Electric Literature Publishes Third Installment of Nelly Reifler’s Intimate Essay Series on Trauma, Memory, and Survival

Electric Literature has published the third and final installment of Nelly Reifler’s essay series “Blue Spark,” bringing to a close a fragmented, deeply personal account of life altered by overlapping tragedies. The essay, presented as Chapter III, continues Reifler’s sustained reflection on marriage, the killing of Billy, and the psychic fallout of September 11, while also looking back on the disappearance of the singer Elliott Smith from her life and imagination. It is part memoir, part reckoning, and part study in how the mind reorders itself under pressure.

The new installment returns to New York after Reifler has spent two weeks at a farm, only to find herself overwhelmed by the post-9/11 atmosphere and by the feeling that death is no longer abstract. She describes a body and mind in crisis: dizziness, vomiting, guilt, shame, and the sense that she should have been on United Flight 93. The essay suggests that survival itself becomes hard to process, not as triumph but as a bewildering condition that leaves her feeling as though she has been handed an “extra” life she did not know how to inhabit.

That tension runs through the essay’s account of trauma in New York City. Reifler portrays the city as a place where visible distress no longer stands out because so many people are similarly shaken. In that atmosphere, her behavior grows increasingly unmoored. She drinks, smokes again, drives recklessly, and feels sudden, intense affection for strangers. The piece does not treat these responses as simple self-destruction; instead, it presents them as symptoms of a mind trying to improvise a way to continue living after a sequence of shocks.

The essay also extends its attention to Reifler’s marriage to Noah, whose own response to the period is marked by withdrawal and obsession. He returns to painting, working in an unheated studio in Red Hook, where the winter cold, industrial decay, and debris from the terrorist attack shape the landscape around him. Reifler describes their relationship as strained by grief, distance, and mismatched movement through the world, even down to their recurring fights about walking speed. The marriage becomes part of the same emotional terrain as the other losses: present, damaged, and difficult to remember clearly.

Memory itself is one of the essay’s central subjects. Reifler says she cannot recall her wedding ceremony, and the blank space where that shared moment should be troubles her. She turns to an image of a water-meter whirligig to explain how her mind worked in the months after the wedding, Billy’s death, and September 11: first spinning wildly, then slowing but never fully stopping. That metaphor gives the series its shape, suggesting that trauma is not a single event but an ongoing mechanical motion, one that changes speed rather than simply ending.

The final part of the installment turns to acts of speaking and remembering as if they were urgent moral tasks. Reifler says she lost her filters and began telling people how much they meant to her, including a writer friend who was struggling and avoided contact. She also revisits Mahnaz, whom she remembers as generous and warmly affectionate, and Billy, whom she had known for years and whose death forced another round of retrospective grief. The essay closes by showing how Reifler’s desire for a second wedding ceremony, one in which she might actually remember her vows, reflects a larger wish: to recover enough continuity of self to hold onto love, loss, and witness at once. For readers and publishing audiences, the series stands out as a formal and emotional experiment in serial memoir, using repetition and return to trace the long aftermath of catastrophe rather than its immediate event.