Memory as Structure: Why NYC Literary Fiction Returns to the Past

Memory isn't decoration in literary fiction — it's architecture.

I understood this most clearly when I was writing Loverboy, Still. The novel moves through a narrator's romantic history chronologically, but the deeper I got into the work, the more I realized I wasn't writing a love story that happened to involve the past. I was writing about how the past is the love story. How memory structures everything — desire, fear, the way we choose people, the way we lose them.

This isn't unique to my book. It's the gravitational force holding together much of the literary fiction coming out of New York, and especially Brooklyn, in the last decade. Writers working in this tradition — the ones telling quiet, intimate stories about Black life, masculinity, intimacy — keep returning to memory not as subject matter but as form.

The Past Never Stays Past

In Brooklyn-set fiction, geography and memory collapse into each other. The block where you first kissed someone is the same block where you learned what silence costs. The bodega on the corner witnessed your father's moods and your mother's endurance. The tree in the churchyard — if it's still there — holds more history than most monuments.

When I was building the early chapters of Loverboy, Still, I kept coming back to a specific tree. A real one, from a real block, that existed long before I turned it into narrative. The protagonist climbs it with a girl he's just learning how to want. They sit in the branches and the world shrinks to just them — until the block starts talking, and the talking becomes louder than anything they could say to each other.

That tree isn't metaphor. It's memory performing the work memory always does: collapsing time, making the past present, showing you that thirteen years old and thirty-three years old are sometimes the same feeling wearing different shoes.

This is what New York literary fiction does best. It refuses to treat the past as concluded. Danez Smith does it in their poetry — the way childhood trauma becomes the syntax of adult desire. Jesmyn Ward does it in everything she writes — the way grief from one generation becomes the unspoken rule book for the next. Honoree Fanonne Jeffers does it across centuries in The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, tracing how memory becomes mythology becomes survival strategy.

Memory in these works isn't nostalgia. It's the thing you're still inside.

Why the Past Won't Let Go

There's a practical reason memory dominates this kind of fiction: it's how people actually process intimacy.

You don't understand why you chose someone — or why you stayed too long, or why you froze when you should have spoken — until you look backward and see the pattern assembling itself. Childhood shows you what love is supposed to look like. Adolescence teaches you what happens when love doesn't deliver. And adulthood is just you walking through rooms that feel haunted by versions of yourself you thought you'd outgrown.

In Loverboy, Still, the narrator revisits his mother not because she was cruel — but because she was distant. That distance became the temperature he mistook for normal. Every woman after her either matched that coldness or provided the opposite, and both options carried consequences. Memory isn't the ornament in that dynamic. Memory is the dynamic.

This is why so much Brooklyn literary fiction resists forward momentum in favor of recursive structure. The story circles back. Re-examines. Finds new meaning in old wounds. Not because the writer is stuck — but because that's how understanding arrives. You don't get the lesson the first time something happens. You get it years later when the same feeling shows up wearing a different face.

The Audiobook and Memory's Voice

When I adapted Loverboy, Still into an audiobook, I had to make a decision about voice. The novel is narrated by Gregory Mitchell, the protagonist — a man revisiting his own romantic history with the clarity that only distance provides. That meant the audiobook needed to be performed in his voice, not mine. Gregory is the one telling the story. Gregory is the one sitting with the past long enough to make sense of it.

That distinction matters because memory isn't neutral. It's voiced. It has tone, pacing, bias. The way Gregory remembers his first girlfriend is different from how he remembers the woman who put her hands on him. Memory as structure means letting the narrator's consciousness shape what gets weight and what gets speed.

You can hear that in the first three chapters for free — the way the voice slows down for certain moments and rushes past others, not because those moments mattered less, but because that's how memory actually moves.

What Memory Gives the Reader

Memory-driven literary fiction does something film and television struggle with: it lets interiority lead.

You're not watching a character move through plot. You're inside their head while they try to make sense of why they moved the way they did. Roxane Gay does this in her essays — the way she revisits the same injuries from new angles until the shape of the thing finally becomes clear. Akwaeke Emezi does it in The Death of Vivek Oji — the way the novel spirals around a central loss, each chapter adding context until the loss becomes something else entirely.

What I wanted Loverboy, Still to do was give readers that same recursive experience. Not a linear love story with rising action and a clean ending. But a portrait of a man sitting with his own choices long enough to understand what they cost — and what they taught him.

That requires memory. Because understanding doesn't happen in real time. It happens later, when you're still enough to look back and say — oh. That's what that was.

Why This Matters for Black Literary Fiction

There's a reason so many Black writers working in literary fiction right now are structuring books around memory: because erasure is still the default.

If you don't write it down, it disappears. If you don't revisit it, it gets simplified. If you don't give it the complexity of recursive attention, someone else flattens it into a single narrative that was never yours to begin with.

Memory as structure is an act of preservation. It says: this happened, and it was complicated, and I'm going to sit with it long enough to get it right.

That's what I tried to do with Loverboy, Still. Write a Brooklyn story that didn't flatten its narrator into a type. That let memory do what memory does — loop, revise, complicate, clarify. That treated the past not as backstory but as the thing still shaping every choice the narrator makes in the present.

If you're drawn to literary fiction that moves like this — that trusts memory to be the architecture rather than the decoration — this book might be for you.

Get your copy and see how one man's past becomes the lens through which he finally understands what love cost him — and what it taught him.