Pushing Boundaries: Radical Style and Nontraditional Form in Hannah Pittard’s We Are Too Many

How much time do I spend going over conversations in my head, replaying exchanges until I can make sense of them? What fragments, gathered while riding the downtown train or passing a couple on the sidewalk, stick with me and form themselves into the beginnings of a narrative? How often do I look at a situation, joyous or heartbreaking, and think, I can use this later? 

Writers work continuously to craft the dialogue in their scenes, noting down word choices that could bring their characters’ voices alive on the page. Sometimes those characters are imagined, but often they are us—our families, our lovers, our friends. In her memoir We Are Too Many, Hannah Pittard presents us with a portfolio of conversations. Written in three parts, Pittard records years worth of discussions leading up to, and following, her husband’s affair with her best friend. By intertwining the history of her friendship and her marriage—and the ways in which the two overlap and intersect—and by walking us through the details in close to real-time, she makes us viscerally experience the breakdown of both. She takes moments where one might wish to be a fly on the wall, and makes us, the readers, just that.

The first part of the memoir, “Remembered Conversations,” is structured as a script. Nonchronologically, the fragments of conversations in this first section—both real and imagined—paint a portrait of the relationships between Pittard, her now ex-husband, Patrick, and their best friend Trish, the paramour. Each exchange, rarely longer than a page, begins with set directions. It feels like one is watching a dark comedy unfold in a series of episodes. The directions at the beginning of each scene give, in a few sentences, an idea of what the speakers are doing at the time: talking on the phone, walking the dog, lying in bed. We see where they are and we are given a hint of the general mood. 

My favourite example of this comes somewhere in the middle of the section, “November 2015—Hannah Asks Patrick to See a Therapist”: 

“They’re in the kitchen. Why are they always in the kitchen when they fight? Patrick is on one side of the island. Hannah on the other. They are divided by an island. Hannah can’t stop thinking about the futility of this symbolism, and she wants to pull the thought from her skull like bubblegum from the sole of a shoe.”

The effect of this is a sort of close, third-person narration, which gives the reader the sense of being an objective observer. We as readers are never told what to think, but we are given the information and left to draw our own conclusions. Similarly, perhaps, to Hannah’s own feelings of learning about the affair and having to piece together how it happened and how, or if, she could have prevented it. We know from the first conversation what is going to happen— “July 2016—Hannah Discovers Her Husband is Having an Affair”—and the rest of Part One takes us back to various points in time that might explain or foreshadow this life-shattering event. We sit at the bar observing multiple tipsy heart-to-hearts where Hannah and Trish appear to bond. We also observe hypocrisies that become so apparent across different interactions with Trish. Take this phone text exchange (can it even be called an exchange?) when Trish learns that Hannah made out with someone she doesn’t “approve” of: 

Trish: What kind of piece of trash are you?

Trish: You disgust me. 

Trish: He was your student. 

Trish: Last year he was IN YOUR CLASS. 

Trish: He’s a baby. He’s a senior IN COLLEGE.

Trish: I’m so gnarled out right now. 

Trish: You’re sick.

Trish: Anything? Anything at all to say? 

We listen in on phone calls between Hannah and various members of her family. Some of her family members seem blissfully unaware, caught just as much off guard as Hannah herself. But her sister, a constant ally and advocate, saw it coming from the beginning: 

Hannah: Guess who’s having an affair.

Greta: Your horrible husband. 

Hannah: Ha! Yes! 

Greta: Wait. For real? 

Hannah: Guess with whom. 

Greta: The loser you insist on referring to as your best friend.

Hannah: Double ha! Yes, yes!

Greta: Oh, H… 

We see Hannah run into Patrick’s ex-wife, Holly, who warns her of certain red-flags, tendencies that we watch, like a forest fire, unfurl over time. We question if Holly has her best interest at heart. Who can be trusted? Is this foreshadowing, or a spurned previous lover? We encounter scenes like this and wonder, like Hannah must have, what the motive might be: 

Holly: You’ll end up paying for everything.

Hannah: I don’t know what you’re talking about. 

Holly: He’ll use you and then dump you. We went through my inheritance in a year. 

Hannah: We’re not together like that. 

Holly: I don’t get it. You’re not his type. 

Hannah: Okay. 

By skipping around in time and drawing different people into the narrative, Pittard presents a multifaceted view of the surrounding circumstances leading up to the affair. We see young Pittard’s naivety in both friendships and romantic relationships. We see the dynamics at play that make us want to call out and warn the young woman on the page. We see her sister actually warn her on multiple phone calls. We want so badly to stop the inevitable, but we are powerless. We can only watch it all happen. 

Part Two, “An Imagined Exchange,” is a switch to a more cerebral examination of what went wrong, an attempt to process the relationship—but not in any traditional way. This section begins as an internal monologue musing about what type of event might bring Hannah and Patrick back into contact, if any. Then we start to see the tense change—Pittard is addressing these thoughts to someone. We learn that “this someone” is Patrick. The section is written as if she were speaking to him. Then, the narrative is interrupted by the ghost of Patrick who still lives in Pittard’s brain: 

There you were, the old you, and I knew you hadn’t changed. It was comforting in its way, knowing you were still you. 

YOU: I disagree with much of how you’ve portrayed me.

Well, sure. Yeah. That makes sense. 

YOU: Don’t condescend to me.

Wherever I go, there I am.

These interruptions by another character complicate the narrator’s perspective in a fresh and unexpected way. By having an imagined Patrick call her out, disagree with her, and point out what he sees as inconsistencies or fallacies, Pittard is calling into question her own perception of how things played out, of where to place blame. 

YOU: Even now, you deny me any agency. Whether it’s intentional or not, whether you 

can even see it happening or [not]… I took care of myself before I met you.  

She is anticipating any possible criticism about her perspective at the same time. She sees in her own narrative the critiques a reader might have and any scepticism they might be bringing to her story. By doing this, she calls out the possibility that she could be an unreliable narrator before the reader might. 

The exchanges in this section also serve as an opportunity for closure. Pittard reminisces about good times she and Patrick had. She shows the sentimentality and tenderness that were nevertheless present in their relationship. “Do you remember our wedding?” she asks imaginary Patrick. 

“It was a great day. One of the greatest of my life,” he answers later. 

Even so, she refrains from glossing over any complicated feelings that come up. She points out that although it was a wonderful day, a happy memory, it was nevertheless still clouded by Trish. We see again that Trish was there from the start. 

Part Three, “A Coda in Pieces,” serves as a conclusion, an ending passage much like a coda in a musical arrangement. This section is structured as a series of short, numbered vignettes. These flashes of memory are more focused on the After, the emotional effects of the affair, which lead up to the present day. They also fill in some important historical information that might not have fit into the structure of the first two parts. We see how Pittard and Trish met for the first time, and learn of Pittard’s reflections on the beginning of their friendship. We learn the origins of Pittard’s eating disorder and how it manifested for years in the background, as well as the relapses that would have been happening during the stretches of time we read about in Part One. 

This section gives us a different kind of insight, a more direct look into Pittard’s thoughts and memories, from her own perspective rather than as an outside observer. The vignettes here are honest, raw, and emotionally vulnerable, like one of my favourite passages that comes near the end of the book under the heading “31.”: 

I like to say I have no regrets, but it’s not true. Because I’d give almost anything to go back—to any one of those moments—to the man at the table full of men or to the female doctor who wouldn’t sterilize me because she didn’t think I—at age thirty—could have known my own mind or to Patrick when he was explaining why it wasn’t a big deal that he’d gone alone to see Lucinda Williams with an attractive, single woman from his workshop and then gone out after, still just the two of them, until three in the morning—and be rude.

My god, to go back and be rude, just once. What a pleasure. 

In We Are Too Many, Hannah Pittard restructures our idea of a memoir into something totally innovative. She takes what we think of as a memoir’s structure and flips it on its head, creating a form that is entirely her own. Within these new parameters, Pittard presents a narrative of an  extramarital affair like none we have ever seen. She gives us a sampling of the complexity of human relationships. She shows us the red-flags, the missed opportunities, the beautiful moments, and the mistakes that make up each of these connections, both within a marriage and outside of it. She shows us all the angles and all the wounds, both open and healed. 

“In grad school, my peers constantly accused me of writing personal essays disguised as fiction by way of the third-person pronoun,” Pittard writes in the book’s introduction. “‘This is you,’ they’d say. ‘This is you. This is you. This is you.’”

 In We Are Too Many, Hannah throws off the guise of fiction and drops the reader, sometimes uncomfortably, into a series of memories. She takes the idea of the personal essay and runs with it, turning it into so much more than just an essay. She takes scenes from her history and makes us, the reader, experience them alongside her. We Are Too Many is a masterpiece of craft. It is an intimate portrait of a writer and of a life, and we, the readers, are unable to look away.