Structure

The Unreality of Memory is a collection of 13 titled essays. The collection is organized into three parts. Part One contains the essays “Magnificent Desolation,” “Doomsday Pattern,” “Threats,” “Big and Slow,” and “The Great Mortality.” Part Two contains the essays “The Little Room (Or, The Unreality of Memory),” “Vanity Project,” “Witches and Whiplash,” and “Sleep No More.” Part Three presents the essays “True Crime,” “I’m So Tired,” and “In Our Midst,” and “Epilogue: The Unreality of Time,” falls immediately following these latter works. Studying the curation of the essays in relationship to one another is vital to understanding the evolution of Gabbert’s overarching arguments, claims, and explorations.

All of the essays presented in Part One examine disasters, and the innate human response to such disasters. In “Magnificent Desolation,” Gabbert confesses that watching the “computer-animated re-creation of the sinking of the Titanic,” inspired her obsession with similarly...