Nonfiction by Jason Irwin, reviewed by Emily Webber
THESE FRAGMENTS I HAVE SHORED (Apprentice House)

When Jason Irwin’s memoir, These Fragments I Have Shored, reached me, I was tempted to set it aside; I already had a massive to-be-read pile. But I decided to read the first page before adding it to the stack. 

“Jay! Jay!” my mother howled from the back bedroom. I woke and ran to find her coiled in a fetal position at the foot of her bed. 

“You better get this body out of here,” she commanded. “I died an hour ago.”

I was about to reach out to her, to brush her hair away from her face, and try to calm her. Instead, I pulled back and stood staring at what she’d become. Purple veins, like dried-up tributaries, spread across the sallow topography of her chest. The twin peaks of her clavicle threatened to puncture her skin with each labored breath. Her dark doe eyes held me in their watery gaze, boring into me, feral and pleading.

“What are you talking about?” I snapped. “You’re not dead!”

Instantly I realized how bothered I sounded, how annoyed. My mother was dying and all I cared about was getting enough sleep. (1)

From that powerful opening, Irwin weaves together two central narratives. He balances the month he spends caring for his mother, Audrey, as she dies of cancer against his own childhood struggles with life-threatening birth defects, when his mother advocated for him through many office visits, hospital stays, and procedures. They have a genuine closeness and friendship, calling themselves the crime-fighting duo. Yet Irwin also shows that they cannot fully understand or help each other with everything. Irwin’s mother struggles with her desire to remain independent and the long-lasting trauma from her own childhood. While Irwin must navigate a new role as a caregiver after gaining his independence without feeling like he is abandoning his mother.

Throughout his childhood, Irwin’s mother was his advocate, companion, and friend during endless medical appointments, all while raising him as a single mother. But they both also craved independence. For Irwin, this meant living independently despite his health challenges and figuring out how to navigate a world in which he’s different from others. His mother, on the other hand, desperately wanted to stay in her apartment without assistance even when poverty and sickness made it impossible. 

Suddenly, because of his mother’s diagnosis, they find themselves living together again. Rather than flattening their lives into medical tragedy, Irwin presents his mother in full detail. He honors her resilience but also captures her prickly nature: her irritation with doctors, her persistent smoking, her refusal to indulge bedside visitors. He doesn’t turn himself into a saint either, confessing the ways he lashed out at others and his impatience with being a caregiver.

A practicing poet, Irwin borrows the memoir’s title from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land“: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins / Why then Ile fit you…” Irwin gathers fragments of his past and present to make sense of his life. In stitching these pieces together, a clear pattern of survival emerges for mother and son—one built on reading and writing, fierce mutual loyalty, and shared dark humor. The fragmented style gives Irwin permission to tell this story:

All our stories are peppered with half-truths and inconsistencies and, like my parents, I, too, am riddled with prejudices and contradictions. All I can offer is what I can remember, what I’ve witnessed and felt, and what I’ve been told. (225)

We cannot know the entirety of someone’s story, Irwin indirectly tells us. This shows up most strikingly in his relationship with his grandmother as compared to his mother’s relationship with her. His grandmother provides Irwin with support, encouragement, and comfort. She’s a steadying presence in his life. Yet, after she dies, he learns of the abuse and neglect his mother and uncle endured as children. 

The treatment of religion as an evolving, living belief system threads through this book. Audrey starts out as Catholic, and throughout her dying days, she clutches and prays her rosary. But Irwin shows the more complicated reality of belief over the course of a lifetime. Audrey shifts churches, stands up to a nun who insists he shouldn’t be at school but institutionalized, and sees the ghost of her grandfather, other family members, and strangers. In one of the most moving scenes, his mother calls a priest to her house—even though she hasn’t attended mass in decades—because she’s hearing footsteps running on the basement stairs. She tells the priest all her trauma, including finding her mother in the basement with a noose around her neck.

When Father Dennis finally spoke, he told my mother that the person she heard running up the stairs was her younger self. “It’s you, and you’re still running,” he said. Before leaving, Father Dennis told my mother she had to not only forgive her mother, but herself as well.

In this scene, and throughout These Fragments I Have Shored, Irwin beautifully blends the uncanny and the mundane. This memoir contains grit and heart in just the right combination. 

When I first read that beginning paragraph, I immediately snapped a picture and texted it to my friend. His own mother is battling bone cancer and dementia. He’s suddenly thrown into the role of a caregiver. My own words had felt so shallow, and this was a way to finally say to him: I see you. I understand what you’re going through.

Isn’t that one of the joys of reading? To understand someone better, to make someone feel a little less alone in their own situation. This is exactly what Jason Irwin’s beautiful memoir does. 

These Fragments I Have Shored by Jason Irwin was published by Apprentice House on May 05, 2026.

Emily Webber is a writer of criticism, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Rain Taxi, the Ploughshares blog, The Rumpus, Writer magazine, America Magazine, and elsewhere. She’s the author of a chapbook of flash fiction, Macerated.