Of all the pleasant and painful memories that we welcome or carry heavily, many of them involve food. It is not always the main character, like a particularly memorable meal at a nice restaurant or that time we got food poisoning, but the ones lingering somewhere in the periphery, occasionally conjured by thoughts of something seemingly unrelated. Some are nebulous, like drifting fog, moving in and out and dissolving away. The ones that settle in can do so because they are so pleasant as to be unforgettable, or because they are the nasty bits that petrify into dense chunks destined to stay with us for a long time, sometimes forever.
without it we die is an ongoing experiment using hypertext to construct a narrative around the complicated relationship between gen-x childhood, family, food, and memory. Much like a choose your own adventure, you can click any linked text at will and be taken to a short story, each contributing to a bigger story, and similar to memories, they emerge, sometimes coalescing into a deeper understanding, or are forgotten. As an ongoing work-in-progress, this project will change and evolve as new stories and links are added.
The title refers to food and to our collective experience of it, because as humans, we all require it. What else do we need to survive? The stories allude to other life-giving sustenance: parental approval, love, sex, friendship, comfort and safety, the agency to invite pleasure, recoil from the abject, or to leave some metaphorical food on our plates and push it away when we’ve simply had enough.