalden there is one virus that has often kept her separate from the rest of the world: her grief. As someone who also lost their parents at a young age and has written a book about it and just completed a second memoir, written in fragments, I felt compelled to reach out to McCalden to see if she was interested in talking to a fellow orphan and writer about her experience of writing her book. We spoke on Zoom about writing the self, fragmentary writing, what it’s like to be orphaned at a young age, and how it impacts a life and the creation of art and literature. Erin Vincent: I must start off by asking, was it weird to be working on a book about viruses—the virus that killed your parents, the concept of “going viral” online, the internet and how we connect—at a time when a massive virus hit the world and forced us into our homes and communicating online? Heather McCalden : Oh, yeah, it was […]

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