Sue William Silverman is an award-winning memoirist, essayist, and poet of eight previous books, including How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences (Nebraska, 2020) and Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul (Nebraska, 2024). She is co-chair of the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her latest book Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader (Nebraska, 2025) is now available.
The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect.
—Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
When I was in kindergarten, my father brought me a puzzle box from Japan. I sat on the floor in my bedroom in our house in Bethesda, Maryland, puzzling, well, how to open it. The tiny box of imbricated wood featured a pink-and-yellow minka house, a gingko tree, a junk boat tied to the shore of a lake. A snow-capped mountain loomed in the distance. Finally, I discovered a hidden panel. I slid it back. I pressed a knob. The secret door snapped open.
It was empty.
Even though my father had called it a “puzzle box,” I expected it to be a treasure chest (despite its size), hoping, perhaps, to discover a jade ring, a string of pearls.
Maybe I had to provide the treasure? What did I own so little, so precious, that it required concealment? The key to my roller skates? My baby bracelet with my name spelled in black letters on white-and-pink beads? A shorn curl tied with a silk ribbon?
Every time I moved to a new house, I brought the empty box with me, a faithful talisman still waiting for me to puzzle its significance. Periodically, I slid the secret panel, pressed the hidden knob, and the box snapped open.
Still empty.
Then, I began to write a collection of flash essays.
Which is when it became a memory box—or a puzzle box that contained puzzling memories. Over the years, without knowing it, I had been storing memories. But not just any memory. No. Just the ephemeral ones that flared back into being when I wrote about them. I only realized this when, ironically, I wrote a brief essay about my obsession with this box.
The box became a metaphor for the flash essay, the way it held those seemingly slight memories.
My first two memoirs tackled big issues—a damaged childhood, a subsequent addiction—narratives much too large for the puzzle-memory box. But, over the course of a life, those experiences, important as they were, did not take up as much space or time as the rest of what happened in my life both during and after those experiences.
I discovered there was much more to write about. But those moments, due to their brevity, initially seemed insignificant—as good as hidden.
Flash considers evanescent moments of time, examining them until they reveal their secrets.
For example, on the cover of Selected Misdemeanors, is an image of a goldfish, belly up. In the essay “Love Deferment,” in which my unloving boyfriend leaves for boot camp, I buy the fish for company. But I also betray my boyfriend by having an affair with his roommate: one of my misdemeanors. Additionally, when the roommate breaks up with me, I’m so distraught I forget to feed the goldfish. He dies. Another misdemeanor. Over the course of drafting the essay, I came to realize that the dead goldfish was a metaphor not just for physical death, but for betrayal in matters of love as well as the absence of love.
So, the soul of this goldfish now resides in the box, along with the sadness of my soul responsible for his demise.
The short essays in this book explore such fleeting moments of beauty, miniature forms of betrayal, and microscopic snippets of loss. Together, they comprise a puzzle box full of brief memories that (with luck and lots of revision) bloom into epiphanies for the reader.
The painting on the box from Japan is depicted as if seen from a distance. You can’t see individual details of the boat, the house, the trees. In a flash essay, the form is small, like the box. But, once the puzzle is pieced together and the secret door opens, the detailed memories cosmically, universally, metaphorically pour out, overflowing their banks, revealing their secrets.
UNP blog 