Trauma and Memory

Traumatic memory in The Shards is a delayed return rather than a recollection the narrator can summon and master. The events of Bret Ellis’s senior year at Buckley in 1981 remain active decades later: attempting to write about them brings on acute panic, while a chance sighting of Susan Reynolds and the return of period songs reopen the past. The novel makes memory consequential in both body and narrative. Forgetting offers temporary relief, but the effort to give the past a coherent account repeatedly exposes what has not been resolved.

The wound and the first failed attempt to write

Bret presents the novel itself as a dream whose return has to be endured. He first tried to write about his final year at Buckley in 1982, a year after the events, when he was nineteen. Even gently remembering the people he had known and what had happened to them proved too unnerving; he abandoned the project before writing a word and forced himself to forget that period. He had left for New York after graduation, fleeing the trauma of that last year, and for a time the distance made avoidance possible.

Returning to Los Angeles did not make the material easier to face. In 2006, at forty-two, Bret began making notes about the autumn of 1981, believing he could steady himself with tequila. Instead, the work triggered a severe anxiety attack. He called emergency services, believing he was having a heart attack, and was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Although a doctor found him basically well, the hospital proposed overnight tests; Bret chose to leave because he understood the crisis as a reaction to memory, not as a bodily illness that those tests could explain.

The writing that provoked the attack concerned the Trawler and his connection to the people Bret had known. Bret identifies the memories of the Trawler, Robert Mallory, and the past with Matt Kellner, Susan Reynolds, Thom Wright, and Deborah Schaffer as the source of the panic. The present-day body becomes the site where a history Bret had tried to suppress insists on being recognized. The episode therefore establishes a central tension: the narrative is a deliberate act of recall, but recall is not fully subject to the narrator’s control.

Avoidance, return, and the body’s response

After the 2006 episode, Bret abandoned the book and wrote two other books over the next thirteen years. The old story receded into what he describes as a dark corner, and avoiding it worked for a time. Its return began around 2019; by 2020, he felt able to start The Shards, though he also frames that change as the book announcing itself to him. The delay matters: willingness to write is not proof that the earlier trauma has been worked through, but a new stage in a long struggle with it.

A later encounter with Susan Reynolds made that unfinished past newly immediate. While driving near the Palihouse Hotel in West Hollywood, Bret recognized her on the sidewalk after nearly forty years without seeing her. He did not stop or approach her. He froze in traffic, and the sight of her brought back the fear associated with 1981. His brief explanation to his partner, Todd, that he had seen someone he knew could not convey the force of the recognition. The encounter made the old events feel real in the present again, while leaving Bret uncertain about what Susan herself now felt or remembered.

Music carries the same double force. During the drive, the radio played Ultravox’s “Vienna,” a song associated with parties and mixtapes in 1981. Its recurrence did not simply provide a nostalgic frame; it returned Bret to a fear he had believed he could manage. Later, while writing, he listened repeatedly to music from that period, including “Nowhere Girl,” “Icehouse,” and “Time for Me to Fly.” Songs once associated with transformation and leaving childhood behind came to sound, in retrospect, like expressions of desire, rejection, and flight. Their changed meaning registers the distance between the teenager’s hope of entering a new life and the adult’s recognition that the past remains unresolved.

Objects, public stories, and what cannot be erased

The narrative also gives memory material form. Decades later, Bret orders a reproduction of the 1982 Buckley yearbook, Images, for ninety-nine dollars. Its cinematic theme and polished senior portraits present an image of youthful identity that conflicts with what followed. Looking through the class pages, Bret counts five missing seniors among the sixty students; three appear in the In Memoriam section. The yearbook cannot restore those who are absent. Its ordered pages instead make absence countable and show how an official-looking record can preserve a version of the past while exposing what that version leaves out.

In the events of 1981, the Trawler’s crimes likewise become knowable only gradually. Before the killer had been publicly named, investigators’ private nickname and a leaked memo eventually shaped the press account; the connection between the disappearances and the home invasions emerged over time. The gap between what was happening and what the teenagers could understand gives the later recollection its unsettled quality: details that once seemed separate become parts of a pattern only in retrospect. The Trawler’s letter, published by the Los Angeles Times, added information about his actions and referred to Robert as “the God,” while insisting that Robert was not responsible for the crimes. The disclosure changed how Bret could understand the events, but it did not make his memories simple or complete.

A more private object links memory to an immediate loss. After learning from Ronald Kellner’s photographs that Matt Kellner was gone, Bret found the white jockey shorts he had taken from the pool house in his own pocket. He put them in a desk drawer he rarely opened, rather than deciding what to do with them. He also kept a paper bearing the initials RM and a phone number. The shorts and note do not resolve Matt’s fate; they mark how the past persists in things Bret has carried away and cannot readily discard. His new routine, by contrast, is designed to suppress such reminders and make the future feel controllable.

Forgetting as a strategy—and a limit

At school, Bret turns that desire for control into a plan. After sleeping through the night following a traumatic afternoon, he decides to behave as if the previous day had not happened. He resolves to reduce his drinking and stop using drugs, structure his mornings around exercise and school, and ignore news of the Trawler. He also tells himself to stop thinking about Matt and Ryan Vaughn. The routine does provide temporary relief: following it makes the next day easier. Yet its calm depends on avoidance, not on the past having been settled. Even as he tries to erase Matt from his mind, the clothes and the note remain with him.

The adult narrator likewise describes the costs of managing the story for others. During a prolonged period of anxiety, he saw several therapists and learned to downplay the horror of what had happened so that sessions would be more palatable. A later therapist, whom he saw weekly for a year, was the first he describes as unafraid of what he told him. The contrast suggests that silence is not simply an individual choice: the listener’s capacity to hear the account affects whether it can be told without being rearranged. Bret’s difficulty is not only remembering, but finding a form of telling that does not require concealing the very facts the memory carries.

Writing as witness, not cure

When Bret finally writes the book, the act remains difficult for the people around him. Todd disputes the veracity of some events that Bret insists occurred, leaves the condo for days while Bret writes, and sometimes stays in motels. Bret, meanwhile, drinks more than usual, uses medication, and listens for hours to songs from the period. The writing reopens the material rather than converting it into a safely finished past. Bret’s return to the story can be understood as a form of witness and attempted reckoning, but the evidence does not present writing as a simple cure.

That unresolved quality gives the novel its temporal structure. A sighting in adulthood, a yearbook page, a song, or an item of clothing can make 1981 present again, while the later narrator supplies meanings the teenager could not yet have. The movement between experience and retrospective interpretation lets the reader see both the original confusion and the adult’s effort to connect it. Memory is therefore neither a transparent record nor a past that disappears once it is narrated. The story’s central achievement is to show the cost of that persistence: Bret can return to what happened and tell more of it, but telling does not erase the fear, the losses, or the gaps that made him avoid the story in the first place.