The Molly Fire is an unconventional book. More anthropological than a memoir, too fragmented for any strong narrative lifeline, this book is a miscellany in the best, most exploratory and curious sense of the word.

Photographer, filmmaker, and author Michael Mitchell is no stranger to the peculiar. His last work, Monsters, first published in 1979 and reprinted by ECW Press in 2002, is an appreciation of New York photographer Charles Eisenmann’s portraits of circus performers and, for lack of a better word, freaks. But unlike Eisenmann’s subjects, the subjects of The Molly Fire – mostly Mitchell’s father, John, and mother, Molly – are very normal. Their small triumphs and gentle defeats and sweet eccentricities could be found in any family’s attic or buried in the back of any suburban garage.

The peculiarities of this book lie in the presentation: it is episodic to the extreme. The small fragments of text, some only a paragraph, move scattershot through time and space. A boy in one fragment, Mitchell may have a son of his own in the next, and may be nothing but a glimmer in his parents’ eyes in a third. Sometimes themes connect the fragments, sometimes not. In parts the book is a meditation, in others a memorial. Sometimes the fragments are overwritten, with Mitchell too earnestly imposing his adult sensibilities on his young self, and perhaps doing more inventing than remembering.

This technique often works. One episode about buying a bell in India is fully realized and quite beautiful. Another about Jean Chrétien is very funny. Often the text has the quality of a scrapbook, with programs and recipes and letters stuck between family snapshots. The effect can be disorienting, but in a good way, like dreaming or remembering.

Another striking aspect is the book’s selection of images: rich, clear colour plates, mostly of Mitchell’s own photography, complement many episodes, and small, bulleted line illustrations begin each fragment of text. These images have their own subtle cadence and make it easy to forgive any flaws in the tone or organization of the prose. And that’s the most peculiar thing about The Molly Fire: that all these little stories and pictures and scraps of the past that we all have at the bottom of boxes in our closets and attics can be assembled into something so definitively whole, and that all these little episodes, put together, are beautiful and meaningful, if only someone wants them to be.