In Falling Through Space: The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist, the author, a novelist and short-story writer, collected a number of miscellaneous pieces that were originally broadcast on National Public Radio, or published in various magazines. The radio pieces constituted a running journal in which autobiography, discussion of her work, and reflections on personal concerns are featured. The selections are arranged in three sections: Origins, Influences, and Work. But, Gilchrist has also included a fourth section: 24 pages of black-and-white photographs that show, primarily, earlier generations of her family, her childhood and youth, and a small number of later pictures. These pictures sometimes tell a different story from the ones conveyed in the written parts of the book.
The photographs truly constitute a separate section of the book, on a par with the others, because all the parts of the journals comment on, and inform, the other sections. Childhood feelings about the places where she grew up come through in the choice of writers and artists who influenced her. In the same way, childhood story ideas are still being developed forty years after they first occurred to Gilchrist. The photographs serve the book in much the same fashion. Rather than merely illustrating the texts, they offer a separate version of Gilchrist's autobiography--one that interacts on an equal basis with the other sections of the journal.
One excellent example of how the interaction between text and pictures takes place is the matter of Gilchrist's appearance. In several of the later "entries," Gilchrist talks about weight and weight loss, self-perception, and susceptibility to fashionable ideas of what a woman should look like. None of this is particularly interesting, however, because it has all been said before. As she herself notes, one of her characters said in an earlier book, that it was her destiny "to start a fad for getting fat" (97). ...