NEURODIVERGENT NARRATIVES - CHAPTER 1: THE 6-WORD MEMOIR

Six Words to Hold a life

Once asked to write a full story in six words, legend has it that novelist Ernest Hemingway responded: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Here we are celebrating the literary form of the 6-word memoir as a radical reclaiming of our voices.

There’s a strange magic in a sentence that barely takes up a single line. A handful of words, no louder than a breath, can carry the weight of years: the years we were overlooked, the years we spent trying to sound normal, the years when the truth of who we were lived just beneath the surface. In this opening chapter, writers pare their stories down to the bone. Not to make themselves small, but to reveal what remains when the armour falls away: the moment of discovery, the ache of misrecognition, the stubborn pulse of hope. Six words that speak the kind of truth that doesn’t ask permission to exist.