An atmospheric, genre-bending memoir that transforms life’s smallest detours into profound moments of revelation
In It Happened. Make of It What You Will, Joanna Potepa resists tidy generic classification, blending memoir, travel writing, and personal essay into a mosaic of what she calls “still frames:” brief moments in which ordinary experience takes on unexpected significance.
Through a fragmentary structure that captures scenes of adolescent and married life as well as her travels across Spain, Portugal, Poland, and England, Potepa’s memoir is ultimately a book about movement and memory. Potepa offers a portrait of the artist as a flâneuse, navigating unfamiliar landscapes with an attention attuned to unexpected points of connection, however fleeting they may seem. Whether she is walking, driving, or wandering, Potepa reminds us not simply to be open to the promise of life’s detours but to notice and reflect on these quiet shifts before they disappear.
The vignettes collected here are haunting and addictive, not because they depict extraordinary events, but because they capture experiences that feel uncannily familiar—a welcome disruption to the monotonous, the increasingly inhuman corporate liturgy, the recognition of one’s own grief and routines in the life of another woman living countries away, or the realization that one’s life might easily have unfolded differently had one backed out of a parking space only seconds later.
Potepa has a gift for illuminating how such everyday moments can become revelatory, if only we grant them the attention and reflective space they deserve. Reading these pieces, one begins almost instinctively to inventory similar moments from one’s own life: a chance encounter, a missed turn, a seemingly insignificant interruption in a serious moment that acquires meaning only in retrospect.
Though her prose is often sparse, Potepa’s gift as a writer lies in her construction of atmosphere. She excels in rendering domestic spaces, capturing what it would feel like to inhabit the space with her, whether she is in “the kind of kitchen that makes you want to cook just because everything is where it should be” or sitting at a plastic table on the balcony of a flat that “still smelled like other people’s holidays—layers of perfume, sunscreen, something fried.” The most ordinary spaces acquire a painterly texture in these still frames, thanks to the evocative, emotionally charged nature of her descriptions.
The experience of the memoir continues through the supplemental materials on Potepa’s website, which are worth exploring. There, Potepa shares a private gallery of photographs connected to many of the moments described in the memoir alongside the artworks they later inspired. Seen together, the photographs, paintings, and prose reveal an artist working across multiple media to revisit the same moments from different angles, each illuminating the others. Yet the memoir never depends upon these visual counterparts. Potepa’s prose is itself capable of rendering landscapes, interiors, and fleeting emotional atmospheres with remarkable clarity, making the companion gallery less a necessary key than a rewarding extension of an already vivid artistic vision.
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