Bret’s unresolved trauma over the events of 1981

Bret’s unresolved trauma over the events of 1981 shapes both his adult life and the form of his account: the past does not remain safely behind him, but returns through bodily crisis, abrupt reminders, and the repeated failure of deliberate forgetting. His attempts to narrate the year are interrupted for decades, until the book itself becomes a way to approach the memories he had tried to leave unwritten.

The first retreat from the past

As a nineteen-year-old, about a year after the events, Bret tried to begin a novel about his senior year at Buckley. He could not get as far as writing a word. Even gently recalling the people and what had happened—including what had happened to him—felt too unnerving, and he decided that his life did not need the added strain. For a time, forgetting seemed possible, so he shut down the project almost as soon as it began.

The retreat was bound up with a larger flight from the setting of the memories. After graduation, Bret left for the East Coast and lived in New York for more than twenty years, describing the move as an escape from the trauma of his final year in high school. The distance did not resolve the past; it postponed his encounter with it. In retrospect, the manuscript’s repeated return is inseparable from the effort to keep that year—and the people associated with it—out of reach.

The body interrupts the attempt to write

After moving back to Los Angeles, Bret believed he was stronger and better able to face the past. He began making notes about the autumn of 1981, using tequila to steady himself as he worked. Instead, he suffered a severe panic attack. While writing about the Trawler, the serial killer whose history was frighteningly connected to Bret’s circle, he became overwhelmed by memories and collapsed. He called emergency services, believing he was having a heart attack, and was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

At the hospital, Bret understood the episode as a response to memory rather than a physical illness. The memories were not confined to the Trawler: he connected the attack especially to Robert Mallory and to the wider group and events of that year, including Matt Kellner, Susan Reynolds, Thom Wright, and Deborah Schaffer. Although doctors wanted him to stay overnight for further tests, he chose to leave, convinced that remaining there would make him feel as though he were slipping into madness. He abandoned the project again.

The crisis did not end with the hospital visit. Bret later describes seven years of pervasive anxiety that alienated people around him and contributed to a forty-pound weight loss. He sought help from several therapists but found that he had to soften or rearrange his account of the past to keep the sessions from being disrupted by its horror. A therapist he saw weekly for a year was, in his telling, the first not to fear what he was describing. The need to make the story more palatable reveals how difficult it remained for Bret to find a listener who could bear its full weight.

Reminders, recurrence, and failed distance

The trauma returned with particular force years later when Bret recognized a former school friend outside the Palihouse Hotel in West Hollywood. He had not seen her in nearly forty years. Rather than approaching her, he froze in traffic, overcome by dread; the encounter made the events of 1981 feel real again and reminded him that their lives were still bound by that autumn. He drove on with Todd, but the sight had already brought the fear back.

A song on the car radio deepened the return. “Vienna,” which Bret associated with parties and mixtapes from that period, recalled the way he and his friends had used music to mark their lives. He had believed that fiction written in his twenties, thirties, and forties had worked through the trauma. The sudden fear showed him that this belief had been premature: what he thought he had resolved without telling this particular story remained unresolved.

During the following week in Palm Springs, Bret slept only a few hours a night despite taking benzodiazepines. The memories followed him into the house on Azure Court, where he lay awake with mounting panic. This recurrence shows the limits of distance and adult stability: a brief sighting in Los Angeles could disrupt sleep and revive a fear that had seemed to belong to another decade.

Memory’s specific objects and scenes

The past also returned through objects that resisted Bret’s attempt to impose a new routine. After learning that Matt was gone, Bret tried to reorganize his life around exercise, school, and controlled habits, and resolved to ignore news about the Trawler. But he found a pair of white jockey shorts he had taken from Matt’s pool house in the pocket of his trousers. The garment recalled photographs shown to him by Matt’s father, which had made Matt’s death unmistakable. Rather than deal with the object, Bret hid it in a desk drawer he rarely opened.

A note from Matt’s desk, bearing the initials RM and a phone number, remained another trace of what Bret was trying to suppress. He carried it with him even as he tried to convince himself that the new schedule would erase memory and restore control. The shorts and the note serve different functions: one is buried out of sight, while the other stays close. Together they show that Bret’s resolve to make the past disappear cannot prevent its evidence from accompanying him.

Another memory returns through a recording of Matt’s final night. Listening to Matt’s fear and recognizing the fish from Matt’s aquarium in the episode, Bret realizes that what he is hearing is real, not acted or staged. The discovery transforms recollection into testimony: the recording makes him a witness to suffering he can neither dismiss as a performance nor safely absorb. His increasing fear as he listens echoes the way writing about the Trawler had earlier overwhelmed him.

Writing as confrontation, not erasure

Bret’s eventual return to the book follows another long interruption. After abandoning the project following the panic attack, he wrote two other books over the next thirteen years. The story began pressing back into his consciousness around 2019, and by 2020 he felt able to start The Shards. He describes the book as if it had announced itself to him, after years in which he had pushed away the memories and the people connected to them. Writing became necessary not because he had already mastered the past, but because avoiding it had itself become a persistent distraction.

The act of writing again carries a cost. As the book approached its ending, Todd disputed the truth of some events and found the material frightening enough that being near Bret became difficult. He sometimes left their home for days while Bret worked through old journals, lists, school-yearbook pages, and notes filled with song titles. After moving through particular passages, Bret sometimes drank gin and used medication to get through the distress, then returned to his office and listened to the music of the period for hours. The material was not transformed into a simple, finished account of recovery; writing brought the fear close again even as it gave Bret a sustained way to tell what he had long withheld.

The novel’s retrospective structure therefore makes belatedness part of the subject. The nineteen-year-old who could not begin, the adult whose notes brought on a medical emergency, and the older writer who finally completes the book occupy different moments, but none can simply discard the others. Bret’s trauma persists in what he avoids, in the memories that arrive without invitation, and in the difficult act of giving those memories a narrative form.