Mediating memory : tracing the limits of memoir [First published 2018.] 9781138092723, 113809272X, 9781315107349, 1315107341

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Mediating Memory

The argument has been made that memoir reflects and augments the narcissistic tendencies of our neoliberal age. Mediating Memory: ­Tracing the Limits of Memoir challenges and dismantles that assumption. ­Focusing on the history, theory, and practice of memoir writing, Editors Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph provide a thorough and cutting-­ edge examination of memoir through the lenses of ethics, practice, and innovation. By investigating memoir across cultural boundaries, in its various guises, and tracing its limits, the Editors convincingly demonstrate the plurality of ways in which memoir is helping us make sense of who we are, who we were, and the influences that shape us along the way. Bunty Avieson is a Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. Fiona Giles is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. Sue Joseph is a Senior lecturer in Journalism and Creative Writing at University of Technology Sydney.

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

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Mediating Memory Tracing the Limits of Memoir

Edited by Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-09272-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10734-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of Tables Introduction

ix 1

B unty Avieson , F iona G iles , and S ue J osep h

Section I

Craft

11

1 Memory’s Fracture: Instability in the Contemporary Memoir

13

M arie O ’ Rour k e

2 Teaching Memoir in Neoliberal Times

29

M egan B rown

3 The Ghost in the Memoir Machine: Exploring the Relationship between Ghostwritten Memoir and Biography

43

M att h ew R ic k etson

4 Re-Presenting Madness in the Form of a Quadrilogue

59

S imon C lar k e

Section II

Boundaries

75

5 The Other-Directed Memoir: Victim Impact Statements and the Aesthetics of Change

77

F iona G iles

6 After He Shot Arthur Calwell: Peter Kocan’s Use of the Second Person T ony Davis

91

vi Contents 7 Memoir for Your Ears: The Podcast Life

104

S iob h á n M c Hug h

8 The ‘I’ and the ‘Eye’: Mediated Perspective in the Documemoir

123

Kat h leen J . Waites

Section III

Sites

139

9 Eco-Memoir: Protecting, Restoring, and Repairing Memory and Environment

141

J essica W h ite

10 ‘Stories’: Social Media and Ephemeral Narratives as Memoir 157 Kylie C ardell , Kate D ouglas , and E mma M aguire

11 Memoir 2.0: The Writing of the Self as Brand

173

G eorgiana T oma

12 Travel Memoir and Australia: From Twain to Tracks and the Present Day

192

B en S tubbs

Section IV

Bloodlines

205

13 Holding the Memories: Death, Success, and the Ethics of Memoir

207

B unty Avieson

14 First-person Narratives and Feminism: Tracing the Maternal DNA

221

Kat h Kenny

15 To Begin to Know: Resolving Ethical Tensions in David Leser’s Patriographical Work S ue J osep h and C arolyn R ic k ett

237

Contents  vii 16 The Epistolary Thread as Collaborative Writing in Grief Memoir

251

F reya L atona

Section V

Recuperation

267

17 Happy, Funny, and Humane: South African Childhood Narratives Which Challenge the ‘Single Story’ of Apartheid

269

A nt h ea G arman

18 Redressing the Silence: Racism, Trauma, and Aboriginal Women’s Life Writing

284

W illa M c D onald

19 Lest We Forget: Mateship, Masculinity, and Australian Identity

299

J ac k B owers

20 Bridges across Broken Time: Armenian ‘Minor-Memoirs’ of the Turn of the 21st Century

315

G ü lbin Kırano ğ lu

Notes on Contributors Index

329 335

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List of Tables

4.1 Perspectives, data sources, and examples used in the quadrilogue 66 4.2 An example of the use of the quadrilogue in electroconvulsive therapy 68

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Introduction Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph

Memoirs are the most intimate of literary forms, revealing the lived experience and inner world of their writers, as they offer themselves with beguiling candor to their readers. As Theo Hobson writes, every memoirist is saying: ‘Judge me … and affirm my humanity’ (2014). Personal narrative dates from Saint Augustine’s Confessions in the 4th century, continuing through the 18th century with Jacques Rousseau, to the present, as an enduring mode of social and cultural revelation. Memoir now sits at the forefront of modern publishing across the English-speaking world where the genre ‘rivals fiction in popularity and critical esteem and exceeds it in cultural currency’ (Couser 2012, p. 3). Its current popularity arguably began in the mid-1990s with Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, demonstrating that not only well-known authors are rendering their personal stories to acclaim, but seemingly ordinary people also are finding audiences. Sportspeople, politicians, trauma survivors, and the marginalized are telling and sharing their experiences. Grief memoirs have become popular, exemplified by Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking in 2007, while in the health humanities, thanatology narratives are developing as a key therapy for those with terminal illness. We learn about ourselves through our stories, and through the stories of others. We actively seek out others’ stories, to know ourselves; to feel the resonances through time and space, across borders, cultures, and language. As William Zinsser writes: ‘…one of the deepest human impulses is to leave a record of what we did and what we thought and felt on our journey’ (2011). Reading those records often helps synthesize our own experiences, making sense of events that resonate. Unlike autobiography, which traditionally moves from birth to fame and beyond, memoir focuses on a time in the writer’s life that is significant in some way. The act of writing is solitary and introspective, undertaken with a multitude of idiosyncratic practices. There are overt links to the ‘other’ in some modes of writing, particularly nonfiction, but it can be argued that various forms, like fiction writing, are covertly relational. Situating memoir in between fiction and nonfiction on a spectrum, what is indisputable is its relational aspect – yes, it is your story to write, but never

2  Bunty Avieson et al. written in a vacuum. It may be your truth about your family, but your family will always be a different one to the one your sister or brother grew up in. Or even that your parents parented. It is a matter of perspective, and perspective will always be subjective. Thomas Larson writes of a ‘teeter-tottering’ in memoir between how we manage to live with ourselves and how we have lived our lives with others. He writes: ‘Not only people, but cultures, ideas, politics, religions, history and more.’ He calls it a ‘balancing act of the self in relation to the outer and inner worlds’ (2007, p. 23). As Couser writes: ‘Memoirs are, undeniably, artful … memoirs are just “texts”. They’re never the whole truth, never truth-ful. They’re errant, fallible, fictive human constructions…’ (2012, p. 168). His ‘truth-ful’ hyphen is heavily loaded but clear – write your truth, which will be fallible and subjective, but do not embellish or fabricate. Fabrication, conflation, and embellishment, without a waiver at the front of the text, lead to the rupture of an implicit contract between an author and his or her readers, one of trust in the written word. Discussion of ethics in writing is often polarizing. There is a notion encompassing the ruthlessness of writing: that everything and everyone is potential material. That anything less is self-censorship. At the other end of the dialogue is relational ethics or an ethic of care, and we argue that this must always matter, not to detract from the writing of your story, but as a philosophical framework. We are not discussing a defense-­ofdefamation reflex here but an integral impulse to cause as little harm and pain to others as possible, as an underlying rule. For writers of memoir, this presents a field of landmines. A closeness to the other means, as Eakin argues: ‘…our privacies are largely shared, making it hard to demarcate the boundary between where one life leaves off and another begins’ (Eakin 2004, p. 8). Where does your story begin and end? How can it be told without transgressing into the stories or truths of our intimate others? Couser claims it must be a counterbalance: ‘­Deliberation on the ethics of life writing entails weighing competing values: the desire to tell one’s story and the need to protect others, the obligation to tell truth and the obligations of trust’ (Couser 2004, p. 198). Throw personal trauma narrative into the mix, and the tensions become tauter. Writing into psychic wounds carries its own personal ethical and care labyrinth, but very often these works are an un-silencing of survivor testimony, important for empowering individuals and aiding in healing. They often perform as advocacy for other silenced people. The surge in trauma memoir – sometimes called misery lit or mis lit, misery memoirs, or mis mems, even misery porn – has its critics. William ­Zinsser defers to this escalation of form as a signifier of people’s desire to ingest ‘talk show syndromes.’ He writes its increase in volume: …has loosed a torrent of memoirs that are little more than therapy, the authors bashing their parents and wallowing in lurid details of

Introduction  3 their tussle with drink, drug addiction, rape, sexual abuse, incest, anorexia, obesity, codependency, depression, attempted suicide, and other fashionable talk show syndromes. (Zinsser 1998, p. 5) His analysis is clearly based on examples of poorly-crafted – perhaps full of extraordinary content – but poorly crafted texts. He lays the blame not at the feet of the author, but at the feet of the publisher. He writes: ‘The issue here is not whether so many bad memoirs should be w ­ ritten. It’s whether they should be published – let’s put the blame where it ­belongs – and whether, once published, they should be reviewed’ (2011). Zinsser counsels: There are many good reasons for writing your memoir that have nothing to do with being published. One is to leave your children and grandchildren a record of who you were and what heritage they were born into. Please get started on that; time tends to surprise us by running out. One of the saddest sentences I know is ‘I wish I had asked my mother about that’. (Zinsser 2011) Writing trauma narrative – indeed, reading trauma narrative – creates an intimate, collaborative space. Here, secrets are told; behaviors exposed; abuse named; shame shaken off. They reverberate and resonate. The echo of reading can help others speak up, can validate their ordeals, and as Zinsser writes: ‘…make you feel less alone’ (2011). There is a collaborative, communal linking to this form of writing. It often inspires, often astounds, mostly has people shaking their heads in wonder at the chances of survival. It always teaches us something. To be more vigilant; to be more aware; to be more humble or grateful. Miller and Tougaw write that this form of memoir has the ability to not only ‘expand the boundaries of identity construction and the contours of the self but also lay claim to potential territories of community’ (2002, pp. 2–3). They write how the singular ‘me’ evolves into the plural ‘us’ and that writing that ‘bears witness to the extreme experiences of solitary individuals can sometimes begin to repair the tears in the collective social fabric’ (ibid). As a form of truth-telling, memoir encourages ‘an extended conversation in a community too large to commune with itself’ (McCooey 1996, p. 25). All lives are intersubjective, and each memoir acts as social biography, providing an account of specific communities in marked historical periods. These can be as small and tightly contained as descriptions of families or illicit love, or as broad as nations snapshotted in specific moments of sociopolitical turmoil. By supplementing archives of personal papers and official documents, memoir brings a different kind of labor to our understanding of the past. Through a narrative shaping of events,

4  Bunty Avieson et al. characterization of actors, and other apparatus of story-making, memoir provides the tracings of memory at work, an ‘active memorialisation’ that reveals the nature of memory, and the palimpsest of collective experience (Velez 2014). Courses teaching the skills and techniques of memoir writing are in demand at universities and beyond. But scholars have been slow to pay attention, perhaps due to criticism that memoir merely reflects the narcissistic tendencies of our neoliberal age (Tolentino 2017). Yet teaching memoir may be ‘not only a provocative way to improve writing, reading and critical thinking abilities’ but also one of the most accessible ways for students to learn about ethics, and to critique the social forces that shape identity, ‘the cultural definitions of selfhood’ (Brown 2010, p. 123). Additionally, memoir as an object of academic inquiry has fallen through the cracks between disciplines, considered too solipsistic to qualify as literary journalism, yet too journalistic to qualify for literary analysis within autobiography studies. At the same time, literary journalism struggles to achieve acceptance within journalism studies on the one hand and literary studies on the other, for similar reasons, so that memoir, resting as it does on the edge of literary journalism, teeters on the brink of academic respectability. The uncertain status of contemporary memoirs as cultural artifacts might lead us to ask if they have been dismissed because they resemble the selfies of literary journalism. Selfies and memoirs are ­disparaged and celebrated along similar lines: the epitome of narcissism, or ­‘collective bursts of affect’ that bind communities (Frosh 2015; Velez 2014); apolitical sentimentalism or intimate publics with political dimensions; neoliberal hyper-individualism (Berlant 2008; Velez 2014), or empowering marginalized populations through shared self-portraiture (Senft  & Baym 2015). From a narrative perspective, memoir is either a case of New Journalism run amok or the most ethical reporting endeavor, documenting ordinary lives as transparently as possible while reaching broad audiences. As a narrative of the self, attracting millions of readers, is it the first example of niche media or the last example of mass media? Is it a low point in literary populism or a high point in citizen journalism? During a period of rapid change, it could be argued that ‘active memorialization’ is needed more than ever. Memoir casts temporal anchors of thoughtful retrospection into the rapids of a discursive public sphere that rushes past at an ever more dizzying rate. It invites us to encounter ‘alterity in non-threatening contexts of reading,’ to enact feminist care ethics, and to engage in what Boulous Walker calls slow reading, against the institution. As she writes, this is reading that embodies a love of wisdom over a desire to know and invites a ‘slow engagement with the “strangeness” or otherness of the world’ (Walker 2017, p. 4).

Introduction  5 By investigating memoir across cultural boundaries, in its various guises, and tracing its limitations, this book challenges the negative assumptions concerning the social, historical, and political value of this genre, made even more necessary by virtue of its popularity. Scholars from around the world who are experts in fields as diverse as clinical psychology, radio studies, digital media, pedagogy, and journalism, demonstrate the plurality of ways in which modern memoir is helping us make sense of who we were, who we are, and the influences that have shaped us along the way. Our objective is to show where facticity, public interest, and personal narrative converge, while acknowledging its overlapping literary and media inflections. The chapters place memoir in a modern context, exploring new dimensions and applications for this most intimate and enduring of genres. They draw connections, highlight intersections, and fill gaps, covering topics that include social media, mommy blogging, podcasting, victim impact statements, docudrama, ghostwriting, second person, and collaborative memoir, in addition to memoir’s more familiar forms. As a chance to read against the institution, memoir’s ambiguous s­ tatus may be, after all, an advantage. As Miller writes: ‘What resides in the province of the heart is also what is exhibited in the public space of the world. In this way, memoir … hesitates to define [its] boundaries…’ (1996, p. 2). The book is organized thematically, grouping essays that cover key aspects of memoir and its scholarship: craft, boundaries, sites, bloodlines, and recuperation.

Craft Marie O’Rourke explores the fallibility of memory, writing about ‘the complex relationship between memory, identity, imagination and story,’ and draws on contemporary neuroscience to understand memory as ‘a re-creation rather than a record of experience.’ Megan Brown considers her experience of teaching memoir and other autobiographical narratives as ‘spaces for critical thinking and for ­developing sociopolitical awareness.’ She argues that memoir provides ‘important counter narratives challenging neoliberal ideologies of autonomy, stoicism and competitiveness.’ Matthew Ricketson examines the complicated ethics of the ghostwriter-­ as-biographer who produces the memoir but whose role remains concealed. Using four high-profile case studies, he explores the role of what Crofts calls ‘the literary handmaiden’ (2004, p. 109) to show the implications of this ‘subterranean area of literary practice for both ­writers and readers.’ Simon Clarke introduces the idea of the ‘quadrilogue’ to capture the non-linear experience of madness and shows how four elements can work

6  Bunty Avieson et al. together to produce a multiperspectival artifact: first-person recollections of events, the author’s medical notes, a carer’s diary, and contemporary reflections on the data. The quadrilogue creates a dialogical narrative with implications for the transformation of mental health services.

Boundaries Fiona Giles considers the victim impact statement, taking it beyond its role in restorative justice, and arguing that it can be considered as a form of trauma memoir. Focusing on the compelling testimony by the survivor of the 2015 Stanford rape case, the chapter demonstrates how this form of personal narrative can attain an aesthetic status with broad sociopolitical significance. Tony Davis reviews how Peter Kocan’s linked novellas pioneered the use of the inherently unstable and shape-shifting second-person narrative voice to give an insider’s view of mental illness and disassociation. By heightening the effects of paranoia and the claustrophobia of institutional life, Davis argues that Kocan’s novella produces a richer reading experience than his first-person work. Davis also argues that the cloak of fiction gave Kocan freedom to describe his experience more openly, so the novellas become convincing, if unconventional, memoirs. Siobhan McHugh’s chapter surveys the evolution of audio memoir, from early audio diaries and edited interviews to polished longform storytelling such as the S-Town podcast (Reed 2017). It concludes that podcasting provides an excellent vehicle for the audio memoir, where the affective power of sound can add visceral force to the spoken word. If voice is the most compelling aspect of memoir, the podcast memoir lets us hear that voice with clarity, and immediacy. Kathleen Waites shows how the memoirist-documentarian wields the camera to persuade the viewer to align with and ‘see’ the subjectivity under construction in light of the life events recalled. But, she argues, the camera may also tell an unauthorized story. In the service of the autobiographical memoir, therefore, the documentary method and the cinematic Eye remind us of the complexity, as well as the hazards, of filmic self-representation.

Sites Jessica White examines eco-memoir in two examples: Tim Winton’s ­Island Home (2015) and Kim Scott’s and Hazel Brown’s Kayang and Me (2005). She explores how memory can describe the loss of an environment but also promote its recovery, and the implications for each writer’s identity. Her chapter argues that, alongside science, literary expressions of memory have an important role to play in raising awareness of the sustainable use and protection of our environment.

Introduction  7 Kate Douglas, Kylie Cardell, and Emma Maguire show how forms of digital self-representation used by young people to communicate with their peers produce life narratives that are personal, relational, public, and private (sometimes all at once). They argue that young people’s use of Snapchat and Instagram demonstrates how their desires, adaptations, and patterns of use are key drivers of the development of technologies for self-narration. The self-deleting image allows for a self in flux, not responsible to an archive of past selves, and evading potential embarrassment for a future self. Georgiana Toma looks at mommy blogs as a memoir 2.0 genre and discusses the rhetorical strategies of self-disclosure and scriptotherapy they employ to foster trust in the authenticity and integrity of their brand. The chapter studies the case of one of the most successful mommy bloggers and analyzes her capability to render events in temporal proximity to real life. This is enhanced by photographic, audio, and video evidence that supports the text and triggers a referential illusion impossible to replicate in any print antecedents. Ben Stubbs’ chapter demonstrates the new depths possible within hybrid travel memoir. He looks at its evolution from works by Mark Twain to Robyn Davidson and Don Watson, tracing the progression of the genre from Twain’s self-centered imperialism to Davidson and Watson’s cultural self-awareness.

Bloodlines Bunty Avieson addresses the complicated ethics of posthumous memoir which makes a truth claim in circumstances where the author cannot be held to account. Tensions of memory fallibility, perspective, and issues of who ‘owns’ the rights to their story are heightened in the highly charged state of grief. Using the case of Timothy Conigrave’s award-winning book Holding The Man, Avieson demonstrates how these tensions are further complicated by two factors: death and success. Kath Kenny examines a new version of celebrity feminism where authors’ life stories are foregrounded. Using two first-person accounts, she argues that the personal story, once harnessed by Second Wavers to build a movement, now is used to build a personal brand. As contemporary forms of consciousness raising, these stories provide readers with consolation and relief. But where they once were used to interrogate problems in women’s social worlds, contemporary feminist stories emphasize individual choice, adaptation and personal transformation. Sue Joseph and Carolyn Rickett examine the ethical tensions for authors negotiating the intersections between self and other, and proprietorial entitlement. They focus on the method in which author David Leser navigates tensions as journalistic investigator and dutiful son in constructing a patriography. Increasingly, with the heightened awareness of

8  Bunty Avieson et al. vulnerable subjects and familial allegiances, harm minimization is often a consideration constraining narration. Leser navigates this tricky ethical terrain by enmeshing his father’s story with his own, bridging a tacit gap between father and son. Freya Latona’s chapter further illuminates some of the ethical problems in writing relational memoir, specifically those about motherloss. She examines whether epistolary co-authoring can bring a therapeutic dimension, as well as an ethical framework, to the composition of grief memoir. Addressing the question, ‘How do we obtain permission to write about the other when they are dead?’ Latona argues that including letters, emails, and other forms of text, gives them a voice. This epistolary thread can be used as a methodology to write collaboratively in relational memoir.

Recuperation Anthea Garman’s chapter resists the ‘single story’ that childhood under Apartheid was entirely without joy or fun. She reaches across a political gulf to explain why childhoods in South Africa might yet have been vivid and extraordinary, especially when the author is black. To write one’s story as a ‘small’ person is to assert an individualism that breaks ranks with the account of collective oppression and asserts a brand of heroism writing into history the importance of the ‘ordinary’ individual who may not feature in larger narratives. Willa McDonald looks at works by three Indigenous women writers which have played a significant role in breaking the silences that exist around the lives of Australia’s First Peoples under European Settlement. These texts respectively tackle overlapping yet distinct themes, broadening western notions of individual memoir to include collective and oral traditions, contributing to a long-term public dialogue about Indigenous history and politics. Jack Bowers examines the role of national narratives in creating context for gender relations and social attitudes. He analyzes memoirs written by three Australian men raised by fathers whose lives were framed by a masculinist discourse of mateship in war and struggles against adversity. He demonstrates how a national identity which is fundamentally misogynist, violent, and controlling, has sent ripples of trauma across generations. Gülbin Kiranoğlu’s chapter looks at memoirs recounting Armenian experiences of displacement, discrimination, and othering that led to their minoritization. There have been few attempts to examine this witnessing literature generically and to illuminate the relationship between the politics of remembering and the formation of a minority literature. She argues that the impact of writing which recounts the marginalization of Armenians (as well as Christian and Jewish peoples) in modern Turkey

Introduction  9 has played a significant role in forming a counter memory through the genre of memoir. These essays show the myriad ways memoirs contribute to our understandings of ourselves as individuals and communities. The shape-­ shifting forms explored – from online identities to radio podcasts – are a testament to its adaptability, while scholarly arguments for including victim impact statements and even fiction as memoir, are powerfully provocative. Examining the ethics of ghostwriting, posthumous representation, and memory fallibility is important in a modern context, as the memoir continues to demonstrate its influence as a discursive force. These essays demonstrate that its relevance extends across all areas of experience, from the realpolitik of nation building to the minutiae of domestic relationships – and how all are infused with both public and private significance.

References Berlant, L. 2008, The female complaint: The unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture, Duke University Press, Durham. Brown, M. 2010, ‘The memoir as provocation: A case for “me studies” in undergraduate classes’, College Literature, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 121–42. Conigrave, T. 1995, Holding the man, Penguin Books Australia, Victoria. Couser G. T. 2004, Vulnerable subjects: Ethics and life writing, Cornell University, New York. Couser G. 2012, Memoir: An introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Crofts, A. 2004, Ghostwriting, A & C Black, London. Didion, J. 2007, The year of magical thinking, Knopf, New York. Eakin, P. J. 2004, The ethics of life writing, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Frosh, P. 2015, ‘The gestural image: The selfie, photography theory and kinesthetic sociability’, International Journal of Communication, vol. 9, pp. 1607–28. Hobson, T. 2014, ‘Why Christianity was the wrong civil religion for Rousseau’, The Guardian, viewed 9 June 2017, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/ feb/10/christianity-wrong-civil-religion-rousseau. Karr, M. 1995, The liars’ club, Penguin, New York. Larson, T. 2007, The memoir and the memoirist, Ohio University Press, Athens. McCooey, D. 1996, Artful histories: Modern Australian autobiography, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. McCourt, F. 1996, Angela’s ashes, Scribner, New York. Miller, N. 1996, Bequest and betrayal: Memoir of a parent’s death, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Miller, N. & J. Tougaw (eds.) 2002, Extremities: Trauma, testimony, and community, University of Illinois Press, Champaign. Saint Augustine 2009, St Augustine’s confessions, Classic Books America, New York. Scott, K. & H. Brown, 2005, Kayang and me, Fremantle Arts Press, Fremantle. Senft, T. M. & N. K. Baym, 2015, ‘What does the selfie say? Investigating a global phenomenon’, International Journal of Communication, vol. 9, pp. 1588–606.

10  Bunty Avieson et al. S-Town. Brian Reed, Serial Productions, 2017, podcast audio, https://stownpod cast.org/. Tolentino, J. 2017, ‘The personal-essay boom is over’, New Yorker, viewed 26 May 2017, www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-personal-essayboom-is-over. Velez, E. 2014, ‘Intimate publics and ephemerality, snapchat: A case study’, The Second Shift: Academic Feminism after Hours, 15 September, viewed 18 May 2017, www.secondshiftblog.com/author/evelez/. Walker, M. 2017, Slow philosophy: Reading against the institution, Bloomsbury, London. Winton, T. 2015, Island home: A landscape memoir, Hamish Hamilton, Melbourne. Zinsser, W. (ed.) 1998, Inventing the truth, the art and craft of memoir, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. Zinsser, W. 2011, ‘The right to write’, The American Scholar, February 18, viewed 1 May 2016, https://theamericanscholar.org/the-right-to-write/#.

Section I

Craft

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1 Memory’s Fracture Instability in the Contemporary Memoir Marie O’Rourke

The sudden death of my sister remains one of the pivotal events in my life, yet it comes to me only in flashes and fragments. Each time I write, talk, or even think about those days, I recall something extra, or slightly altered from the narrative I’ve previously known. I remember the pause in the voice, telling me, ‘you need to hurry, it’s not looking good.’ I  remember the sight of my father’s dirty hand clasping Mia’s bruised and limp one, the tangle of tubes and wires denying him a firm grasp. I ­remember the sickening smell of lilies, not enough vases in my home to hold the bright bouquets of condolence. My life, like most, is one of small successes and tragedies, the stories I tell myself and intimates of little import in the wider scheme of things. But as a writer and scholar of memoir, I have become increasingly fascinated with the gaps, silences, and inconsistencies in what I remember, and determined to somehow bring that sense of mutability to the page. Taking its name from the French mémoire – which means ‘reminiscence’ or ‘memory’ – the genre of memoir is built on the process of remembering. Distinct from autobiography in exploring a segment of a life rather than its entirety, and focusing on interconnected experiences (Smith & Watson 2010), the author’s primary archival material springs from their own mind and consciousness. Thus, the auto/biographical act of remembering necessarily precedes any auto/biographical writing. John D’Agata, champion of lyric and experimental nonfiction, says the best memoirs acknowledge the core of ‘anxiety, wonder and doubt’ central to our existence rather than offering neat resolutions (2009, p. 70). Anxiety, wonder and doubt that should, I argue, be directed at the source of those memories themselves. Outlining some of the recent developments in the understanding of autobiographic memory, this chapter contends that the writing and reading of memoir can only be strengthened by considering and reflecting on the processes and limitations of remembering. I suggest that works which display an awareness of memory’s inherent instability and fracture, its fluidity and fragmentation, most effectively honor Philippe Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’ (1989).

14  Marie O’Rourke

Mapping Memory A fascination with the past and our recollection of it is nothing new. Musing on the mind and human nature began with the ancients, and when Augustine of Hippo penned his Confessions in AD 397, the genre of memoir was born. Our memory is, in the words of Luis Buñuel, ‘what makes our lives…our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing’ (1983 cited in Wood & Byatt 2009, p. xi). It is little wonder that countless writers have been compelled to explore the relationship between what we remember, how we remember, and the ways that memory shapes our identity. Yet even with the recent advances in cognitive neuroscience, it is clear we still understand only a little of this faculty which is so intimately entwined with our sense of self and identity and which lies at the heart of the genre of memoir. Remembering is an intricate network of processes, with biological, emotional and philosophical implications. The nascent field of memory studies explores these, drawing insights from literature, philosophy, ­psychology, history, and more to examine the ways in which relationships between the past and present are articulated in the present ­(Roediger & Wertsch 2008). This chapter will focus on the cross-hatch of connections between cognitive neuroscience and memoir, the term ‘memory’ referring only to autobiographic memory, or our memory for events. Central to both the perception of the individual and the genre of memoir, this ‘diary’ of autobiographic memory preserves many layers of ­contextual detail and is markedly different in nature to the ‘­encyclopedia’ of semantic memory (Anderson & Conway 1997). The neurological complexity of memory is staggering – and well beyond the scope of this chapter – but as Giaimo argues, a basic understanding allows us insight into both ‘the biological and the referential motivations between thinking and writing life narrative’ (2014, pp. 36–7). A quick summary, then. The average human brain is made up of approximately 86 billion neurons or nerve cells, connected to one another by nerve fibers in a network that pulses sensory, perceptual, affective, and behavioral information throughout the brain (McClelland 2011). Each neuron has an average of 10,000 discontinuous contacts or synapses with multiple connections, the number of possible combinations between neurons almost beyond comprehension: ‘…on the same order of magnitude as the number of positively charged particles in the universe’ (Changeux 2011, p. 56). Information is transmitted through an electrochemical process of ‘firing’ between the synapses, neurotransmitters releasing a signal which either prompts the receiving cell to also fire, or inhibits it from doing so. It’s difficult to grasp, but in this system, it seems a memory exists as nothing more than a subtle shifting of weights between synaptic connections that encourage or discourage communication (Paulson et al. 2013).

Memory’s Fracture  15 Lehrer describes it in laymen’s and literary terms thus: ‘…when Proust tastes a madeleine, the neurons downstream of the cookie’s taste, the ones that code for Combray and Aunt Leonie, light up. The cells have become inextricably entwined; a memory has been made’ (2007, pp. 83–4). This Proustian moment embodies our current understanding of the way associations are formed in the brain and memory and is an example of the present maxim – born from Hebbian theory (1949) – cells that fire together, wire together. A development from this ‘firing and wiring’ connection has been the understanding that messages repeatedly travelling the same pathways strengthen and transmit faster, whereas unused or ignored pathways lose power. Discoveries such as this have been crucial to the growing recognition of our brain’s plasticity, or ability to organize and reorganize to be as useful as possible, reinforcing and growing new connections even as others are severed.

Memory’s ‘Mythmaking’1 A complex cognitive activity, remembering is a synthesis of several processes which occur across numerous regions of the brain, synapses, cells and circuits in constant flux. There have long been four recognized stages: encoding (the initial representation of incoming information), consolidation (the organization of information in some type of meaningful way, such as association or practice to stabilize the memory trace), storage, and retrieval. To this, contemporary neuroscience has added a fifth and final stage, reconsolidation, which acknowledges that ‘stable’ long term memories can be malleable and subject to revision. Foreshadowed by the pioneering work of Frederic Bartlett (1932), contemporary memory studies have shifted away from the notion of remembering as a simple replay of a stored event to a reconstruction, integrating fragments of information anew each time. As we re-call and re-store memories, they are changed to fit into the context of new experiences, emotions and knowledge. Further evidence of the brain’s plasticity, this stage of reconsolidation also alerts us to the potential for bias and instability in memories, for we are motivated to view our pasts in ways that enhance our current view: ‘[m]emory’s mythmaking is necessary to life’ (Lejeune 1991, cited in Eakin 2000, p. 290). Yet psychologist Daniel Schacter (1996, 1999, 2001) reassures that reconsolidation is not necessarily a bad thing, just evidence of the mind working to update and fine-tune itself. This is part of what he terms ‘memory’s fragile power’ (1999, p. 182), its ability to make many things possible while also having the potential to falter, distort, or even intrude into our mind with things we would rather forget. Interestingly, Schacter argues these ‘weaknesses’ – or, as he likes to call them ‘seven deadly sins’ – are not to be feared, and may even have adaptive benefit. They allow us to focus on what’s most important, transfer learning, enhance our sense of self, or avoid potential danger.2

16  Marie O’Rourke Given the act of remembering is the bedrock on which memoir is built, you can see the complications these new scientific understandings bring. Or should. Of course, dilemmas around the truth status of memoir are a staple of both life writing and creative writing scholarship, proving it remains a contested genre. But while deliberately falsified memories are comparatively rare, if skewing of recollections is an everyday occurrence, what does or should this mean for memoir? There is always, in memoir, what Nancy K. Miller calls a ‘strange and necessary tension between what is documented and what is remembered’ (1996, p. 17). This tension is more important than ever when viewed in the light of the new revelations regarding the biology and psychology of remembering. Smith and Watson assert ‘both the unified story and the coherent self are myths of identity’ (2010, p. 61), and this quintessentially postmodern attitude is reflected in what Frank Kermode terms ‘the counter-­ Augustinian trend’ in modern memoir and autobiography – born from writers like Nietzsche and Barthes – which strives to acknowledge multiplicity within the self (2009, p. 6). Recent neuroscientific research meshes well with this, revealing memory to be a system made up of many distinct components that work together to simply create an impression of unity, rather than a single information storehouse in the brain ­(Prebble, Addis & Tippett 2013). Memory – central to both one’s identity and the genre of memoir – is now understood to be in a constant state of revision and flux, ‘a living network of understanding rather than a dormant warehouse of facts’ (McCrone 2009, p. 267). Once we accept this, it seems counterintuitive to expect memoir to represent remembering as one smooth, stable, unraveling of experience. Postmodernism alerted us to the possibility of multiple versions of reality, and life writing scholarship has moved to reflect this instability of the ‘I.’ Why, then, do we still feel threatened by the notion of multiplicity and uncertainty in memory? Surely, if we know memories are susceptible to change in the actual process of remembering, memoir should signal some of this vulnerability to the reader.

Fragments in Blue Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is one work where structure and subject matter embody the fracture and instability which memory studies expose. Experimental in nature, this memoir comprises 240 ‘small shards of free-floating text’ (Segal 2011, p. 159), which Nelson claims is designed to emulate Wittgenstein’s use of ‘numbered sections to think sequentially, and to jump, in turn’ (Segal 2011, p. 158). While these fragments of thought and recollection – or to use Nelson’s term, ‘propositions’ – ostensibly explore her love for the color blue, the undercurrent throughout is an uneasy attachment to a failed and damaging relationship with a former lover, the so-called ‘prince of blue’ (2009, p. 6). Exhibiting

Memory’s Fracture  17 qualities of lyric essay, philosophical tract and poetry, Nelson’s work is emblematic of the contemporary move toward hybrid forms, shifting freely between genres. While each segment offers a single snapshot of Nelson’s thought process, they accrete in the manner of a mosaic, to depict – in a way traditional memoir never could – the contradictory and confusing nature of the self, relationships, and our recollections of them. As Nelson remembers and reflects, we are drawn into both her life and her mind, the text mimicking those processes of wiring, firing, fluidity, and fragmentation already outlined. Nelson’s tone invites intimacy from the outset, laying bare for the reader both the complex web of associations we build with other people and within our self. ‘Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke’ (2009, p. 1): a seeming second person address to the reader, it is only apparent later in the piece that the ‘you’ being addressed is the ‘prince’ himself. This is typical of the confusion inherent in such an act of self-examination. And it is an uncertainty and instability borne out repeatedly in the text as Nelson’s thoughts and memories seesaw between past and present, personal and philosophical, trying to get closer to the ‘you’ ‘by breaking down her feelings in language’ (Als 2016, n.p.). The effect of this slow realization is akin to montage. Bursts of textual imagery compress periods of time into a few brief lines, the structure serving to mirror the associative quality and shape of Nelson’s memory and the movement of her mind. Within the text’s poetic prose is a constant and crucial awareness of the blue in Nelson’s life. As a color with complex connotations, many of her memory fragments play with the hue’s multiple levels of meaning. Whether reflecting on blues music, the pigmentation required for blue paint, or the pieces of blue plastic that she sees in the world around her, readers sense that all is anchored in the metaphoric blueness of this memoir, that profound sadness connected to the man ‘with the face of a derelict whose eyes literally leaked blue’ (2009, p. 6). Reaffirming the impact of context on memory, the text reminds us how layers of meaning can be added in the process of remembering, the way connections may be forged or amplified through the lens of recollection. David Shields (2010) contends that in a well-constructed collaged work, we might read its patterning in whatever way we choose, yet ‘pluck it at any point, the entire web will vibrate’ (p. 125). The success of Bluets is evident in this regard, for while it lacks a clear narrative thread, the multiple and tangled lines of reflection and discussion effectively emulate the structure of neural pathways. As Nelson’s recollections are connected and enmeshed in complex networks of association, older memories are linked with new in a fashion which mirrors the process of consolidation and reconsolidation. We know that the more a person

18  Marie O’Rourke practises – or in the case of remembering, recalls – the stronger those connections and memories become; that the more ‘associative hooks’ a piece of new information has, ‘the more securely it gets embedded into the network of things you already know, and the more likely it is to remain in memory’ (Foer 2011, p. 165 cited in Giaimo 2014, p. 71). Always at the base of Nelson’s remembering is the blue and its prince, coloring past, present, and future. Conveying a sense of the obsessional and crippling nature of such loves, the memoir is all the more satisfying and accurate for its fractures. This sense of fragmentation and distance is amplified through N ­ elson’s use of observer memories, those in which we remember from a perspective outside ourselves, a third-person point of view. Distinct from field memories, which are recollected in the original, first-person perspective, observer memories are inherently ‘fictional,’ and cannot be an accurate representation of what we saw and experienced at that moment: Freud took them as evidence of the reconstructed nature of recollection (Fernyhough 2012). Importantly, remembering in this way also creates psychological distance between the subject and their memory (Schacter 1996). Building the image of her ‘prince’ in flashes – bodies entwined in a hotel bed, a blue shirt, symbols in dreams – Nelson’s gathered ‘fragments of blue dense’ (2009, p. 68) reinforce our sense of the relationship’s disconnection. Through this web of musings on literature, science, art critique, and philosophy runs a curiosity about the structure of memory itself. N ­ elson specifically discusses the question of memory’s stability, and while pondering the notion of the engram – or permanent memory trace – she points out, ‘since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor’ (2009, p. 81, emphasis in original). Nelson envisages Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, but a more helpful analogy from the realm of cognitive science which ties in with the propositions and process of Bluets may be found in Dennett and Kinsbourne’s work. Likening perception and memory to multiple drafts and editing, they speak in terms of the mind weaving ‘a skein of narratives’ rather than one canonical text (1992, p. 196). The numerous strands running through Nelson’s memoir mimic this. Interestingly, work from memory researchers such as Elizabeth and Robert Bjork (2011) suggests such ‘interleaving’ or switching between narrative threads and topics often has the ultimate effect of enhancing understanding. In creating a ‘desirable difficulty’ for readers, memoirs such as Bluets may stimulate deeper processing than we would normally engage in. Like ‘the countless blue stones, blue shards of glass, blue marbles, trampled blue photographs peeled off sidewalks, pieces of blue rubble from broken buildings’ (2009, p. 69) which Nelson has amassed over the years, memory is made of scraps collected from all over the place.

Memory’s Fracture  19 Making some sense of these memories seems to be her aim, and there is an obsessive determination to measure, define, explain, and analyze in the fragments of this text. But how can we truly measure pain, color, love? Ultimately, it seems, no words, scales or contraptions are up to the task, the impossibility of the project summed up when Nelson says, ‘I  am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning’ (2009, p. 16). Conway (2005) talks about the forces of correspondence and coherence in human memory, that the need to stay true to the facts of what happened competes with the need to keep recollections consistent with our current goals, images, and beliefs about our own selves. Tied in with Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance – which suggests that individuals will always strive for internal consistency (Engel 1999) – we recognize our tendency to rewrite personal history and bring old memories in line with what we believe at present. Bluets is a profoundly unstable book, determinedly postmodern in its manner of sitting with that instability and accepting that things do not always compute, no matter how many times you rethink them. Somehow, Nelson’s fragments work in unison, even as they contradict each other, clear-sighted analysis sitting comfortably beside moments of almost blind and obsessive love. At surface level Bluets seems a text of dualities: sight and blindness; dark and light; pleasure and pain; remembering and forgetting, Nelson ‘rocking between them (sea-sickness)’ (2009, p. 80). However, she continually blurs these distinctions and refuses the neatness of opposites, reinforcing the dark within the light, the pain within the pleasure. Even in writing them, ­Nelson destabilizes her memories and observations, declaring ‘my mind is essentially a sieve’ (2009, p. 62). She warns, ‘words do not look like the things they designate’ (2009, p. 28, emphasis in original), and we could argue the same is true of memories. Knowingly shaped, reconstructed to align with our current feelings or reasons for remembering, our recollections may resemble the original occurrence but are far from a direct copy. Nelson observes that writing ‘can have the effect of an album of childhood photographs, in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve’ (2009, p. 77). This is perhaps why she ‘avoid[s] writing down too many specific memories of you’ (2009, p. 78). Yet despite the text’s lack of personal detail, there is something in the nature of this memoir that feels committed to exposing and laying things bare, like the author’s collection of blues kept on display, with full awareness that sunlight will fade them. ‘How often I’ve imagined the bubble of body and breath you and I made, even though by now I can hardly remember what you look like, I can hardly see your face’ (2009, p. 75). Unable to forget, yet seemingly pained by remembering, Nelson’s sparse prose embodies the contradictions of memory. Capturing so many different moments and meditations, Bluets mirrors what we now understand of the fragmented and associative nature

20  Marie O’Rourke of memories, their tendency to be reshaped and reimagined each time we recall them. In this way, Nelson moves toward Brewster’s ideal ‘poetics of memory’ which ‘incorporate[s] affect—as distinct from objectifying it’ (2005, pp. 398–9, emphasis in original). Perhaps this is what makes Bluets feel so raw and honest, persistently picking at the scab of a relationship which Nelson will not leave to heal. Shields reminds us that ‘[a]mbitious work doesn’t resolve contradictions in a spurious harmony but instead embodies the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure’ (2010, p. 136). Refusing neat resolutions, Nelson’s memoir simply concludes, ‘[t]he most I can say is that this time I learned my lesson. I stopped hoping…Perhaps, in time, I will also stop missing you…In any case, I am no longer counting the days’ (2009, pp. 93, 95). In her latest memoir, The Argonauts, Nelson speaks of spending ‘a lifetime devoted to ­Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed…Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing’ (2015, p. 3, emphasis in original). Bluets is evidence of that determination to find a voice for what cannot be simply said, of instability and fracture in memory, consciousness and life.

Memories Inherited and Imagined Alice Pung’s Her Father’s Daughter is another example of memoir which pushes at the limits of the genre’s traditional definition and techniques, both its structure and content offering insight into the memory systems from which it arose. Written entirely in third person, telling a story through the eyes of ‘Daughter’ and ‘Father,’ the book manages to shed light on both the horror of life under Pol Pot and the way such traumas shape memory, the present and the future of survivors and their families. Third person and broad, general naming are techniques which distance the reader from the subject matter and create an ‘everyman’ feeling about the experiences the memoir describes. There is a sense, through the combined impact of both narrative point of view and reference to many friends’ and family’s similar experiences, that this is a story where the names or setting could be changed yet remain essentially the same. The exploration of survivor fear, the traumatized family’s dynamics and the distinction between public and private memory are all part of a narrative played out over and again in our recent world history. Pung has spoken of aiming to emulate a conversation in the narrative structure, with first person avoided altogether to allow ‘both voices to have equal weight and gravitas’ (2012, p. 44). In a memoir which deals with intergenerational trauma, repression and even refusal of memories, the distance created by third person point of view is vital. Like Nelson, Pung imitates the phenomenon of observer memories, but more importantly, third person also enables Pung to engage in a kind of informed

Memory’s Fracture  21 imagining. Describing events never directly experienced, ‘the world of 1975 Cambodia [emerges] in its Technicolor horror’ because she employs ‘a wider lens’ (2012, p. 44). Researchers exploring the contextual nature of remembering have drawn our attention to the intimate connection between memory and imagination. They are now recognized as closely related functions of, if not a single cognitive system, kindred functions that have significant overlap and many of the same neural mechanisms (Richardson 2011; Schacter et al. 2012). Obviously, when you are translating the act of remembering into memoir, the role of imagination is even more significant, and for the writer of trauma narrative specifically, ‘[i]magination allows the past to be remembered differently, the present to be transgressed and the future to be re-imagined differently’ (Metta 2011, p. 18, emphases in original). Remembering and imagining with her father and family, rather than for them, Pung reminds the reader how collaborative the practice of remembering can be. The result is an argument for something akin to cultural memory, exploring the embodied nature of recollection and the many, varied ways a parent’s trauma may transfer to and shape their offspring. The growing field of epigenetics looks at the ways heritable changes in gene expression – perhaps due to environmental stress or major emotional trauma – may leave certain marks on the chemical coating, or methylation, of the chromosomes. This becomes a sort of ‘memory’ in the body, a constant physical reminder of events in the past of our forebears as well as our own (Kellermann 2013). Research has revealed that children of famine victims can be genetically altered by their parents’ bodily suffering. Her Father’s Daughter suggests that children can likewise internalize the emotional distress of their forebears, absorbing ‘the repressed and insufficiently worked-through…trauma of their parents, as if they have actually inherited the unconscious minds of their parents’ (Kellermann 2013, p. 33, emphasis in original). Pung was not by her father Kuan’s side as he buried corpses, or lay in the dark ever alert for the sound of soldiers in the jungle. But living with her parents’ seemingly constant preparation for disaster and escape, this daughter feels what it means to live in the shadow of trauma, fear and insecurity infiltrating her being. Travelling in China, Pung overtly engages with the language of epigenetics: when suddenly aware that ‘…she automatically feared any­ arents had passed one official in uniform…She wondered whether her p on this fear through their genes’ (2011, p. 22). Maria ­Tumarkin says: Much of the memory in the world is transmitted in thrillingly complex ways. We leave the past to our children and grandchildren not only as a series of stories, artefacts and silences but as lingering questions that may remain unanswered – and unasked – for lifetimes. (2013, p. 318)

22  Marie O’Rourke It is Pung’s quest for answers which drives the exploration of her own memories and those of her father, interrogating the complex experience of remembering in the process. From the outset, Kuan’s internal monologue is one obsessed with questions of fear and safety. The past is always with him in the present, even if resting just beneath the surface of consciousness. A planetarium’s stars cast him back to nights in the jungle on the run from the Black Bandits, the stars ‘wink[ing] like unforgiving blades’ (2011, p. 53). Alarmed when his wife gets lost after catching the wrong tram, Alice realizes how Kuan’s panic ‘permeated everything so that nothing was normal anymore…casting shadows…making her walls crack loose like chalk’ (2011, p. 93). Sliding seamlessly between horror and the mundane throughout, the woven structure of the narrative reminds readers that the memory of Cambodia in the 1970s is knit into everything both ­Father and Daughter do in present day Australia. Like Bluets, this text also engages with the link between consciousness, involuntary memory, and dreams. Meaning is made as we integrate new memories into preexisting memory networks, and dreams seem to play an important part in this process. Research shows memory for neutral scenes and emotional scenes decay across the day, but memories for the emotional core of daily events is ‘selectively and actively maintained, and possibly even strengthened while we sleep.’ This may account for the classically bizarre and hyper-associative content of dreams (Stickgold 2011, pp. 83, 87). For Kuan, dreams reveal ‘indelible stains on the brain’ (Miller 2014, p. 41), graphic and terrifying scenes that return him to Cambodia’s Killing Fields. Like the bandit who refuses to die in Kuan’s dream – even after repeated smashing with the back of an axe – we are reminded that memory is unable to be completely repressed or erased, no matter how concerted the effort. This attempt to suppress or even stop remembering is central to Her Father’s Daughter, on both a cultural and personal level: Pol Pot’s regime sought to eradicate the Cambodians’ memory of the recent past, and Kuan’s attempt to do the same in his private life is central to the Father narrative. Pung terms this act of repression ‘Dismemory,’ or ‘a memory that you had deliberately forgotten to remember’ (2011, p. 191). While this may be vital for survival (echoing Schacter’s argument regarding the ‘deadly sins’ of memory) the text also suggests that these ‘dismemories’ are what is transmitted between the generations, shaping the present and future of survivors’ children. Pung recognizes dismemory in her father ‘trying to cut off the sharp tip of a knife’ (2011, p. 191), taking walks near the river and fearing drowning, plotting ‘that she would either move back home or stay inside the college’ (2011, p. 192). Only in writing her father’s past does Pung realize that like him, she has ‘refused…to look beyond the here and now’ for looking ‘at darkness through rose-coloured glasses, all you got was a congealed blood colour…It was best not to look at all’ (2011, p. 193).

Memory’s Fracture  23 Remembering and forgetting are thus all-important for this memoir’s characters. Kuan states the key to a happy life is ‘a healthy short-term memory, a slate that can be wiped clean every morning, like one of those toys he bought for his daughter when she was young’ (2011, p. 5). It is interesting, then, that despite his wish for a ‘clean’ memory, this father has not kept the truth of the past from his daughter. Pung is aware that her childhood has been shared ‘with survivors – weary looking men and women’ (2011, p. 7) whose unspoken, in everything, is that they survived the Black Bandits. She also knows the fate of her family members: ‘grandfather…dead of starvation, her two cousins buried alive, half her relatives wiped out’ (2011, p. 8). The bare simplicity of Pung’s language and imagery is shocking and illustrates how this horror is a part of the everyday life and family story for both father and child. Outwardly, Kuan strives to maintain a matter-of-fact approach to the terrors of his past, dismissing as ‘rubbish’ the work around post-­ traumatic stress disorder that ‘Western psychologists had made up to stop a person from moving on in life, to extract exorbitant sums by sitting them down and making them talk’ (2011, p. 197). Assuring us he did ‘a spring-clean of his mind’ before coming to Australia, and ‘brought a truck in there to haul out all the debris’ (2011, p. 210), the words and imagery of the Father narrative constantly contradict him. Once again, as in Bluets, we see the power of involuntary memories, those remembrances of things past which come to mind with no conscious attempt at their retrieval. Often disturbing or distressing in nature, these unbidden recollections are evidence of Schacter’s ‘deadly sin’ of persistence, which he argues has adaptive benefit in alerting us to that which threatens our survival, physical or emotional (1999). The structure of Her Father’s Daughter also works in other ways to illustrate how the memory of Kuan’s trauma relates to his family’s present lives. The dual narrative focus in the text, chapters alternating between Father and Daughter, is maintained throughout four of the five sections of the memoir, but in ‘Part III. Cambodia: Year Zero’ the text steps even further back, moving from third-person-limited to an omniscient point of view. More than simply creating distance and dissociation from the most horrific sections of the story, the omniscient point of view also widens the focus of Pung’s lens, to show the experiences of more than just Father and Daughter. Kuan promises his daughter: ‘If you want to know about the time of Pol Pot, I will introduce you to people…and they will talk to you and tell you about their lives’ (2011, p. 110). As well as this oral collaboration, Pung has spoken of basing the book on conversations with her father ‘on both the spoken words and the unspoken thoughts behind them’ (Sullivan 2011, n.p.). It’s therefore fitting that Pung flags this through a shift in style, while openly admitting ‘[s]he may never know what happened, but perhaps it was time for her to take a stab in the dark’ (Pung 2011, p. 112). Aware of the responsibility that comes

24  Marie O’Rourke with telling, she remembers ‘how at some pivotal point these older folk began to speak to her as if they no longer saw her as a child but as someone who would store these stories’ (Pung 2011, p. 111). Thus, in the 73 pages of intense and graphic writing that make up ­Section III, Pung covers the four years of the Pol Pot regime. Significantly, this section sits at the middle of the text, bisecting the story of Kuan and his daughter, just as in life the experiences in Cambodia sit between him and his family, his present and future. Key incidents from within the family serve as summations of the years and the result is a memoir which reflects, consciously or not, the phenomenon of flashbulb memories, a notion introduced by Brown and Kulik in 1977. ­Originally defined as ‘vivid, highly detailed memories that endure, apparently unchanged, for many years’ (Anderson & Conway 1997, p. 219) these memories are traditionally thought to be associated with highly emotional, fearful, or shocking events. Under stressful situations we produce adrenaline, which encourages our neurons to process more information than they normally would. Forming a greater number of synaptic connections in the brain builds a stronger memory for that event, which is then strengthened by further recall (Ortega & Vidal 2013, p. 348). When ‘Daughter’ muses on how ‘thoughts developed like Polaroids…some images would not show up as anything but a grey blur, while others were so vivid that it hurt to look at them with the naked eye’ (Pung 2011, p. 59), the narrative engages with the snapshot quality of memory. Kuan’s story contains numerous moments of heightened sensory experience and hyper-clarity, ‘heat behind his eyeballs…powdered earth beneath his feet, wetness, beneath his armpits…his banging heart’ (2011, p. 76). The complex intertwining of memory, language and the body – those sensations ‘Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart’ that Wordsworth speaks of in ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798, ln. 30) – are reinforced once again. Smith and Watson remind us that intergenerational life writing can demonstrate how trauma can be embodied in future generations, as well as the way memories shape a family’s present. It is a form of life writing which can also offer ‘stories that position those who have suffered not only as victims of violent events but as survivors with imagination, energy, and resilience’ (2010, p. 30). In the text’s kaleidoscopic structure, moving through the childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of Father and Daughter, between Melbourne, Macau, Cambodia, and China, Her Father’s Daughter mirrors the instability and complexity of remembering in general, and specifically, when dealing with trauma and its aftermath.

Conclusion Current research proves remembering is an unpredictable activity, an inherently creative process of selection, omission, and recreation. Imperfect as it is, however, memory remains central to our sense of self and identity

Memory’s Fracture  25 and, therefore, central to the literature of remembering, memoir. Just as laboratory reports cannot detail the nuances of autobiographic memory, I have argued that memoir which ignores the basic neurological and cognitive processes from which it is born falls short of its potential. Suzanne Nalbantian speaks of ‘a changing, intellectual zeitgeist brought about by memory studies’ (2011, p. 2), positing that words such as ‘[c]onstruction, reconstruction, stabilization, lability’ which help us to understand both ‘the gestation and metamorphosis of memory’ (2011, p. 3, emphasis in original) are key to our continuing forging of links between the sciences and the humanities. I contend that meeting the genre of memoir on its unstable terms, and accepting the insights that cognitive neuroscience offers, can only strengthen the production of this literature and its scholarship. Success will lie in texts’ ability to be ‘engines, not reflections of culture’ (Spolsky 2010, p. 85), bringing audiences to new understanding. What shift in tactics might this entail for memoir? David Shields demands ‘books equal to the complexity of experience, memory and thought’ (2010, p. 54), and necessary to that, an admission of fracture, instability and uncertainty. Of course, this does not mean presenting questionable truth or openly playing loose with facts, rather, aligning with André ­Aciman, who urges memoirists and scholars to think in terms of ‘quantum mnemonics.’ He suggests writing in a way that acknowledges ‘[t]here is no past; there are just versions of the past. Proving one version true settles absolutely nothing, because proving another is equally possible’ (2013, p. 62). The meshing of images, symbols and stories in memoirs such as Bluets and Her Father’s Daughter embodies this thinking. Robin Freeman and Karen Le Rossignol maintain that ‘[m]emoir, as an interrogation of memory, is the interpretation of events through the lens of experience that enables understanding of an individual consciousness within a context of the wider world’ (2015, n.p.). Similarly, Drusilla Modjeska suggests that we view the genre as ‘the mapping of a mind rather than (or as well as) the recreation of experience’ (2002, p. 196). This refinement of the term ‘memoir’ itself, the shift of emphasis from the events of the life to the individual consciousness explored, expands the genre’s potential. As cognitive neuroscience reveals more details of  the brain’s secrets and subtleties, memoir scholarship must respond. As Paul John Eakin says: If memory indeed is the anchor of autobiographical truth, of texts and selves, if autobiography really is in some fundamental way an art of memory, then any shift in our conception of memory is bound to have important consequences for our thinking about autobiography and identity. (2000, p. 291) This chapter opened with a discussion of the source of the word memoir, and now returns to matters etymological, looking to D’Agata’s analysis

26  Marie O’Rourke of the term. He sees in the roots of the word ‘something much less confident…the ancient Greek mérmeros’ which links back to ‘the Indo-­ European root for all that we think about but cannot grasp: mer-mer, “to vividly worry,” “to be anxious about,” “to exhaustingly ponder”’ (2009, p. 70). I have spoken at some length about the plasticity of the brain, its ability to change and adapt to suit contextual circumstances. As a mapping of the mind, or examination of an individual consciousness, I argue the genre of memoir needs to exhibit that same plasticity, to worry about and ponder memory’s fracture and fluidity, and to adapt its structures, content and processes to reflect the insights offered by cognitive neuroscience. For it is in reading memoirs such as Bluets and Her Father’s Daughter that we might appreciate not only the unique details of these authors’ lives, but the fascinating complexity of the process of remembering itself.

Acknowledgements Sincere thanks to my supervisors Jane Grellier and Rachel Robertson, and colleague Daniel Juckes, for feedback on earlier versions of this chapter. This chapter was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Notes 1 Lejeune 1991, cited in Eakin 2000, p. 290. 2 See Schacter 1999, 2001 for further elaboration.

References Aciman, A. 2013, ‘How memoirists mold the truth’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 1303, no. 1, pp. 61–2. Als, H. 2016, ‘Immediate family’, The New Yorker, April 18, viewed 21 November 2016, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/maggie-nelsons-many-selves. Anderson, S. J. & Conway, M. A. 1997, ‘Representations of autobiographical memories’, in M. A. Conway (ed.), Cognitive Models of Memory, Psychology Press, East Sussex, pp. 217–46. Bartlett, F.C. 1932, Remembering: a study in experimental and social psychology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom. Bjork, E. L. & Bjork, R. 2011, ‘Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning’, in R. W. Gernsbacher, L. Pew, M. Hough & J. R. Pomerantz (eds.), Psychology and the Real World: essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society, Worth Publishers, New York, pp. 56–64. Brewster, A. 2005. ‘The poetics of memory’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Culture Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, viewed 8 April 2015, doi:10.1080/10304310500176875. Changeux, J.-P. 2011, ‘The epigenetic variability of memory: brain plasticity and artistic creation, in S. Nalbantian, P. M. Matthews & J. L. McClelland

Memory’s Fracture  27 (eds.), The Memory Process: neuroscientific and humanistic perspectives, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Conway, M. A. 2005, ‘Memory and the self’, Journal of Memory and Language, vol. 53, no.4, viewed 27 November 2016, www.sciencedirect.com.dbgw.lis. curtin.edu.au/science/article/pii/S0749596X05000987. D’Agata, J. 2009, ‘Mer-Mer: an essay about how I wish we wrote our nonfictions’, in D. Lazar (ed.), Truth in Nonfiction: essays, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, pp. 66–76. Dennett, D. C. & Kinsbourne, M. 1992, ‘Time and the observer: the where and when of consciousness in the brain’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 183–201. Eakin, P. J. 2000, ‘Autobiography, identity, and the fictions of memory’, in D.  L.  Schacter & E. Scarry (eds.), Memory, Brain and Belief, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 290–306. Engel, S. 1999, Context Is Everything: the nature of memory, W.H. Freeman and Company, New York. Fernyhough, C. 2012, Pieces of Light: the new science of memory, Profile Books, London. Freeman, R. & Le Rossignol, K. 2015, ‘Writer-as-narrator: engaging the debate around the (un)reliable narrator in memoir and the personal essay’, TEXT, vol. 19, no. 1, viewed 14 May 2015, www.textjournal.com.au/april15/freeman_ lerossignol.htm. Giaimo, G. N. 2014, Unable to Remember but Unwilling to Forget: cognition, perception, and memory in the contemporary American memoir, doctoral thesis, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, viewed 7 September 2016, https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/files/neu:1450/fulltext.pdf. Hebb, D.O. 1949, The Organization of Behavior, John Wiley & Sons Inc., New York.  Kellermann, N. P. F. 2013, ‘Epigenetic transmission of Holocaust trauma: can nightmares be inherited?’ The Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 33–7. Kermode, F. 2009, ‘Palaces of memory’, in H. H. Wood & A. S. Byatt (eds.), Memory: an anthology, Vintage Books, London, pp. 1–12. Lehrer, J. 2007, Proust was a Neuroscientist, Text Publishing, Melbourne, Australia. Lejeune, P. 1989, On Autobiography, trans. K. Leary, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. McClelland, J. L. 2011, ‘Memory as a constructive process: The parallel distributed processing approach’, in S. Nalbantian, P. M. Matthews & J. L. McClelland (eds.), The Memory Process: neuroscientific and humanistic perspectives, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 129–51. McCrone, J. 2009, ‘Not-so total recall’, in H. H. Wood & A. S. Byatt (eds.), Memory: an anthology, Vintage Books, London, pp. 266–71. Metta, M. 2011, Writing Against, Alongside and Beyond Memory: lifewriting as reflexive, poststructuralist feminist research practice, Peter Lang AG, Bern, Switzerland. Miller, N. K. 1996, Bequest & Betrayal: memoirs of a parent’s death, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Miller, N. K. 2014, ‘Memory stains: Annie Ernaux’s shame’, a/b: auto/Biography Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 38–50.

28  Marie O’Rourke Modjeska, D. 2002, Timepieces, Pan MacMillan, Sydney. Nalbantian, S. 2011, ‘Introduction’, in S. Nalbantian, P. M. Matthews & J. L. McClelland (eds.), The Memory Process: neuroscientific and humanistic perspectives, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 1–26. Nelson, M. 2009, Bluets, Wave Books, Seattle and New York. Nelson, M. 2015. The Argonauts, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN. Ortega, F. & Vidal, F. 2013, ‘Brains in literature/literature in the brain’, Poetics Today, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 327–60. Paulson, S., Aciman, A., LeDoux, J., Schachter, D. & Winter, A. 2013, ‘The mystery of memory: in search of the past’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 13031, no. 1, pp. 36–55. Prebble, S. C., Addis, D. R. & Tippett, L. J. 2013, ‘Autobiographical memory and sense of self, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 139, no. 4, pp. 815–40. Pung, A. 2011, Her Father’s Daughter, Black, Inc., Victoria. Pung, A. 2012, ‘Writing about my father in Her Father’s Daughter’, Westerly, vol. 57, no. 2, pp. 41–7. Richardson, A. 2011, ‘Memory and imagination in Romantic fiction’, in S.  ­Nalbantian, P. M. Matthews & J. L. McClelland (eds.), The Memory Process: neuroscientific and humanistic perspectives, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 277–96. Roediger III, H. L. & Wertsch, J. V. 2008, ‘Creating a new discipline of memory studies’, Memory Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 9–22. Schacter, D. L. 1996, Searching for Memory: the brain, the mind, and the past, Basic Books, New York. Schacter, D. L. 1999, ‘The seven sins of memory: insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience,’ American Psychologist, vol. 54, no. 3, pp. 182–203. Schacter, D. L. 2001, ‘The seven sins of memory: how the mind forgets and remembers’, Psychology Today, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 62–6. Schacter, D. L., Addis, D. R., Hassabis, D., Martin, V. C., Spreng, R. N. & ­Szpunar, K. K. 2012, ‘The future of memory: remembering, imagining, and the brain, Neuron, vol. 76, no. 4, pp. 677–94. Segal, B. 2011, ‘The fragment as a unit of prose composition: an introduction’, Continent, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 158–70. Shields, D. 2010, Reality Hunger: a manifesto, Penguin Books, Great Britain. Smith, S. & Watson, J. 2010, Reading Autobiography: a guide for interpreting life narratives, 2nd edn, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN. Spolsky, E. 2010, ‘Making ‘quite anew’: brain modularity and creativity, in L.  ­Zunshine (ed.), Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. Stickgold, R. 2011, ‘Memory in sleep and dreams: the construction of meaning’, in S. Nalbantian, P. M. Matthews & J. L. McClelland (eds.), The Memory Process: neuroscientific and humanistic perspectives, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Sullivan, J. 2011, ‘Memories of relative unease’, The Age, August 20, p. 30. Tumarkin, M. 2013, ‘Crumbs of memory: tracing the ‘more-than-representational’ in family memory,’ Memory Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 310–20. Wood, H. H. & Byatt, A. S. (eds.) 2009, Memory: an anthology, Vintage Books, London. Wordsworth, W. 1798, ‘Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, in H. Bloom & L. Trilling (eds.), Romantic Poetry and Prose, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 146–50.

2 Teaching Memoir in Neoliberal Times Megan Brown

Whenever I teach the ‘Reading and Writing Memoir and Autobiography’ course at the university where I work, I have to make difficult choices about the required book list. Sometimes I select books that emphasize changes in the memoir genre over time; sometimes I provide models of a wide range of writing styles; sometimes I foreground a broad theme, such as ‘coming of age’ or ‘identity and politics.’ No matter the approach, one challenge surfaces every time: always, at least one of the books I want to assign includes material that may disturb readers. For instance, my spring 2017 version of the course asks students to read memoirs that include scenes of rape, child abuse, gun violence, suicide, and encounters with racism. Given debates within higher education about assigning texts that include disturbing themes or scenes, I find myself hesitating before committing to certain books, but in the end, I make the commitment. In this essay, I will address my reasons for teaching memoirs that may prove troubling to my students and the kinds of topics I try to address during class discussion of these books. I would like to make a case for memoirs, especially ones that may be deemed troubling for student readers, as important counternarratives challenging neoliberal ideologies – the very same ideologies that criticize college students as too sensitive, too spoiled, too demanding. Undergraduate courses on reading and writing memoirs can be spaces for critical thinking and for developing sociopolitical awareness in neoliberal times.

Neoliberalism and Its Reach Neoliberal is a complicated word used in a variety of contexts. The term originally refers to a philosophy that champions the power of the individual and advocates minimizing government intervention, particularly in business (Hayek 1994). Early neoliberal thinkers worried that ‘welfare state’ policies and programs designed to uplift and support people in need could lead to the rise of totalitarianism by emphasizing the good of the overall citizenry over the good of the individual citizen (Monbiot 2016). The ongoing influence of neoliberal thinking can be seen in calls to roll back government regulations on businesses, to lower taxes, and

30  Megan Brown to dismantle or privatize social services and community programs. For the purpose of this essay, however, I wish to focus on the ways in which neoliberalism affects our values and behaviors more broadly, beyond the realms of economics and politics. Neoliberalism encourages and celebrates self-reliance, self-improvement, and competition among individuals; it also insists that society is a meritocracy: that hard work will bring deserved rewards (Nadesan 2008). While these traits and phenomena do not sound problematic in and of themselves, neoliberalism’s insistence on individual agency has serious consequences, just as the economic policies associated with neoliberalism have contributed to financial and environmental crises all over the globe (Harvey 2005). Consider, for example, the idea of self-reliance, which has multiple, simultaneous effects. A society influenced by neoliberal thinking encourages people to gain new knowledge and skills in order to succeed independently – and it would be difficult, even perverse, to criticize such an idea. Neoliberalism’s emphasis on the individual over the collective, however, also entails inequalities and uneven developments: some people will have greater access than others to the type of education that would allow them to gain new knowledge and skills, and the playing field thereby tilts (Kontopodis 2012). A true meritocracy cannot stand on this tilted foundation, as hard-working individuals who begin with disadvantages have less of a chance to become self-reliant, to win competitions, to thrive. Self-improvement – another concept difficult to critique – operates along similar lines: in a society that celebrates individual agency rather than collective welfare, some individuals will begin with better resources to work toward self-improvement and will be more likely to see their efforts come to fruition. (Ironically, the already-­privileged, some of whom have done nothing to merit said privilege, are likeliest to find themselves at the top of the meritocracy.) Moreover, in insisting on individuals’ power to control their own lives and destinies, we risk overlooking the crucial role of social forces in shaping who and how we are in the world. Values like self-reliance and self-improvement all too easily shade into criticism and blame of the self and of others: I would have been promoted if I had put in more hours in the office – it’s all my fault that my family is struggling. I’m not smart enough to get into university. The person who cannot find a job and must rely on public assistance has not tried hard enough. The student suffering from emotional distress should just toughen up and finish her semester. The elementary school child’s difficult home life and rough neighborhood do not excuse or help to explain his chronic misbehavior. Neoliberal thinking tells us that opportunities are equally available for all who work hard for them, but the ideology depends on rendering structural inequalities invisible. Yet another irony comes into play here: though early neoliberal thinkers were concerned about welfare programs leading to totalitarianism by downplaying individual desires in favor of the common good, today’s neoliberalism wants to capitalize on certain

Teaching Memoir in Neoliberal Times  31 aspects of individual difference while effacing the troubling effects that differences of ethnicity, background, class, ability, and gender can have on particular subjects (Nadesan 2008; Nealon 2007). Although some argue that neoliberal economic policies met their end, or at least the beginning of their end, with the global economic downturn of 2008, the broader ideals guiding these policies continue to permeate schools, workplaces, social spaces, and political discourses (Steger  & Roy 2010). Some analysts attribute the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency to neoliberalism; others point to Brexit as evidence of neoliberalism’s continued ascendancy. As I hope is already clear, I  believe that the ongoing influence of neoliberal thinking is best seen in everyday interactions and in people’s ways of conceptualizing themselves and the world they live in. It is this ‘everyday’ quality, in part, that leads me to believe in the value of memoir as a pedagogical tool in neoliberal times.

Memoir and the Social Forces Shaping Subjects Memoirs may seem to align smoothly with neoliberalism’s emphasis on individualism. After all, these are stories of the self, accounts of the writer’s experiences, ideas, and emotions. Also, the memoir genre may not seem to offer much potential for productive or progressive use in the classroom. Most avid readers have encountered at least one navel-gazing memoir that has tested their patience. Perhaps the culprit was a book about overcoming drug addiction through sheer force of will, without depending on the assistance of a twelve-step program; maybe it was a self-aggrandizing account of its narrator’s boundless capacity for charitable compassion; or its writer’s tremendous talents in a world full of mediocre poseurs. Some readers might even feel reluctant to choose memoirs at all, because they have seen or heard dismissive reviews of ‘yet another miserable childhood story’ or of ‘the usual rags-to-riches inspirational tale.’ Even generally well-reviewed memoirs sometimes meet sharp ­criticism – the lush details of Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club (1995) deemed excessive, the lively voice of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) called simplistic and repetitive. ­Moreover, given the high-profile scandals making headlines in the past two decades (James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces debacle is probably the most notorious) there are understandable reasons for greeting memoirs with skepticism. As a teacher, though, I find that the ‘problems’ of memoir have become productive topics for conversations with students born and raised in societies dominated by neoliberal ideologies. In particular, the following aspects of the memoir genre provide opportunities for student reflection and critical thinking: 1 Emphasis on social forces that shape identity and affect individual lives 2 Focus on the narrator’s vulnerability 3 Questions about factuality and perception

32  Megan Brown First, I would like to consider the question of social – and institutional – forces shaping identity and the ways in which memoir can spark conversations about this issue. Of course, some memoirs are rightly characterized as narcissistic tales of individual triumph or trauma, but others offer complex ways of thinking about the forces that shape and affect subjects (rather than the other way around). Many of the examples I especially admire are about issues of race and socioeconomic class. Some memoirs directly undercut the neoliberal ideal of total self-­ reliance, acknowledging, instead, the central role of outside circumstances in shaping individual interiority and life trajectory. Examples of this undercutting can sometimes be found in unexpected places. As I have written elsewhere, Chris Gardner’s The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), a bestselling memoir adapted for a film starring Will Smith, is a more complicated text than it may first appear to be.1 This narrative seems to traffic in well-worn ‘rags-to-riches’ tropes: a young, black, American man – a single parent of a toddler – experiences several ­personal and career setbacks and becomes homeless, but then begins a successful career in business and finds the ‘happyness’ for which he had been searching. The narrator acknowledges poor decisions that may have led to his troubles – an acknowledgement in line with neoliberal discourses about taking total responsibility for one’s circumstances – but he also suggests the ways in which policies and practices targeting homeless populations contributed to his struggles securing shelter, sustenance, and employment. He is eventually hired by an impressive firm, Dean Witter, and while he expresses faith in the American Dream and its rewards for hardworking individuals like himself, he also notes the structural, institutional oppression that could (and, in some ways, did) affect his ability to survive and thrive. For instance, he writes that he did not always receive the credit he deserved for his hard work; he was ‘constantly being made Broker of the Day only to set up business that was promptly given to a white broker because the client wanted “someone with more experience”’ (Gardner 2006, p. 271). Gardner’s accounts of his younger years likewise evince intense awareness of the effects of prejudice, explaining that he and his family had to struggle through ‘the trials of poverty and racism’ (p. 19). As celebratory of ‘triumph over adversity’ success stories as it may seem, The Pursuit of Happyness does interrogate the ideal of success gained via individual willpower or effort. Challenges to neoliberal ideals of individualism and self-sufficiency can also be found in memoirs that are more overtly political in their commentary on social structures. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), a bestseller very different from The Pursuit of ­Happyness, has an epistolary structure in which the narrator writes a letter to his son in hopes of conveying important lessons about living as a black man in a racist society. Coates recounts his childhood and adolescence in Baltimore, his college years at Howard University, and

Teaching Memoir in Neoliberal Times  33 his young adulthood in New York, all the while offering an unflinching analysis of systemic oppression and brutality. Looking back, he grows frustrated with the lessons offered by teachers and administrators of the Baltimore public schools he attended as a boy, seeing these teachings as misguided at best and deliberately misleading at worst. The ideal of ‘getting an education’ – that neoliberal ideal that those who work hard to learn will succeed in life – disguises the reality that for some people, school is characterized not as a ‘place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing’ (Coates 2015, p. 26). As he notes, ‘the laws of the schools were aimed at something distant and vague. What did it mean to, as our elders told us, “grow up and be somebody?” And what precisely did this have to do with an education rendered as rote discipline?’ (p. 25). He is taught to follow rules and stay in school to avoid the streets and their dangers, but even if he absorbs these lessons and avoids trouble, even if he becomes what the schools deem to be a successful student, what he ‘learns’ will never develop his mind, foster his curiosity, encourage his imagination, or help him to ‘be somebody.’ This disadvantage, Coates argues, haunts the black children of inner city America as they grow to adulthood and helps to reify and reproduce a system that focuses on individual triumphs and tragedies rather than addressing the broader social and economic forces shaping these. He describes a Howard University classmate, Prince Jones, who seems to be a ‘successful’ individual in every way: his mother, Dr. Mable Jones, became chief of radiology at a Texas hospital (‘Her disposition toward life was that of an elite athlete who knows the opponent is dirty and the refs are on the take, but also knows the championship is one game away’), and he graduated from a magnet school (a public school with a specific theme and specialized instruction, devised to attract top students from diverse populations) for math and science (Coates 2015, p. 140). Regardless of the advantages Jones enjoyed thanks to his loving family, and regardless of the successes and goodwill he earned through his own hard work and kindness, Jones was killed by a police officer in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The circumstances as Coates describes them are suspicious at best – the officer, who was not wearing his badge during the pursuit, was looking for a suspect who did not match Jones’s description at all – but the officer is exonerated and returned to his post. Coates tells the story of Jones’s death not only because it affected him personally, but also to interrogate the idea that black Americans and families, already working ‘twice as hard’ as white Americans in the hope of gaining social acceptance, career advancement, or other rewards, will see their efforts come to fruition: ‘if [Jones], good Christian, scion of a striving class, patron saint of twice as good, could be forever bound, who then could not? And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him’ (p. 81). This is a difficult, painful lesson for students of

34  Megan Brown all backgrounds to learn, but it helps us to understand, and to challenge, the dangerous cultural discourses that insist we all have equal power to control our own destinies, that mislead us into crediting our successes to (and blaming our failures on) ourselves alone.

Vulnerable Narrators and Trigger Warnings Moving on to the second item on the list of opportunities that memoir can provide in the classroom in these neoliberal times, I will now turn to texts that emphasize their narrators’ vulnerability – even in ways that make the books difficult to read and discuss. As mentioned earlier, the memoirs on my course book list this semester include material that my students will find disturbing. In The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr describes being raped, twice, when she was a child. Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) addresses – in great detail – her father’s suicide and its aftermath. Coates’s Between the World and Me is a personal account of growing up black in America, referencing experiences of racism both systemic and specific. All of these memoirists are unflinching in their depictions of trauma, offering powerful, vulnerable self-portraits. I believe it is important for students to encounter life writing of this sort because such books remind us of the particularity and potentially political power of individual feelings, including the feelings of vulnerability and pessimism so maligned in neoliberal discourses. Consider, for example, Jesmyn Ward’s memoir, Men We Reaped (2013), a book in which the narrator’s raw emotions about a variety of traumatic experiences are almost painfully apparent. Ward describes the main subject matter of Men We Reaped as follows: ‘From 2000 to 2004, five Black young men I grew up with died, all violently, in seemingly unrelated deaths…To say this is difficult is understatement; telling this story is the hardest thing I’ve ever done’ (Ward 2013, p. 7). The narrative, which immediately undercuts the stereotype about memoiras-­narcissism in that it highly emphasizes characters other than the narrator, is an effort to process these losses by looking at their roots, to ‘understand a bit better why this epidemic happened, about how the history of racism and economic inequality and lapsed public and personal responsibility festered and turned sour and spread here’ (p. 8). The ‘here’ in question is DeLisle, Mississippi and the nearby community of Pass Christian; her family lived in this area for generations, and even those who moved away tended to return. Ward’s chapters, which alternate between the story of her childhood and adolescence and an account of her interactions with the young men who died, are firmly situated in their setting; readers get an autobiography of place that addresses drug abuse, disenfranchisement, dysfunctional relationships, and despair in the US Deep South. As Ward writes, ‘we felt like death was stalking us, driving us from one another, the community falling apart’ (p. 31).

Teaching Memoir in Neoliberal Times  35 I do not assign this book to force students to ‘be brave’ or to make a point about productive discomfort. Instead, I assign this book to open up conversations about literary representations of ethnicity, socioeconomic class, gender, and trauma – testimonies that are not generally welcome, as neoliberal cultural discourses encourage expressions of strength and optimism. Even if Ward, in the end, can be interpreted as a success story with a traditional trajectory – our narrator leaves ­DeLisle for Stanford University in 1995, continues her studies in graduate school at the ­University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and is now a professor at ­Tulane – she never attempts or even expresses desire to escape her past, her family, or her community. Instead, she speaks up to share her story, and the stories of lost friends and family members, in a narrative that insists on the worth of people often depicted as neoliberalism’s ‘bad subjects, who are judged to be risky and/or are perceived as incapable of rational self-government…targeted for increased surveillance and disciplinary normalization’ (Nadesan 2008, p. 213). Moreover, the narrator’s memories, however painful, shape who she is and who she can be in the world. She grapples with this idea when she attempts to write fiction about Mississippi: I knew the boys in my first novel…weren’t as raw as they could be, weren’t real. I knew they were failing as characters because I wasn’t pushing them to assume the reality that my real-life boys…­ experienced every day. I loved them too much: as an author, I was a benevolent God. I protected them from death, from drug addiction, from needlessly harsh sentences in jail for doing stupid, juvenile things like stealing four-wheel ATVs. All of the young Black men in my life, in my community, had been prey to these things in real life, and yet in the lives I imagined for them, I avoided the truth. I couldn’t figure out how to love my characters less. (Ward 2013, p. 70) It seems that nonfiction is the place where Ward’s narrative can be appropriately ‘raw.’ A classroom directly engaging with books like hers, about painful memories, is a far cry from the campus ‘trigger warning’ policies so often misinterpreted, even lampooned, within neoliberal ideologies that celebrate individual responsibility and willpower while devaluing emotion and empathy. The phrase ‘trigger warning’ derives from studies of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – a condition associated at first with soldiers’ feelings of anxiety, panic, or emotional numbness after wartime experiences. After many years of debate among researchers as to whether or not this condition should be recognized as a distinctive diagnosis with specific symptoms and recommended treatment protocols, PTSD was included in the 1980 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Writing for the New Republic, Jeet

36  Megan Brown Heer offers an account of PTSD’s increasing association with traumatic experiences beyond the battlefield; recent editions of the DSM include such examples as sexual assault and domestic abuse. Consistent in the research throughout these changes over time, however, is the idea of PTSD as ‘a theory of memory: it posits that for certain people the memory of a trauma always exists, lying just below the surface of consciousness, ready to be triggered’ (Heer 2015). This understanding of PTSD has come to affect campus culture. Courses in the humanities and social sciences, in particular, may require students to engage with subject matter that could ‘trigger’ memories and feelings of trauma; therefore, some students ask for ‘warnings’ about potentially triggering material in assigned texts or upcoming class discussions. Some faculty members do provide various kinds of trigger warnings, and some do not. Some departments and universities have trigger warning policies, and some do not. No matter the particular situation at individual universities, though, it is clear that trigger warnings have become a matter of public debate. Politicians, pundits, and reporters select examples they deem extreme and subject these to scrutiny, even parody. In Iowa, where I live, a state lawmaker proposed a ‘Suck It Up, Buttercup’ bill that targeted university funding for grief counseling or support group sessions post-US 2016 Presidential election. (Note: the state universities in question had not spent any money on such counseling or other support-related events.) In a much-reposted Atlantic Monthly article tellingly titled ‘The Coddling of the American Mind,’ Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt cite various student objections to classic works of literature and use these examples to predict a dystopian future full of thin-skinned young adults. While I concede that trigger warnings are disturbing in that they may erode the important concept of academic freedom, and freedom of speech more generally, I remain more interested in the way student concerns are portrayed in the debate. Vulnerability becomes a liability, emotions are for demanding ‘buttercups’ or ‘special snowflakes,’ and requests for assistance or support are for wimps destined to doom the cultures in which they dwell. Heer acknowledges frustrations with trigger warnings while also expressing an understanding of where the trend comes from: ‘Most current college students grew up in the shadow of September 11, with the specter of large-scale terrorism always looming and with a steady stream of soldiers returning home to grapple with their demons. It is no wonder that they feel that they, too, deserve security’ (Heer 2015). We live in anxious times, and even if such confrontations with anxiety might take the form, for some, of a desire to avoid or shut down troubling subjects, at least these confrontations are indeed taking a form rather than being squelched in the service of ‘looking on the bright side.’ I find that the expression of emotions – even unpleasant emotions – is an act of bravery and potential political action rather than an act of cowardly immaturity.

Teaching Memoir in Neoliberal Times  37 My stance extends to students who express concerns about the texts they encounter. While I do not assign readings based on the notion of protecting students from certain subjects, I do welcome conversations with students about their concerns. I can contribute to such conversations by addressing, specifically, the lesson I hope students will understand: not all subject positions entail equal opportunities or access, and an individual’s subject position can dictate that individual’s responses and choices. Again, circumstances matter, even if neoliberalism’s celebrations of the power of individual will over all other factors suggest otherwise.

Memoir, Facts, and Uncertainties The third item I would like to posit as an advantage of teaching memoir in neoliberal times is the genre’s emphasis on questions of factuality, and on perceptions and representations of factuality. Many life-writing scholars, as well as memoirists themselves, have weighed in on these questions, particularly when it comes to distinguishing between fiction and nonfiction. Some argue that memoir has always been a blurry c­ ategory and that memory itself is composed of semi-fictionalized, continually recreated, contingent narratives, and others – including Mary Karr – ­insist that standards of factuality nonetheless remain in nonfiction, even if some recreation of scene details or dialogue is inevitable. In her book on craft, The Art of Memoir (2015), Karr writes that deliberate untruths are unacceptable in memoir and that a writer’s strategies for reckoning with uncertainty about memory or perception should be announced as such: ‘I would defend anybody’s right to move the line for veracity… though I’d argue that the reader has a right to know’ (p. 10). Essayist John D’Agata has a different perspective, evinced when he turned a long argument with a magazine’s fact-checker into a book. In The Lifespan of a Fact (2012), D’Agata and Jim Fingal, then an intern with The Believer, debated the factual inaccuracies in D’Agata’s essay about Las Vegas; D’Agata defined them as acceptable artistic license while Fingal insisted that nonfiction should contain no fiction. While the factuality question is complicated, long-steeped in genre history and theory, discussing it with students is necessary, especially when they are working on their own creative nonfiction and need to decide where, when, and how to represent their experiences and perspectives. Therefore, we spend time in class identifying the effects of deliberate deception and imposture, and considering, more broadly, the nature and complexity of narrative testimony. The much-publicized, deliberate deceptions in James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003) offer evidence of the reach and danger of neoliberal ideology. A gritty story of drug addiction and recovery, A Million Little Pieces features a narrator insistent on the importance of personal responsibility. While in a rehab program, he rejects the famous twelve steps of

38  Megan Brown recovery culture; rather than admitting that his life has spiraled out of his control, as Narcotics Anonymous and other programs encourage addicts to do, he doubles down on the idea that his individual decisions are to blame for his predicament: ‘There is no Higher Power or any God who is responsible for what I do and for what I have done and for who I am’ (Frey 2003, p. 76). While the book repeatedly emphasizes the narrator’s flaws, it also presents him as a hero for adhering to the neoliberal ideal of the self-sufficient, autonomous individual; as Julie Rak writes, Frey’s narrator displays the contemporary ‘hallmarks of American citizenship’ (Rak 2012, p. 226). In the service of presenting this flawed-but-heroic self, Frey exaggerates and fabricates events, making his suffering so harrowing that his survival would seem all the more laudable. For instance, as documented by the Smoking Gun in the exposé that led to Frey’s public shaming, he falsely claims to be ‘an outlaw “wanted in three states,”’ and he ‘invented a role for himself in a deadly train accident that cost the lives of two female high school students’ (‘A Million Little Lies’ 2006). The Frey incident not only suggests the toxicity of neoliberal celebrations of macho willpower, but also points toward problematic contemporary attitudes toward honesty, credibility, and authenticity. While dishonesty in government is not a recent development, the proliferation of social media avenues for spreading fake, biased, or highly curated versions of news is still new. As Daniel T. Rodgers writes as part of a cluster of articles in ‘The Post-Truth Issue’ of the Chronicle of Higher ­Education, ‘We live…in a political-cultural moment saturated with competing claims on truth, each insisting on its veracity. We have contrived to construct an open marketplace of truths, and it is not a happy state.’ He rightly connects the ‘marketplace’ image with the atomizing effects of neoliberal ideology: ‘where truths are utterly free to be individually chosen, where the processes of inquiry are marginalized, the social disintegrates’ (Rodgers 2017). The problem with A Million Little Pieces is not the fact that the book includes inaccuracies – memoirists cannot be expected to be able to remember, fact-check, and corroborate every detail of their narrated experiences – but that it never discloses its ‘processes of inquiry,’ never notes uncertainties or allows for multiple perspectives, never suggests that the narrator’s account of his experiences is flawed. Also, in interviews about the controversy, Frey justifies his writerly choices using two different excuses: one, he claims that he was accurately depicting his experiences as he understood them; and two, he states that he deliberately set out to challenge literary genre conventions. 2 Like a social media poster sharing long-disproven conspiracy theories and refusing to respond to people who object or offer counternarratives, Frey chooses, creates, and cleaves to his own ‘version’ of what happened, shutting out possibilities for connection or conversation. What I see as a more productive approach to engaging with notions of factuality, perception, and representation can be found in Lacy M.

Teaching Memoir in Neoliberal Times  39 Johnson’s The Other Side (2014), an account of the narrator’s kidnapping, rape, beating, and imprisonment by an abusive ex-boyfriend. This memoir directly addresses the issues of multiple truth claims and testimonies. Sometimes, this occurs through subtle, stylistic choices; for instance, the book’s opening sentence establishes the narrator’s uncertainty about her own story by using ‘or’ to offer two descriptions: ‘I crash through the screen door, arms flailing like two loose propellers, stumbling like a woman on fire: hair and clothes ablaze. Or I do not stumble’ (Johnson 2014, p. 11). At other times, the narrator juxtaposes two versions of the same story. In one scene, she and her ex-boyfriend (referred to through much of the memoir as The Man I Lived With) bring her cat, suffering from feline leukemia, to the veterinarian to be put to sleep, and in another just afterwards, the ex-boyfriend kills the cat and puts it in a dumpster. The narrator confesses, ‘I tell people we have put the cat to sleep… I can’t remember how and when I came to believe that lie’ (p. 52). As the narrator continually interrogates her own recollections in ways large and small, she also offers testimonies that would cause some readers to doubt her credibility – she writes, without euphemisms or apologies, about working as a stripper, about taking drugs, and about enjoying consensual, violent sex play. While Frey’s memoir attempts to render moments of vulnerability and uncertainty invisible via its strident insistence on the narrator’s gritty authenticity, Johnson’s presents a complex narrator who never claims absolute authority. Johnson’s self-aware storytelling – rather than coming across as pretentious or cutesy, as self-aware storytelling often does – is purposeful; The Other Side invites readers to weigh and assess the testimony of its vulnerable, uncertain narrator, moving the ‘processes of inquiry’ to which Rodgers refers from the margins to the center (Rodgers 2017). Some of the processes depicted in the memoir are legal and procedural, as Johnson compares ‘official’ written statements from records and newspaper reports to her memories of her ex-boyfriend’s crimes. In these comparisons, the narrator often reflects on modes of representation: ‘The writers do not reflect. They do not sympathize. They express no pity or outrage or disgust. Each report simply records my story, and yet it is not my story, though it is the same version of the story I would tell’ (Johnson 2014, p. 25). Other inquiry processes are therapeutic in nature; the narrator meets several different therapists after the kidnapping as she attempts to work through her experiences. Here, Johnson comments not only on a particularly disquieting realization, but also on memory and narrative more broadly: The fact is, The Man I Live With will remember the hostel in ­Budapest. And the train. And the bruise-blue boat. He will remember the campground in Amsterdam. And he will remember them differently.

40  Megan Brown I close the book and place it on the shelf, trying not to think about that fact, because thinking about it would mean acknowledging that my story is not the only story. And there is no story in which this, or our life together, makes sense. (p. 90) No version of the story – even her own compared to her abusive ex-­ boyfriend’s version – is presented as definitive, but each helps the narrator to piece together and respond to what has happened. This does not mean that all statements are true and valid, or that lies are just ‘alternative facts,’ but it does mean that memories are made of the stories we tell ourselves, and that we need to be mindful of assessing their credibility. Indeed, this assessment – paired with careful, reflective narration of the sort that Johnson’s memoir features – may encourage skeptical readers to return to trusting in first-person narration, particularly from voices that struggle to be heard and taken seriously.

Neoliberal Narratives and Counternarratives Leigh Gilmore describes recent critical responses to memoir as being part of a ‘boom/lash’: while memoirs remain popular, they are also stigmatized. Publishers, critics, and readers once ‘showed considerable interest’ in memoirs that served as ‘literary eyewitness to history, capturing the experience of complex lives not characterized by privilege or status,’ but then these ‘were tagged as both lies and inconvenient truths, and their authors were shamed, sidelined, and turned into examples of the excesses of identity politics, and increasingly of the pitfalls of memoir itself’ (Gilmore 2017, p. 88). For example, Gilmore notes, Rigoberta Menchú, whose I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983) was disparaged as an ideologically motivated misrepresentation of life during the Guatemalan Civil War, found her reputation under attack, culminating in calls that she be stripped of her 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. After the publication of The Kiss (1997), a memoir detailing her incestuous relationship with her father when she was a young adult, Kathryn Harrison was attacked in reviews; some reviewers shamed Harrison for exposing her children to the story by publishing it; and others questioned her credibility by alleging that incest survivors would surely seem less impressive and well-adjusted in their adult lives. Gilmore suggests that such narratives of struggle and crisis have given way to ‘neoliberal life narratives’ focusing on a narrator ‘who overcomes hardship and recasts historical and systemic harm as something an individual alone can, and should, manage through pluck, perseverance, and enterprise’ (Gilmore 2017, p. 89). One might think, for instance, of such bestsellers as Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012), in which the narrator processes grief and overcomes addiction by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail alone, or

Teaching Memoir in Neoliberal Times  41 of A Million Little Pieces, which eschews twelve-step support groups for solo attempts to conquer adversity through sheer willpower and macho strength. Gilmore’s argument is persuasive – so much so that it encourages me, rather than dissuades me from, continuing to teach memoir in undergraduate courses. The majority of memoirs I encounter do tend to follow that neoliberal narrative pattern: the narrator overcomes obstacles ­without asking for help or leaning on others for support; and these o ­ bstacles are presented as individual, personal setbacks rather than systemic problems. As such, I find myself wanting to show students the progressive potential of memoir by offering them powerful ­counternarratives, like Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ward’s Men We Reaped, or ­Johnson’s The Other Side, which remind readers that identities and lives are shaped by social forces, emphasize vulnerability rather than ­Horatio Alger-­esque pluck, and foreground questions about fact and perception. Even if memoirs seem to align smoothly with neoliberalism’s emphasis on individualism, there are many that challenge – explicitly or ­implicitly – ­neoliberal values.

Notes 1 See Chapter 5 of my American Autobiography after 9/11 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017). 2 For examples, see Peretz 2008 and Frey 2006.

References ‘A million little lies: James Frey’s fiction addiction’ 2006, The Smoking Gun, viewed 28 April 2017, www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/celebrity/mil lion-little-lies. Angelou, M. 1969, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Random House, New York. Bechdel, A. 2006, Fun Home: a family tragicomic, Houghton Mifflin, New York. Coates, T. 2015, Between the World and Me, Spiegel & Grau, New York. D’Agata, J. & Fingal, J. 2012.The Lifespan of a Fact, W.W. Norton & Company, New York. Frey, J. 2003, A Million Little Pieces, Anchor Books, New York. Frey, J. 2006, ‘Interview with Larry King Live,’ CNN, viewed 28 April 2017, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0601/11/lkl.01.html. Gardner, C. and Troupe, Q. & Rivas, M. E. 2006, The Pursuit of Happyness, Amistad/HarperCollins, New York. Gilmore, L. 2017, Tainted Witness: why we doubt what women say about their lives, Columbia University Press, New York. Harrison, K. 1997, The Kiss, Random House, New York. Harvey, D. 2005, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, New York. Hayek, F. A. 1994, The Road to Serfdom: fiftieth anniversary edition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

42  Megan Brown Heer, J. 2015, ‘Generation PTSD: what the “trigger warning” debate is really about’, The New Republic, viewed 20 May 2015, https://newrepublic.com/ article/121866/history-ptsd-and-evolution-trigger-warnings. Johnson, L. M. 2014, The Other Side: a memoir, Tin House Books, Portland, OR. Karr, M. 1995, The Liars’ Club, Viking, New York. Karr, M. 2015, The Art of Memoir, Harper, New York. Kontopodis, M. 2012, Neoliberalism, Pedagogy, and Human Development: exploring time, mediation, and collectivity in contemporary schools, Taylor & Francis, Hoboken, NJ. Lukianoff, G. & Haidt, J. 2015, ‘The coddling of the American mind’, The Atlantic, viewed 30 September 2015, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/. Menchú, R. 1983, I, Rigoberta Menchú, Verso, New York. Monbiot, G. 2016, ‘Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems,’ The Guardian, viewed 30 April 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2016/ apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot. Nadesan, M. H. 2008, Governmentality, Biopower, and Everyday life, Routledge, New York. Nealon, J. 2007, Foucault Beyond Foucault: power and its intensifications since 1984, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. Peretz, E. 2008, ‘James Frey’s morning after,’ Vanity Fair, viewed 2 April 2017, www.vanityfair.com/culture/2008/06/frey200806. Rak, J. 2012, ‘Memoir, truthiness, and the power of Oprah: the James Frey controversy reconsidered,’ Prose Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 224–42. Rodgers, D. T. 2017, ‘When truth becomes a commodity,’ The Chronicle of Higher Education, viewed 31 January 2017, www.chronicle.com/article/ When-Truth-Becomes-a Commodity/238866?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_ medium=en&elqTrackId= 68c361b683fa41639664d75bfbc7fcf7&elq= 6561329100f847fe8ae425e069e316b7&elqaid=12229&elqat=1&elqCampaign Id=4955. Steger, M. B. & Roy, R. K. 2010, Neoliberalism: a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, New York. Strayed, C. 2012, Wild: from lost to found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Knopf, New York. Ward. J. 2013, Men We Reaped, Bloomsbury, New York.

3 The Ghost in the Memoir Machine Exploring the Relationship between Ghostwritten Memoir and Biography Matthew Ricketson Introduction Memoir, autobiography, and biography have been among the most popular nonfiction genres for many years. Of these genres, biography has been taken more seriously, probably because of the amount of research required for a comprehensive biography, but I would not want to overstate the genre’s acceptance among scholars, many of whom are scathing about the form, seeing it either as second-rate history or dumbed-down philosophy or irredeemably prurient. Germaine Greer spoke for many when she described her biographer, Christine Wallace, as a parasite, a dung-beetle and flesh-eating bacterium (Greer 1994). In recent years, however, the popularity of autobiography and especially memoir has far outstripped that of biography. Ben Yagoda in Memoir: A History, records that between 2004 and 2008 in the United States total sales in the categories of ‘Personal Memoirs, Childhood Memoirs, and Parental Memoirs’ increased more than 400 percent (2009, p. 7). In the United Kingdom memoirs accounted for seven of the top ten bestselling nonfiction hardcover books in 2007 and 2008 (p. 9). What has so far escaped most people’s attention is how many memoirists have been aided by a ghostwriter. This is understandable; ghostwriters, as the term suggests, are meant to be invisible. Their role may be to put into pleasing words the deeds and thoughts of a person skilled in, say, science or sport but not in storytelling. But what if the ghostwriter’s involvement extends beyond wordsmithing to creating an authorial voice for the memoirist that is integral to the book’s success? And what if that voice is fundamentally at odds with the memoirist’s, as has been asserted by the ghost of the memoir of no less a figure than the United States president, ­Donald Trump (Mayer 2016)? Given that an authentic voice is central to the popularity and influence of memoir, shouldn’t we pause to consider the role of these unheralded toilers in the literary vineyard, especially when for so many readers a memoir or autobiography represents their most extensive, meaningful exposure to a person?

44  Matthew Ricketson Since 2002 Nielsen BookScan has published annual bestseller lists that account for around 85 percent of all books sold in Australia ­(Webster 2016). I analyzed the top 50 bestselling nonfiction books whether ­Australian or overseas for the period 2002–2016 and found 171 memoirs or autobiographies and 20 biographies among the 750 bestsellers. Between them, memoir or autobiography and biography comprised one in four nonfiction bestsellers, but as the figures show the overwhelming majority of them were memoirs or autobiographies. What is less visible is the number of ghostwritten memoirs. By my count ghostwriters were involved in 47 of the 171 bestselling memoirs, but it is hard to be definitive. In some, the ghostwriter’s role was made explicit, as in Major General John Cantwell’s 2012 memoir Exit Wounds: One Australian’s War on Terror where journalist Greg Bearup was named on the cover as a co-author, while in others, like former Australian test cricket captain Michael Clarke’s My Story, Malcolm Knox’s role was confined to the acknowledgements (2016, p. 456). In some, the ghostwriter may not be mentioned at all.

Memoir’s Appeal, and Its Shortcomings Before considering the implications of the ghostwriter’s role, it is necessary to briefly examine the relative strengths and shortcomings of memoir and biography. Autobiography and memoir have a long history, the most famous early example of which is St. Augustine’s Confessions written in ad 397. The genre’s power lies in giving people freedom to express themselves and to tell their own story. This power should not be underestimated given how many people have been voiceless for long periods of history. The emergence and popularity of slave narratives in the United States exemplifies both the problem and the solution. William Dean Howells, editor of Harper’s magazine, said as long ago as 1909 that autobiography and memoir constitute the ‘most democratic province of the republic of letters’ because their authors are not, or should not be, restricted by ‘age or sex, creed, class or colour’ (Yagoda 2009, p. 150). This is even truer today when many memoirs are written about particular episodes or events in a person’s life. Yagoda argues the memoir boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been a boon overall. Memoirs have cast light on a wide variety of social, ethnic, medical, psychological, regional, and personal experiences. ‘Under its auspices, voices and stories have emerged that, otherwise, would have been dull impersonal nonfiction tomes or forgettable autobiographical novels, or wouldn’t have been expressed at all’ (Yagoda 2009, p. 240). From the reader’s perspective the genre’s appeal lies in the access it gives to the subject’s innermost thoughts and feelings. If the memoirist is famous, the reader is privy to an insider’s perspective on important events. If the memoir is honest, readers welcome that, as honesty is inherently

The Ghost in the Memoir Machine  45 appealing. Reading of another person’s struggles with their demons encourages sympathy, then reflection, and perhaps inspires us to begin, or renew, our own struggles. Attesting to the strength of his conversion to Christianity, Augustine feels he must confess all his sins to God, which he does at length: Out of the muddy concupiscence of the flesh, and the bubblings of youth, mists fumed up which beclouded and overcast my heart, that I could not discern the clear brightness of love from the fog of lustfullness. Both did confusedly boil in me, and hurried my unstayed youth over the precipice of unholy desires, and sunk me in a gulf of flagitiousnesses. (Augustine 401, p. 19) The bigger the demons, the more dramatic the struggle, and the more engaged is the reader, especially as they experience the memoirist’s authorial voice speaking directly to them. If the memoirist is a good storyteller, as were actors Carrie Fisher and, from an earlier generation, David Niven, their works can be highly readable and entertaining. If they are a truly skilled writer, the memoir or autobiography may be regarded as literary art. Yagoda includes Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life: A Memoir (1989), and The Liars’ Club: A Memoir (1995) by Mary Karr as ‘literature of the first order’ (p. 240). The single perspective, though, is also the genre’s unavoidable shortcoming. Memoirists choose what to include, who to praise, denigrate, or ignore; they have the first word and the last word, and so the power to shape the story of their life. Not everyone writes as artfully as St. Augustine or is as honest about their blind spots, their missteps, or their shameful moments as was Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Confessions. The memoir was published after his death in 1781 because his accounts of masturbation and of becoming aroused as an eight year old when spanked by the wife of a minister with whom he was boarding had shocked Parisian private reading audiences (Rousseau 1782–1789, pp. 13–16). With the best will in the world, it is hard for us to truly see ourselves as others do, and not every memoirist has the best will in the world, as the case studies discussed later demonstrate. Given the sheer number of memoirs that are published it would be surprising if many weren’t self-serving and some downright false. As George Orwell writes, with characteristic bluntness: ‘Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats’ (Orwell 1944, p. 185). He is not alone: George Bernard Shaw and Sigmund Freud both dismissed autobiography on the grounds that if it is to be truthful, family and friends will be irreparably hurt (Yagoda 2009, pp. 169–70). These three august men all seem to assume they could write an honest memoir, and perhaps

46  Matthew Ricketson they could have, but none did. This prompts questions about people’s willingness to accept the vulnerability that swims in the lane next to public honesty. Even before honesty, though, the vagaries of memory must be considered. In The Seven Sins of Memory, psychologist Daniel Schacter identifies five persistent memory biases: Consistency and change biases show how our theories about ourselves can lead us to reconstruct the past as overly similar to, or different from, the present. Hindsight biases reveal that recollections of past events are filtered by current knowledge. Egocentric biases illustrate the powerful role of the self in orchestrating perceptions and memories of reality. And stereotypical biases demonstrate how generic memories shape interpretations of the world, even when we are unaware of their existence or influence. (Schacter 2001, p. 139) Yagoda makes the astute point that the problem with these biases, for memoir, is that they push writers toward making their accounts more dramatic. ‘There is an inherent and irresolvable conflict between the capabilities of memory and the demands of narrative’ (Yagoda 2009, p. 109).

Can Biography Solve the Problems of Memoir? Can the genre of biography provide an answer to this inherent, irresolvable conflict? In some ways yes, but in others no. Undeniably, it is valuable to present a range of perspectives on a person’s life. Family, friends and colleagues, not to mention the biographer, may see through the subject’s blind spots. They can be a corrective to the memoirist’s vanity or their very human desire to present themselves well. ­Biographers can check memories against the written record and can sift and sieve through a range of accounts of an event or experience so that their reconstruction of it will approach, or gain on, the truth. Historically, most biographies were written about people no longer alive, but from the 1970s biographers, many of them journalists, began writing the lives of people before they died, according to Steve Weinberg’s Telling the Untold Story (1992). No doubt the trend identified by Weinberg was tied to journalism’s expanding ambition post-Watergate, but it was also a response to the increasing popularity of autobiographies that were partial or misleading or plain wrong. The bite of revelation has fed the sales of many bestselling contemporary biographies. In the United States, Kitty ­Kelley’s muckraking biographies of singer Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan, wife of president Ronald Reagan, and the English Royal family, reached the Publishers Weekly annual top ten bestselling nonfiction books in 1986,

The Ghost in the Memoir Machine  47 1991, and 1997 respectively (Ricketson 2010, Appendix A). In ­Australia, Paul ­Barry’s investigative biographies of entrepreneur Alan Bond and of media mogul Kerry Packer were among the bestselling nonfiction books for the 1990s, as was Chris Masters’ biography of Sydney radio shock, Alan Jones, in the 2000s (Ricketson 2001; Webster 2016). All these biographies extended the news media’s fourth estate or watchdog role to book-length. They contained newsworthy revelations that either cast doubt on the veracity of the subject’s memoir (as in Nancy Reagan’s 1989 memoir My Turn) or scrutinized the work and life of influential public figures, such as Packer, Bond and Jones. They provided a valuable corrective to a self-serving, misleading memoir or disclosed information the subjects preferred to keep hidden. Not that an exposé is the only path to a large readership: David Marr’s 1991 biography of author Patrick White, written before the Nobel prize winner died, was among the best-selling Australian nonfiction books of the 1990s (Ricketson 2001) and more recently, Walter Isaacson’s 2011 bestselling biography of Steve Jobs, sought, like Marr, to explain rather than excoriate the subject. There remains, no doubt, a place for biographies of those no longer alive, but these biographers are slaves to the availability of historical records. Conversely, what readers can expect with biographies of living people are works humming with the urgency of journalistic engagement. Interviews can be conducted, and scenes of the subject at turning points in their lives vividly described. The biographer can take a narrative approach to the life story they are telling, which makes for compelling reading, whether the biography is a conventional cradle-to-grave type or more experimental. Among the latter, John Lahr uses the frame of a season he spent backstage at the Royal Drury Lane theatre in London to construct a searching examination of the art and the life of satirist Barry Humphries (Lahr 1991). Such works require high-order research and narrative skills. More common sadly are the ‘dull impersonal nonfiction tomes’ referred to earlier by Yagoda. Janet Malcolm is icily dismissive of the genre, arguing that most are so appallingly written that readers tolerate them only because they collude with the biographer ‘in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole’ (Malcolm 1993, p. 9). Malcolm’s comment is acute but reductive. Nor does the dynamic between biographer and subject need to be as impoverished as Malcolm argues in The Silent Woman, her 1993 account of the biography industry that sprouted around the life and death by suicide of poet Sylvia Plath, as I have argued elsewhere (Ricketson 2014, pp. 87–115). Equally important, the biographer–subject relationship is integral to providing the range of perspectives on a subject that eludes most memoirists. The dynamic ranges from cooperation, such as Isaacson enjoyed with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, to hostility, as Barry experienced with Packer,

48  Matthew Ricketson whose lawyers threatened to sue if he wrote the biography. He did, and they didn’t (Barry 1993, pp. 412–13). More often, biographers of living people dance between their desire for access to the subject and their demand for independence from them. The two rarely coexist comfortably. Sometimes the glittering bracelets of access, which sparkle with hours of hanging-out time and viewing private records, morph into handcuffs that lock biographers into conditions of avoiding certain topics or protecting family members. The literature about biography is replete with biographers’ horrified accounts of difficulties encountered pursuing their quarry, such as Ian Hamilton’s In Search of J.D. Salinger (1988).

The Rise of the Invisible Art of Ghostwriting The practice of biography, then, solves some of the problems inherent in memoir but not all and it has its own limitations. So, when we read memoirs we need a keener sense of what is at stake and a mind attuned to how much more widely we should read to understand a particular person’s life story. This is especially true given the proliferation of ghostwritten memoirs. If there is a spectrum along which the telling of true life stories sits, with an independent investigative biography at one end and a memoir or autobiography written solely by the subject at the other end, the ghostwriter sits adjacent to the latter. The ghostwriter’s job, according to Andrew Crofts’ handbook, Ghostwriting, is to act as literary handmaiden to the subject. ‘Your job is to produce the books that the authors would have written themselves if they had been able and willing’ (2004, p. 109). Crofts is alive to the role’s tensions, citing Sue Norris’ arch comments in The Financial Times: The cult of celebrity has spawned a lucrative niche market for the writer with no ego and limitless discretion. Someone who is content to see the autobiography of the pop star, the footballer or the actor sell by the cartload, knowing that they wrote every word, but who is not going to gnash their teeth in resentment or dish the unpublished dirt drunkenly revealed as the tape recorder, forgotten, spun on. (Crofts 2004, p. 1) Crofts extols the professionalism required of ghostwriters, but more commonly ghosting is seen as hack work; search the website of prize-­ winning Australian novelist and journalist Malcolm Knox’s literary agent, Lyn Tranter (http://austlit.com/archives/283), and you won’t find references to the several books he has ghostwritten. Yet the ghostwriter performs many of the same research and writing tasks as a biographer; the difference is they stop short of revealing the subject in any light other than their own limelight. On the crunch question of what a ghostwriter should do if the subject lies to them in interviews, Crofts says the

The Ghost in the Memoir Machine  49 ghostwriter should raise it, but beyond that it is between the subject and their publisher (pp. 108–9). Little academic work has been done on ghostwriting, which is not surprising given its subterranean, poorly regarded place in literary practice. But it is overdue given its growing importance in a popular, influential genre and especially since much of the transaction and its various ethical tensions are hidden. Revelations by Donald Trump’s ghostwriter about The Art of the Deal should sharpen scholarly focus (Mayer 2016). During the 2016 United States presidential campaign Tony Schwartz grew increasingly worried that the false image of Trump that he had created in the 1987 memoir helped him win the election. ‘I put lipstick on a pig’ Schwartz told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer (2016, p. 21). ‘I created a character far more winning than Trump actually is’ (p. 24). If he was writing the book in 2016 he would title it ‘The Sociopath.’ After spending eighteen months working with Trump on the memoir, Schwartz felt he knew him better than anyone except his family. Trump narrated his life as a Horatio Alger-style story of great success from humble beginnings but Schwartz soon found it was false. His father was a wealthy property developer who lent Trump US$7.5 million to get started as a casino operator in Atlantic City and used his political muscle to pave the way for his son’s property deals. Schwartz found kernels of truth in stories Trump liked telling about himself, but they were exaggerated to make him seem cleverer than he was. After almost abandoning the project, Schwartz hit upon the idea of sitting with Trump while he conducted his business on the phone. Such a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ strategy is common among journalists writing profile pieces, but as a ghost Schwartz could not write what he saw and felt about Trump, which was loathing for Trump’s insatiable hunger for ‘money, praise and celebrity.’ Instead, he realized that for the ghostwritten memoir to work Trump needed to be seen as a ‘weirdly sympathetic character’ (p. 23). Armed with his extensive first hand observation of Trump, Schwartz created a voice for him, as this passage from the memoir shows: I play to people’s fantasies…People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and it’s a very effective form of promotion. (in Mayer 2016, p. 23) Schwartz regrets that the myth he created in the memoir of ‘a charmingly brash entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for business’ resonated with so many voters, who, he predicted, ‘will learn what anyone who deals closely with him already knows – that he couldn’t care less about them’ (Mayer 2016, p. 26). The Art of the Deal is perhaps the most salutary

50  Matthew Ricketson reminder of the consequences of a ghostwritten memoir that is a piece of myth-making. It is by no means the main reason Trump was elected president, but it clearly played a role in creating an image that appealed to many. Three further case studies illustrate other issues arising from ghostwritten memoirs.

It’s Not About the Truth: Lance Armstrong’s Memoir It’s Not About the Bike Lance Armstrong’s memoir was released in 2000. He was a successful cyclist, having won the 1999 Tour de France, but beyond sport he was unknown. Soon, though, the world knew the story of how, on the cusp of cycling stardom, Armstrong had been struck down with testicular cancer and of how he had recovered to resume his career and win the world’s most coveted cycling event. The book’s title told readers this was no ordinary sporting memoir replete with tedious recitations of training regimes and torn hamstrings but one concerned with matters for which sport is a proxy – life and death. The memoir’s tight focus on ­A rmstrong’s illness and recovery makes his triumph all the sweeter because for most of the book, sport has been pushed far into the background. It’s Not About the Bike is written in prose as spare and unsentimental as Armstrong appears to be. In this, Armstrong was ably assisted by a ghostwriter, Sally Jenkins, a respected sports journalist who played a major role in the book’s success. For the reader, it is ­A rmstrong’s candor that feels so impressive, whether in allowing us to see his restless prickliness, or his pain and desolation in masturbating to donate sperm ahead of chemotherapy treatment that would render him temporarily, perhaps permanently, sterile (Armstrong 2000, pp. 80–84). Readers responded; sales soared immediately, and it stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for a year, selling more than a million copies ­(Albergotti & O’Connell 2013, p. 130). The book continued selling strongly for years as it became a hand-around classic. It also won the prestigious William Hill sports book of the year award. There was, however, a hole in the heart of the book: in its 275 pages there was only one mention of performance enhancing drugs, on pages 252–3. Armstrong dismisses accusations by French journalists during the 1999 Tour de France that he had tested positive for a banned substance, corticosteroid, saying he had used a cortisone cream to treat saddle sores and that race authorities had immediately issued a statement clearing him. He then makes two statements he was to repeat countless times over the next decade: that the people accusing him were the same people who had written him off when he had cancer, and that he had spent months that year training in France, which had been cracking down on drug cheats. ‘If I was trying to hide something, I’d have been in another country’ (p. 253). The twin themes of journalists trying to tear

The Ghost in the Memoir Machine  51 him down and of passing any drug test he was asked to take became mantras for Armstrong. Inside the cycling world it was well known that to compete at the highest levels you had to take banned substances; from one angle, Armstrong was only doing what everyone else was, and the gap in his memoir was similar to the gap in other memoirs. In the end, however, what made the Armstrong case different was this: first, he became the most successful cyclist in history, winning the Tour de France a record seven times; second his memoir reached many more people than any other cyclist’s; third, he became a fierce public advocate for cancer sufferers and set up the Livestrong Foundation which raised more than US$500 million to fight cancer; and fourth, he viciously attacked his questioners, including former teammates and their families, both verbally and in million dollar defamation suits. It was primarily the work of Irish investigative journalist David Walsh (who Armstrong used to call ‘the little troll’) and French filmmaker Pierre Bellestar who blew the whistle on Armstrong’s drug cheating in a book they co-authored in 2003 entitled L.A Confidentiel. In it, among other accusations, they questioned Armstrong’s saddle sores’ story from the 1999 tour, saying the prescription for the treating cream had been back-dated to mask the use of corticosteroid, a banned substance. It took the institutional muscle and prosecutorial nous of US authorities to persuade Armstrong’s teammates on the United States Postal team to accept immunity or reduced penalties and testify that Armstrong took banned substances. A long time journalist with The Sunday Times in London, Walsh developed his reporting into a 2012 book entitled Seven Deadly Sins, from which this section draws. Despite his numerous awards as sportswriter of the year and that he was manifestly on the right side of history, Walsh’s book sold fewer copies than Armstrong’s memoir, partly because it was released while Armstrong was still vociferously defending his innocence, partly because it is not as well written as the ghostwritten memoir, and, finally, perhaps because Armstrong’s triumph-over-­adversity myth was more appealing to the public than Walsh forcing us to see that our hero has feet of clay. As for Sally Jenkins, despite the weight of evidence against Armstrong and his manifest dishonesty over many years, she has continued to defend him, on the grounds that he was unfairly targeted because the drug cheating culture was so rampant at the time, that others have escaped without penalty, and the authorities’ mission to crush him was unseemly (Jenkins 2012). There is some weight to her argument – there is little doubt that for anti-doping authorities Armstrong was public enemy number one – but their zeal was impelled by Armstrong’s status and his belligerent refusal to lead on the drug cheating issue. Armstrong really gave them no choice but to go after him. Jenkins’ excusing of Armstrong is also disingenuous given how little attention the memoir pays to performance enhancing drugs. It is telling that another journalist, Tom

52  Matthew Ricketson Clynes, was initially slated to ghostwrite the memoir but lost interest after spending time with Armstrong. He found him to be ‘kind of a jerk to many of the people around him, from his girlfriend, Lisa, to the guy who washed his car.’ When Clynes asked Armstrong about doping the cyclist said ‘everybody does it,’ leaving Clynes feeling he was going to need to be ‘patently dishonest about who Lance really was’ in the m ­ emoir (­A lbergotti & O’Connell 2013, pp. 93–94). By comparison, even after Armstrong finally confessed his drug cheating on Oprah Winfrey’s television program, Jenkins said she had forgiven him (Kinder 2013).

The Value of Personal Testimony: Confronting the Church of Scientology If, in a sense, Lance Armstrong’s ghostwriter created a problem for him by so compellingly drawing public attention to his life story, Lisa Pulitzer, ghostwriter for Jenna Miscavige Hill, has penned an unsophisticated narrative, but it is one that so far has resisted the hostility of the Church of Scientology. Miscavige Hill is the niece of the church’s current head, David Miscavige, who assumed control of the church in 1986 when its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, died or, to use Scientology lingo, ‘dropped his body.’ Her parents were not simply members of the church but worked for it which meant that she spent her entire childhood in the church and had no idea how weird it was when, aged seven, she was asked to sign a contract pledging her life to the church for one billion years (Miscavige Hill 2013, pp. 1–4). The subtitle of her memoir – My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape – accurately describes the book, which begins with her signing the billion year contract and works methodically through her childhood and adolescence. It was written after Miscavige Hill left the church as a young woman, but she tries to recreate her childhood experiences without much adult reflection so as to give the reader a sense of how little awareness she had that childhood could be anything other than what she experienced inside the church. For much of her childhood she lived apart from her parents even though both she and they were living within the church. From the age of six Miscavige Hill and other children in the ‘Cadet Org,’ the junior version of the church’s ‘Sea Organization’ that her parents worked for inside the church, were required to wear a uniform, to do harsh manual labor from morning to evening, and were encouraged to monitor each other for any signs of cadets straying from L. Ron Hubbard’s pre-ordained path. By adulthood Miscavige had become increasingly suspicious of the church and resolved to leave it with her boyfriend, Dallas, whom she married and with whom she had two children. She set up a website, www.exscientologykids.com to encourage others who had left the church to tell their stories. At 404 pages, Beyond Belief is a lengthy memoir; it is written clearly and honestly but is well short of profound. In a sense, she comes across

The Ghost in the Memoir Machine  53 as an ordinary young woman who just happened to be caught up in the extraordinarily strange world of the Church of Scientology. And perhaps this explains the book’s appeal, especially to the students who have read it in the True Stories class I have taught at university for several years. Jenna is ‘relatable,’ to use their preferred term. The child in the white dress staring out from the book’s cover could be one of them. In this, Miscavige Hill has been aided by her ghostwriter, who after a career as a crime reporter and author of modestly successful true crime books, has forged a second career as the deft exponent of the ‘escape story’ subgenre. Beyond Belief is her most successful book, reaching The New York Times bestseller list. Lisa Pulitzer combines a journalist’s ability to write quickly – she spends two weeks interviewing her subjects and completes a book in three months – with ‘a motherly presence that is comforting to women who are about to expose raw truths of a sordid past.’ This allows her to establish a level of trust with them quickly, according to an interview in The New York Times (Kaufman 2013). Pulitzer checks the veracity of her co-author’s claims and provides background material (Beyond Belief carries a chapter about the death of L. Ron Hubbard, most of which is straight reportage), but she does not probe her co-author’s thoughts deeply nor does she investigate or analyze the institutions from which she fled. That is because memoir is limited to the knowledge and perspective of the subject. To see beyond it, you need to turn to Lawrence Wright’s 2013 book Going Clear or the Alex ­Gibney-directed documentary of the same name that drew on Wright’s exhaustive research. There is a wealth of information in Wright’s book that provides both a history of the church and its founder, as well as a fair-minded discussion about the sources of Scientology’s appeal for people. It is the discussion of the political implications of the church’s practices, though, that really separates Going Clear from Miscavige Hill’s memoir. Wright carefully tracks the decades-long fight by the church to have its tax-exempt status as a church reinstated after the United States Internal Revenue Service declared it wasn’t in 1967. The church flooded the IRS with more than 200 lawsuits, forcing it eventually in 1993 to capitulate, settling for US$12.5 million in back-taxes instead of the US$1 billion for which the IRS originally petitioned. The impact of the cave-in is monumental, as the church relies on its tax-exempt status as a religion even though, unlike other religions, it charges exorbitant fees for its services (Wright 2013, pp. 225–32).

My Career Goes Bung: Julian Assange’s ‘Unauthorised Autobiography’ In the history of misfired and misdirected memoirs, few have gone as spectacularly awry as that of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. In 2010 the Australian-born cypherpunk became known around the

54  Matthew Ricketson globe through his encrypted, magnet-for-secrets website that published thousands of pages of documents shedding light on American conduct in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as pulling back the curtain on how international diplomacy is conducted. He had an extraordinary life story to tell, and the publishers Canongate and Alfred Knopf paid UK600,000 pounds and US$800,000 respectively for the rights to it. ­Assange was reportedly paid an advance of UK162,000 pounds which he planned to use to pay lawyers to fight lawsuits he faced over WikiLeaks’ disclosures, as well as separate allegations against him of sexual assault in Sweden (Leigh, Ball & Addley 2011). A ghostwriter was hired to assist; he was no hack but a respected author, Andrew O’Hagan, who has written award-winning novels as well as a powerful work of narrative nonfiction, The Missing. He did not want his name on the book’s cover as a co-author, as Jenkins and Pulitzer had. The ­Scottish writer sympathized with WikiLeaks’ political goals, and A ­ ssange respected O ­ ’Hagan’s writing. So far so good. But in reality what gradually, painfully became clear was that Assange never really had any intention of writing an autobiography. In fact, he appeared to be allergic to sustained reflection and continually swerved away from discussing his personal life. Despite accepting the whopping advance, Assange would not meet the terms of the contract. O’Hagan waved magic dust over the many hours of snatched conversations, half-completed interviews, and rambling monologues, managing to create a partial autobiographical narrative that seemed to capture Assange’s voice and character, as Henry Porter wrote in a review for The Guardian (Porter 2011). The problem was, Assange denounced the entire project; he loftily intoned ‘All ­memoir is prostitution,’ but refused to repay the advance. ­Canongate’s publishing executives were furious; like numerous people before and since, they found Assange almost impossible to deal with. They decided to take the rare if not unprecedented step of publishing the subject’s autobiography against his wishes, which is how they came to give the book its contradictory subtitle, The Unauthorised Autobiography (Assange 2011, pp. 7–8). Some of this arm wrestle came to light in a carefully worded publisher’s note at the beginning of the book, but its cryptic description of the process raised as many questions as it answered. When the book was released in 2011, it was received with puzzlement by readers and critics alike. The former expressed their bewilderment by opting not to touch the polluted project with a barge pole; the latter allowed that O’Hagan had managed to do his best in the worst circumstances but said overall the book was damaged goods. Which it was (Flood 2011). It was only three years later, in 2014 when the book had been largely forgotten, that much of the back story summarized above was revealed. O’Hagan wrote a 26,000 word essay for The London Review of Books1 that is probably the most exhaustive – and exhausting (for O’Hagan) – exegesis about the ghostwriter–subject relationship. It is a brilliant essay

The Ghost in the Memoir Machine  55 that deserves to be read in full. It describes the events in detail, from his dogged efforts to corral Assange, to his gradual realization that ­Assange is not only colossally narcissistic but genuinely uncivilized in ways that are both charming and repelling. He preferred Googling himself to having his own say in an autobiography. He would gleefully hack into communication systems anywhere in the world but was obsessed with protecting the privacy of both WikiLeaks and himself. When O’Hagan would roll his eyes at these contradictions, Assange would look at him blankly. Assange seemed deep in a jungle of his own making: ‘It was like trying to write a book with Mr Kurtz’ (O’Hagan 2014). The portrait that emerges of Assange in O’Hagan’s essay is the fullest and most perceptive I have read. It is free of the irritated competitiveness of journalists who have worked with, then fallen out with Assange, and brims over with a good novelist’s insight into character. And it reflects on the peculiar relationship between ghostwriter and subject, which hovers between handmaiden, reporter, conjurer, and ventriloquist but never quite alights on any. First and foremost, though, O’Hagan re-­asserts that he is an independent writer, something that Assange consistently forgets. Julian is an actor who believes all the lines in the play are there to feed his lines; that none of the other lives is substantial in itself. People have inferred from this kind of thing that he has Asperger’s syndrome and they could be right. (O’Hagan 2014) The moment of clarity for O’Hagan came when Assange desperately wanted his ghostwriter to accompany him to a literary festival to talk about their book which had not been completed. He was flying in from Neverland with his own personal J.M. Barrie. What could be nicer for the lost boy of Queensland with his silver hair and his sense that the world of adults is no real place for him? By refusing the helicopter [ride to the festival] I was not refusing that side of him, only allowing myself the distance to see it clearly, too: I have had to fight to grow away from my own lost boy, and it seemed right that day to fly a kite with my daughter and retain my independence from this man’s confused dream of himself. (O’Hagan 2014)

Conclusion If O’Hagan’s words are a fine expression of independence, they should also remind us just how much skill and care and commitment it takes to be an independent writer. By definition that means many, including many who write their own memoirs, don’t possess these qualities, which

56  Matthew Ricketson is why so often ghostwriters are called in, with results ranging from the celestial to the ghastly, as the four case studies discussed above clearly show. The implications of the ghostwriting process, whether for writers taking part in a sizeable, growing part of literary practice or for readers told so little about a process that substantially shapes the published memoir, are intrinsically important. Some, like Lisa Pulitzer, help their subjects tell valuable life stories while others, like Sally Jenkins and especially Tony Schwartz, are complicit in creating false narratives about people playing significant roles in public life. These false narratives circulated to many people for many years. It was more than a decade after publication of Armstrong’s memoir when he admitted publicly he had repeatedly lied about drug cheating, and nearly three decades elapsed between the publication of The Art of the Deal and its ghostwriter’s heartfelt mea culpa. And without Andrew O’Hagan’s essay we would still be mystified about Assange’s autobiography. The work of investigative journalists in exposing Armstrong, of a guilty ghostwriter confessing his literary crime in creating the Trump myth, and of a novelist drawing back the curtain on the backstage drama of ghostwriting all serve to remind us of the slide to solipsism that can befall memoir; they also underscore the value of alternate voices and independent scrutiny.

Note 1 Published this year as one of three essays in the book The Secret Life, Faber and Faber.

References Albergotti, R. & O’Connell, V. 2013, Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the tour de France and the greatest sports conspiracy ever, Headline, London. Armstrong, L. with Jenkins, S. 2000, It’s Not About the Bike: my journey back to life, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York. Assange, J. 2011, Julian Assange: the unauthorised autobiography, Text Publishing, Melbourne. Augustine, St. 401, Confessions, translated by E. Pusey, Megalodon Entertainment, Metairie, Los Angeles, 2010. Barry, P. 1993, The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer, Bantam, Sydney. Cantwell, J. & Bearup, G. 2012, Exit Wounds: one Australian’s war on terror, Melbourne University Press, Carlton. Clarke, M. 2016, My Story, Pan Macmillan, Sydney. Crofts, A. 2004, Ghostwriting, A. & C. Black, London. Flood, A. 2011, ‘Julian Assange memoir sells just 644 copies’, The Guardian, 28 September, viewed 2 May 2017, www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/28/ julian-assange-memoir. Going Clear: Scientology and the prison of belief, directed by A. Gibney, produced by HBO, 2015.

The Ghost in the Memoir Machine  57 Greer, G. 1994, ‘Me, my work, my friends and my parasite’, The Guardian, 31 October, p. 18. Hamilton, I. 1988, In Search of J.D. Salinger, Minerva, London. Isaacson, W. 2011, Steve Jobs, Simon & Schuster, New York. Jenkins, S. 2012, ‘Why I’m not angry at Lance Armstrong’, The Washington Post, 15 December, viewed 2 May 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/sports/ othersports/why-im-not-angry-at-lance-armstrong/2012/12/15/5802bcce460e-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532_story.html?utm_term=.118ac1d69229. Kaufman, L. 2013, ‘A midwife for harrowing memoirs’, The New York Times, 11 March, viewed 2 May 2017, www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/books/­lisapulitzer-author-of-memoirs-about-defecting.html. Kinder, L. 2013, ‘How Lance Armstrong’s dwindling band of backers reacted to his doping confession’, The Telegraph, 13 January, viewed 2 May 2017, www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/cycling/lancearmstrong/9810988/ How-Lance-Armstrongs-dwindling-band-of-backers-reacted-to-his-dopingconfession.html. Lahr, J. 1991, Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilisation, Bloomsbury, London. Leigh, D., Ball, J., & Addley, E. 2011, ‘Julian Assange autobiography: why he didn’t want it published’, The Guardian, 23 September, viewed 2 May 2017, www. theguardian.com/media/2011/sep/22/julian-assange-memoir-argument. Malcolm, J. 1993, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Picador, London. Marr, D. 1991, Patrick White: a life, Jonathan Cape, London. Mayer, J. 2016, ‘Trump’s Boswell speaks’, The New Yorker, 25 July, pp. 20–6. Miscavige Hill, J. with Pulitzer, L. 2013, Beyond Belief: my secret life inside Scientology and my harrowing escape, William Morrow, New York. Miscavige Hill, J. & Woodcraft, A. 2008, Ex-Scientology Kids, viewed 2 May 2017, http://exscientologykids.com/. O’Hagan, A. 2014, ‘Ghosting’, The London Review of Books, vol. 36, no. 5, 6 March, viewed 2 May 2017, www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n05/andrew-ohagan/ghosting. O’Hagan, A. 2017, ‘Ghosting’ in The Secret Life, Faber & Faber, London, pp. 9–99. Orwell, G. 1944, ‘Benefit of clergy: some notes on Salvador Dali’, reprinted in S. Orwell and I. Angus (eds.), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, As I Please, Secker and Warburg, London, pp. 185–95. Porter, H. 2011, ‘Julian Assange: the unauthorised autobiography—review’, The Guardian, 2 October, viewed 2 May 2017, www.theguardian.com/ media/2011/oct/02/julian-assange-unauthorised-autobiography-review. Ricketson, M. 2001, ‘Names to conjure with’, The Age, Saturday Extra section, p. 8. Ricketson, M. 2010, ‘Ethical issues in the practice of book-length journalism’, PhD, Monash University. Rousseau, J.-J. 1782–1789, The Confessions, Alfred Knopf, New York, Everyman’s Library edition, published in 1931, with an introduction, bibliography, chronology and editorial matter by F.N. Furbank, 1992. Schacter, D. 2001, The Seven Sins of Memory: how the mind forgets and remembers, Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

58  Matthew Ricketson Tranter, L. ALM: Australian Literary Management, Sydney, viewed 2 May 2017, http://austlit.com/archives/283. Walsh, D. 2012, Seven Deadly Sins: my pursuit of Lance Armstrong, Simon & Schuster, London. Webster, M. 2016, Principal consultant with Nielsen Bookscan in Australia who generously provided access to the nonfiction bestseller lists for 2002 to 2016. Weinberg, S. 1992, Telling the Untold Story: how investigative reporters are changing the craft of biography, University of Missouri Press, Missouri. Wright, L. 2013, Going clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the prison of belief, Alfred Knopf, New York. Yagoda, B. 2009, Memoir: a history, Riverhead Books, New York.

4 Re-Presenting Madness in the Form of a Quadrilogue Simon Clarke

Introduction The value of research participants’ subjectivities as valid objects of study in social science research has a long history in qualitative inquiry. Sustained questioning of positivist assumptions of researcher neutrality, scientific objectivity, and the possibility of value-free research (Davies 2007) led to the flourishing of research approaches emphasizing the value of ‘lived experience’ (Hammersley 1992). Drawing upon diverse theoretical frameworks, a plethora of subjective methodologies employ novel and groundbreaking approaches (Denzin & Lincoln 2000). S­ imilarly, the research inspired by these approaches also shed light on areas of experience and social life previously marginalized by social scientists, such as crime and imprisonment, mental health, ethnicity, sexuality, and power (Holman Jones 2005). The works that arise from these subjective methodologies mark what many label a ‘golden age’ in social science research (Denzin & Lincoln 2000). However, despite attempts to mark out new territory in the investigation of personal experience free from the ideological baggage of positivism, many of these approaches are underpinned by problematic theoretical assumptions (Riessman 1993). In practice, this often results in qualitative research taking on established social science conventions consistent with positivist social science. Some of the conventions include a clear linkage to theory and hypotheses, the predominant use of impersonal ‘academic’ third person voice, and the employment of conventional writing structures (Anderson 2006; Ellis, Adams & Bochner 2011). Even more problematically perhaps, the researcher is often entirely invisible from the research, even if their assumptions and prejudices are visible in the work in indirect ways (Holman Jones 2005). Given this, the initial surge of interest in qualitative approaches and their associated critique of positivism led to a position where the form and content of how research was communicated did not change. In essence, many qualitative approaches failed to capture and communicate the experience of subjectivity in any particular depth (Grant 2014), especially in terms of the experience of certain subgroups within mainstream

60  Simon Clarke society such as homosexuality, ethnicity, and mental health (Biddulph 2010). Indeed, it was often researchers from these subgroups who found that their personal experiences of difference were either misrepresented, or marginalized entirely, by the white, male, middle-class, heterosexual, and abled hierarchies of mainstream academia (Holman Jones 2005). Arguably, new approaches were needed that captured such experiences but could also challenge the ‘onto-epistemological’ (Barad 2007) assumptions underlying such practices (Speedy 2013). Criticisms of positivism were thus sustained and extended during a period in human inquiry termed the ‘narrative turn’ (Riessman 1993), or the ‘triple crisis’ of representation, legitimation, and praxis (Denzin & Lincoln 2000). Informed by postmodern and poststructuralist critiques of humanism underlying much of the research in the social sciences (Grant 2014), narrative researchers aim to honor, as closely as possible, the lived experience of participants in terms that participants themselves describe. In practice, this entailed research which was either generated by the participants themselves (e.g. in the case of Frank’s narratives on cancer), or participants were recruited by academics as ‘co-producers’ of the research (see Ethrington 2007). Perhaps the most startling innovation in narrative research is the re-appropriation of the experiences of the researcher and the subsequent weaving of these narratives back into the reporting of the research process (Speedy 2013). It is in this climate of critique in the social sciences that the methodology of autoethnography emerged. Autoethnography combines personal narrative (‘auto’) writing (‘graphy’) to reflect on, analyze, and explore socio-cultural practices and institutions (‘ethno’). Within autobiography, the focus is often on ‘epiphanies’ – ‘remembered moments perceived to have significantly impacted the trajectory of a person’s life’ (Ellis et al. 2011). These recollected accounts are retold for dramatic or personal interest purposes (Biddulph 2008), often utilizing literary tropes (e.g. first or third person accounts, dialogue, imagery, etc.) to increase the interest of the story and maximize impact for the reader. Ethnography, on the other hand, is a form of research which purports to illustrate the cultural, relational, and social practices of a given community or a subculture within a wider social group (Davies 2007) through the researcher’s practice of participant observation – becoming an active member of the social group under observation (Anderson 2006). Autoethnography combines both the conventions of autobiography in the retelling of ‘epiphanies’ with the explicit ethnographic goal of investigating the social world (Ellis et al. 2011). Autoethnography is both a process and a product of social research, utilizing personal experience as primary data in developing an understanding of social phenomena (Denshire 2014). In other words, the researcher’s experience of belonging to particular groups in society is used as the basis for exploring wider social themes relating to difference and belonging. These issues are particularly pertinent for researchers involved in mental health and madness studies.

Re-Presenting Madness in the Form of a Quadrilogue  61

The Narrative Turn in Mental Health Research Madness is arguably one of the most disruptive experiences in Western society (Leader 2012). A psychotic breakdown is most likely to occur during late adolescence, a time when essential social, vocational, educational, and sexual experiences are established. The impact can extend to all domains of functioning throughout the person’s developmental trajectory (Bentall 2009). Experiences such as hallucinations, unusual beliefs, and distorted perception are linked to high psychological distress, mood disturbance, and functional disability (Bentall 2003). The prognosis for someone experiencing a first-episode psychosis can be bleak, with partial recovery rates estimated at around one-third (Warner 2004). Literary attempts to depict the experiences of madness through memoir and life writing, and those using or working in mental health services, are extensive (Baker et al. 2010). Outside fictional representations, more straightforward first-person accounts of mental health difficulties abound (Hornstein 2009). Indeed, medical memoirs of madness and mental distress are so extensive (Baker et al. 2010) that a full account is well beyond the remit of this chapter. It is worth noting that significant overlaps between autobiographical, narrative, and clinical accounts in the relating of psychological distress provide groundbreaking leaps in terms of knowledge of self and society. Indeed, most of the early theories of psychoanalysis are derived from the narratives presented in Freud’s early case studies (Frosh 2016), including Freud’s famous case study of madness based on the memoirs of Judge Schreiber (Freud 1911; Schreiber 1903). Freud’s own insights into the unconscious are derived from his own self-analysis, which arguably places subjectivity at the forefront of knowledge-production (Frosh 2016). Additionally, first-person accounts of psychosis inform later theories of schizophrenia (Cohen 1970). Autoethnographic accounts of mental health arguably differ from these forms of analysis as autoethnography is a methodology developed for the explicit purpose of exploring social and cultural reality alongside personal subjectivity. Inspired by the ‘illness narratives’ of writers such as Frank (1993), who used his own personal experience of illness to inform his research, an early groundbreaking example of an autoethnographic account of psychological distress is Kathryn Church’s (1995) Forbidden Narratives. Church experienced a psychological breakdown during the data collection for her PhD thesis. These experiences became a major focus of the thesis and were woven into the analysis of her participants’ stories of mental health activism and resistance (Church 1995). Church’s (1995) account was developed prior to establishing autoethnography as a research methodology. More recent examples of explicit autoethnographies of mental health include Grant’s (2006) personal narrative account of breakdown and recovery and Short et al.’s (2007) presentation of a co-constructed narrative, including three perspectives

62  Simon Clarke of the author’s breakdown and hospitalization presented simultaneously. Additionally, Jago’s (2002) controversial depiction of an academic breakdown is portrayed using a ‘layered account’ approach (layered accounts focus on the author’s experience alongside data, abstract analysis, and relevant literature), a method used by Rambo (2013) in exploring her experiences of dissociation and multiple identities during therapy. ­Autoethnographic accounts of counseling and psychotherapy also explore themes such as: the impact of a bereavement on professional practice (J. K. Wright 2009); the intrusion of the politics of psychotherapy (particularly the culture of ‘evidence-based practice’) on identity as a care professional (Wright & Cunnigham 2013); and the experience of leaving a counseling practice (Wyatt 2013). Taken together, these accounts provide insightful and powerful descriptions of the interaction between mental health experience and the social world. As the next section shows, such approaches are not without their critics.

Criticisms of Narrative The alliance of first-person accounts of madness found in literature, biography and case study with narrative social science methodologies such as autoethnography, appears fruitful. Nonetheless, autoethnography is considered a controversial approach in the social sciences for many reasons. It has been criticized for a lack of validity, objectivity, and parsimony (­Anderson 2006); lacking academic rigor (Ellis & Bochner 2000); and narcissism and bias (Denzin 2006). Others call into question ethical issues surrounding the use of personal experience in research, particularly in terms of informed consent (or the lack of) from other persons in the text (Tolich 2010). Other critiques center less on practice and more on theoretical assumptions of the work, particularly what can be called solipsism or ontological individualism (Guignon 2008). Atkinson (2009) argues that ‘narratives are treated as proxies for the direct apprehension of subjective, personal experience’ (Atkinson 2009, S1.3) resulting in the voices of narrative ‘treated as sources of authenticity, grounded in the biographical particularities of speaking subjects’ (2.11). Ultimately, these assumptions are inherently individualistic, borrowing extensively from humanist ontologies that prioritize the experience of self-enclosed subjects without linkage to the social. Such humanist notions also dovetail rather uncomfortably with neoliberal capitalist ontologies extolling discourses of individual self-improvement and wellness (Wright 2014). In Atkinson’s (2009) and others’ (Atkinson & Silverman 1997) view, narrative research therefore ‘embodies a Romantic view of the speaking subject… devoid of social identity or cultural resources,’ whilst the narrating speaker is ‘celebrated as an atomised subject’ the ultimate consequence of which is the ‘equation of the social with the personal’ (2.14).

Re-Presenting Madness in the Form of a Quadrilogue  63 Perhaps a deeper and more incisive criticism is that much narrative research assumes an untroubled relationship between experience and its inscription, replicating the humanist assumptions plaguing early qualitative research. This appears paradoxical, given that many narrative approaches borrow extensively from postmodern theorists such as ­Derrida and Cixous (Speedy 2013). Theories as diverse as the ‘metaphysics of presence’ (Grant 2014) derived from the work of Derrida (1976), ­Foucault’s (2001) analysis of discourses of power, and psychoanalytic notions of the unconscious (Frosh 2017) trouble this narrative assumption of epistemological authenticity. What binds these critiques together is a questioning of the notion that the researcher voice is able to provide a clear window into the inner life of the self (Grant 2014), along with the assumption that self and voice are identical (Glass 1974). In contrast, the voices of ‘self’ are better portrayed as multiple and contradictory, belying a unitary selfhood or reliable, central, coherent narrative (Grant & Zeeman 2012). Similarly, as experience is filtered through situated, contextualized language distorted by historical and contemporary relations of power (Grant 2014; Grant, Short & Turner 2013), there are serious questions around whether research can retell experience in an uncomplicated, unmediated way at all. In psychoanalysis, truth concerning the self is both unconscious (i.e. not immediately accessible to awareness) and something we inevitably defend ourselves against due to the painfulness of that knowledge (Winship 2014). This reality prevents the straight-forward accrual of self-knowledge according to many neoliberal paradigms (Wright 2013), as a profound s­ kepticism is placed on conventional notions of the ‘self’ or even the possibility that ‘knowledge’ can be derived from first-person perspectives or autobiography (Frosh 2016). Narrative research falls into difficulty in two main ways. The first is that it is inherently solipsistic, presenting the first-person perspective uncritically and without linkage to its social context. Individual narratives are presented in isolation from any associated social critique or analysis. The second major problem is that the framing of first-person narratives is limited by the social, psychological, linguistic, and cultural context in which such narratives are communicated. These problems make claims of ‘authenticity,’ a concept that is powerful to narrative writers and often used as a rallying cry for autoethnographic research (Bochner 2001), at best fanciful, at worst illusory. These problems are further exacerbated in mental health research. Madness is a ‘limit experience’ which, according to Foucault (2001), has the ‘function of wrenching the subject from itself, of seeing to it that the subject is no longer itself, or that it is brought to its annihilation or its dissolution’ (p. 241). Such experiences are not experienced as linear or coherent as the sense of self is often fragmented or even entirely absent from itself (Woody 2003). Additionally, recollection is distorted

64  Simon Clarke by unusual experiences such as delusion and hallucination (Baldwin 2005), and the person’s experience may not adhere to a coherent storied structure (Stone 2004). Perhaps more profoundly, the very language of madness itself is disjointed in its communal, intersubjective roots (Glass 1989). This creates ‘a disjunction between the content to be narrated and the possibilities inhering in conventional narrative forms’ (Stone 2004, p. 18), and this difficulty strikes at the heart of narrative attempts to restory madness. Given these concerns it is no surprise that some service user researchers and activists question the value of narrative research in mental health. Indeed, one prominent service user researcher colleague referred to such research as the ‘pornography of the first-person perspective’ detracting from the possibility of generating substantial knowledge to challenge the practices of orthodoxies such as medicine. This is a position echoed in other forms of mental health service user activism research (Costa et al. 2012).

Establishing the ‘Quadrilogue’ Does this mean that narrative approaches to health research, particularly with madness, are doomed? To a certain extent, the answer may well be yes. Narratives are filtered through the vagaries of language, through the mechanism of social discourses of power (e.g. the academy or the clinic), or else subject to the researcher’s bias, both conscious and unconscious. Narrative research will always fail to adequately represent the subject of experience to a certain extent. However, these difficulties need not preclude the attempt to narrate experience. In a similar vein to Stephen Frosh’s (2016) impossibility of talking with finality about one’s relationship to psychoanalysis as the unconscious subject is liable to be inaccessible, or at least distorted by defensive representations, ‘one has to speak, or nothing happens at all’ (p. 470). As Judith Butler forcefully points out, the act of speaking constitutes an important aspect of performativity in terms of the realization of narrative identity (Butler 1990). How to do this, of course, is the crucial issue, particularly when recognizing some of the pitfalls of narrative discussed in previous sections. There is always the possibility that first-person accounts slip into overly gratuitous or over-aestheticized representations retaining the somewhat uncomfortable character of ‘patient porn’ or ‘disability tourism’ (Costa et al. 2012). Yet, in mental health in particular, certain discourses enjoy a greater sense of legitimacy, based upon established professionalized hierarchies, power relations, and reified ideology (Parker 2007). These claims of legitimacy do not always correspond to accurate and nuanced understanding of what it is like to be mad (Laing 1960), even though they dominate the mainstream of clinical practice (Wallcraft 2013). In other words, stories can play a role in reclaiming marginalized identities

Re-Presenting Madness in the Form of a Quadrilogue  65 by building solidary and inspiring activism (Costa et al. 2012), or else in establishing identity through a form of performativity, without slipping into the perversions of exhibitionism or voyeurism. A narrative account sensitive to these risks may provide a basis for assessing the knowledge claims of survivors outside of the ‘master’ discourses (Dickson & Holland 2016) of the clinic or the psychiatric profession. Gayatri Spivak proposed the notion of ‘strategic essentialism’ (Danius, Jonsson & Spivak 1993) as a deliberate strategy that marginalized groups employ to lay claim to a shared identity, even though it is recognized these categories are somewhat spurious. In the same way, narrative approaches similarly lay claim to a ‘strategic authenticity’ in representing the experiences of madness. One strategy to create an authentic mad narrative is through the utilization of different perspectives and texts in an unfolding dialectic or conversation. Frank (2005) proposes a dialogical approach to illness narratives informed by the work of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, in which the multiple viewpoints of the ‘self,’ situated in its social context, are explored concurrently. Frank (2005) thus formulates a socially situated self that interacts with multiple actors in a matrix of socially constituted discourse, and not the atomized social self of liberal humanist discourse. The present research continues Frank’s ideas by proposing a ‘quadrilogue’ as a form of an autoethnographical mad narrative. It should be noted that the term ‘quadrilogue’ need not imply a direct dialogic engagement between some or all the sources used in research, but that the juxtaposition of different texts together effectively encourages them to ‘speak to each other,’ or at least the reader to approach them that way. This echoes the idea of both contextually mediated documents and intertextuality in social research (Prior 2008). Such an approach recognizes not only the dialogical self of Frank’s (2005) research, but more so: a multifaceted self that is situated within a network of social and institutional relationships and which also crosses time from past to contemporary perspectives. The use of the quadrilogue in my research on my experiences of psychiatric care is discussed in more detail in the following sections.

Quadrilogue Methodology – Background The concept of the quadrilogue emerged from my PhD research on the subjectivity of madness. The purpose of the research is to interrogate the question of authenticity in madness narratives via an autoethnographic methodology using my own experience of mental health services as a guide. More specifically, I want to establish a way of representing the experiences of madness (and its treatment) with a degree of integrity to the experience, without falling into the pitfalls peculiar to narrative research mentioned in the sections above. Taking my cue from psychoanalytic, mainly Lacanian, theory on institutions (e.g. Mackie 2016) and

66  Simon Clarke Foucauldian analysis of discursive practices of self-care (Foucault 2009), I represent the socially situated nature of the self and how different discursive practices lead to the construction of certain identities. The research represents an experience of madness and its subsequent social impact. The data used is from three main sources: personal recollections and writings; my medical notes; and my mother’s diary. These three sources are supplemented by a fourth perspective: my own as a researcher undertaking doctoral work; making sense of the data through a range of activities including reflexivity, supervision meetings, discussions, diary notes, and theoretical interpretation. This fourth perspective is integrated in order to ask questions about the three perspectives to make sense out of their relationship. Therefore, the three perspectives (patient, medical team, carer) overlap to some extent, especially in terms of their relationship with each other chronologically (i.e. they are written around the same time). In contrast, the fourth perspective of the researcher folds these aspects together and encompasses them by framing questions about the relationship between Table 4.1  Perspectives, data sources, and examples used in the quadrilogue Perspective

Data sources and description

Patient

Recollections from personal experiences, poems and diary entries Diary entries from my mother from the periods 1994 to 2000, given to me unsolicited following a discussion of the research

Carer

Team

My NHS patient file 1994–1997, including staff clinical notes, letters from psychiatrists and reports

Researcher

My ongoing reflexive research diary (2009–present) and supervision notes

Example

Re-Presenting Madness in the Form of a Quadrilogue  67 them, particularly in terms of apparent discrepancies, contradictions, and differences. These questions are used as a spring-board to make theoretically informed judgments about what the data represents in terms of madness and its treatment. The data sources corresponding to these four perspectives are represented in Table 4.1, above. The following section presents an example of the use of the quadrilogue in my autoethnography through the experience of using electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

The Quadrilogue in Use – Analysis and Discussion During my inpatient stay I received 12 sessions of ECT. ECT is a psychiatric treatment administered by electrical currents passing through the patient’s brain, intentionally triggering brief seizures. It is an extremely controversial procedure, both vilified and praised by service users, professionals, and carers alike (Perkins 1994; Whitaker 2010). According to the UK National Institute of Clinical Excellence, ECT should be used ‘Only to achieve rapid and short-term improvement of severe symptoms after an adequate trial of treatment options has proven ineffective’ (NICE 2003, p. 4). Despite these guidelines, studies indicate that practices of coercion are common, with many patients reporting severe side effects and insufficient explanation from medical staff (Rose et al. 2009). There are also marked differences between staff and patient perceptions of the benefit of ECT (Rose et al. 2003). Table 4.2 illustrates the methodology in action. The patient perspective is represented by a poem written at some point after discharge a month later, the carer example by a diary entry some hours following after ECT was administered, and the team perspective is represented by clinical notes written shortly after the procedure. What does this very brief example of the quadrilogue say about the experience of ECT? Additionally, what are the implications for the quadrilogue as a methodology in terms of illustrating madness and using mental health services? Taking the researcher’s questions as a starting point to interrogate further, the most striking observation is the differences of opinion and how they are expressed. For example, the medical team determines success in surface symptomology: better ‘affect’ and ‘reduced frequency’ of paranoia. Quite remarkably, and perhaps symbolically, the carer determines success in terms of the patient reassuming the aspects of a former disability in the ‘gaze’ of the Other (Krips 2010). In contrast, the patient’s voice seems to express treatment in terms of a game or performance, of pretending to be well by suppressing affect, an episode likened to an industrialized process. Interpreting such findings becomes a complex process. Arthur Frank (2004) uses the term ‘generosity’ to depict an ethic of care (relational in character) within the care setting in which a medical intervention takes

68  Simon Clarke Table 4.2  A  n example of the use of the quadrilogue in electroconvulsive therapy Patient

Carer

Team

Researcher

His affect slightly Why are the 25.11.94 Simon Breakdown accounts so better following had ECT We try not to different in ECT × 1 as Thursday make it sound terms of their his feelings (24th). When I human. assessment of of being came and saw By producing an ECT outcome? persecuted is him later he affect that’s What ‘concern’ less intense was wearing unreal. is being and reduced his glasses!! He As we try to oil expressed by frequency. was also alert the machinery the patient? He however and seemed again. What is the still expresses hyperactive. We must try our significance of concern and is We met Dr ___. best not to feel. the glasses for anxious. Simon asked the carer? Why if he could go is suppression home & stay of feeling so the night but important for was told he had the patient? to take things slow.

place. In doing so, Frank makes the case that medicine is often effective in terms of outcome (i.e. the patient gets better or is relieved of their symptoms), but ineffective in terms of process (i.e. the patient may feel dissatisfied, upset, or angry about how the treatment is administered). The example in the quadrilogue therefore may provide an example of the failure of generosity – a patient restored to normative psychological functioning, received gratefully by members of his family, but the short, sad lament expresses some evidence of a lack or a failure to acknowledge something vital. Ernest Hemingway remarked to his biographer (Hotchner 1955) following his course of ECT: ‘What is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient….’ (p. 280). Taking this point further, one of the most remarkable aspects of ­Foucault’s later work is his recognition that Western culture had separated the acquisition of knowledge from the formal requirements of transformation peculiar to its attainment (Foucault 2009). In other words, Western medicine has appropriated knowledge about the world without that knowledge impacting subjectivity. In terms of its treatment of the insane, this necessitated some degree of silencing mad voices (­Foucault 1961) or an absence of a ‘care of the self’ (Foucault 2009). In the example of the quadrilogue demonstrated above, what seems quite clear is that the effect produced by ECT demonstrates Foucault’s point forcibly. The subject is changed but not transformed, and the essential

Re-Presenting Madness in the Form of a Quadrilogue  69 character of this change is the resumption of a former state of dependency (symbolized through the glasses in the carer’s account) or, perhaps worse, the presentation of an empty façade that belies the subject’s ‘true’ state of despair and anguish. In many ways, the subject’s life may have been saved (and who can blame the mother’s elation?), but at a terrible cost. This cost could be characterized as a lack of transformative engagement with subjectivity that results, eventually, in what Freud may have characterized as a ‘return of the repressed’ (Freud 1915; Strachey 1957) as the cycle of breakdowns and treatment continued for several years afterwards. Worse, it added a further overlay of trauma, indicated by nightmares and flashbacks. In summary, ECT may indeed have removed the immediate symptoms of paranoia and depression, thus giving the illusion of a ‘cure.’ However, it was a cure that only buried the psychological issues that led to the breakdown in the first place. It was through a non-medicalized, therapeutic faith community that the trauma of ECT could be released and the underlying psychological issues finally resolved, addressing the pattern of breakdown/treatment once and for all.

Conclusion This chapter argues that the representations of mad narratives and mental health experiences in narrative research methodologies such as autoethnography are vulnerable to a number of criticisms, including methodological solipsism and theoretical naivety regarding the role of language and culture. To counteract these issues, a quadrilogue methodology is proposed; an approach which combines several different sources together along with multiple perspectives on the same event. The four elements of the quadrilogue are: (1) first-person recollections of events; (2) the author’s medical notes; (3) a carer’s diary; and (4) contemporary reflections on the data. In discussing the accounts, the chapter focuses on how the different perspectives express modern psychiatry’s failure to install an ethic of generosity (Frank 2004).

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70  Simon Clarke Barad, K. 2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Bentall, R. 2003, Madness Explained: psychosis and human nature, Penguin, London. Bentall, R. 2009, Doctoring the Mind: why psychiatric treatments fail, Penguin, London. Biddulph, M. 2008, ‘Stolen intimacies: (auto)narratives of *MSM, HIV, spaces and sexualities *men who have sex with men’, Auto/biography Yearbook 2008, pp. 171–93. Biddulph, M. 2010, ‘Can only Dorothy’s friends speak for Dorothy? Exploring issues of biographical positioning in qualitative research with gay/bisexual men’, in T. Huber (ed.), Storied Inquiries in International Landscapes: an anthology of educational research, Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, NC, pp. 215–18. Bochner, A. 2001, ‘Narratives Virtues’, Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 131–157. Butler, J. 1990, Gender Trouble, Routledge, New York. Church, K. 1995, Forbidden Narratives: critical autobiography as social science, Gordon and Breach, Newark, NJ. Cohen, S. 1970, Drugs of Hallucination, HarperCollins, New York. Costa, L., Voronka, J., Landry, D., Reid, J., Mcfarlane, B., Reville, D., & Church, K. 2012, Recovering our stories: ‘a small act of resistance’, Studies in Social Justice, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 85–101. Danius, S., Jonsson, J. & Gayatri, C. S. 1993, ‘An interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’, boundary 2, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 24–50. Davies, C. A. 2007, Reflexive Ethnography, Routledge, Abingdon, UK. Denshire, S. 2014, ‘On auto-ethnography’, Current Sociology, vol. 62, no. 6, pp. 831–50. Denzin, N. K. 2006, ‘Analytic autoethnography, or déjà vu all over again’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 419–28. Denzin, N. K. & Lincoln, Y. S. 2000, ‘Introduction: the discipline and practice of qualitative research’, in N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed., Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 1–28. Derrida, J. 1976, Of Grammatology, translated by G. Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. Dickson, A. G. & Holland, K. 2016, ‘Hysterical inquiry and autoethnography: a Lacanian alternative to institutionalized ethical commandments’, Current Sociology, vol. 65, no. 1, pp. 133–48. Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. 2011, ‘Autoethnography: an overview’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, vol. 12, no. 1, Art. 10. Ellis, C. & Bochner, A. P. 2000, ‘Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject’, in N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (eds.), Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed., Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 733–68. Ethrington, K. 2007, Trauma, Drug Misuse and Transforming Identities: a life story approach, Jessica Kingsley, London. Foucault, M. 1961, Madness and Civilization: a history of insanity in the age of reason, translated by R. Howard, Routledge, London.

Re-Presenting Madness in the Form of a Quadrilogue  71 Foucault, M. 2001, Power, translated by R. Hurley, J. D. Faubion (ed.), The New Press, New York. Foucault, M. 2009, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, translated by G. Burshell, Picador, New York. Frank, A. W. 2004, The Renewal of Generosity: illness, hospitality, and dialogue, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Frank, A. W. 2005, ‘What is dialogical research, and why should we do it?, Qualitative Health Research, vol. 15, no.7, pp. 964–74. doi:10.1177/1049732305279078. Freud, S. 1911, The Schreber Case, translated by A. Webber, Penguin Classics, New York. Freud, S. 1915, ‘The unconscious’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume XIV (1914–1916): on the history of the psycho-analytic movement, papers on metapsychology and other works, translated by J. Strachey (ed.), The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, London, pp. 159–215. Frosh, S. 2016, ‘Towards a psychosocial psychoanalysis’, American Imago, vol. 73, no. 4, pp. 469–82, doi:10.1353/aim.2016.0025. Frosh, S. 2017, ‘Primitivity and violence: traces of the unconscious in psychoanalysis’, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 34–47. doi:10.1037/teo0000049. Glass, J. M. 1989, Private Terror/Public Life: psychosis and the politics of community, Cornell University Press, New York. Grant, A. 2006, ‘Testimony: god and aeroplanes: my experience of breakdown and recovery’, Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 456–7. Grant, A. 2014, ‘Troubling ‘lived experience’: a post-structural critique of mental health nursing qualitative research assumptions’, Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 544–9. doi:10.1111/jpm.12113. Grant, A., Short, N. P., & Turner, L. 2013, ‘Introduction: storying life and lives’, in N. P. Short, L. Turner, & A. Grant (eds.), Contemporary British Autoethnography, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, NL, pp. 1–16. Grant, A. & Zeeman, L. 2012, ‘Whose story is it? An autoethnography concerning narrative identity’, The Qualitative Report, vol. 17, no. 36, pp. 1–12. Guignon, C. 2008, ‘Authenticity’, Philosophy Compass, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 277–90. doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00131.x. Hammersley, M. 1992, What’s Wrong with Ethnography? Routledge, London. Holman Jones, S. 2005, ‘Autoethnography’, in N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3rd ed., Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA. Hornstein, G. A. 2009, Agnes’s Jacket, PCCS Books, Ross-on-Wye, UK. Hotchner, A. E. 1955, Papa Hemingway: a personal memoir, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA. Jago, B. J. 2002, ‘Chronicling an academic depression’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, vol. 31, no. 6, pp. 729–57. Krips, H. 2010, ‘The politics of the gaze: Foucault, Lacan and Žižek’, Culture Unbound, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 91–102. Laing, R. D. 1960, The Divided Self, Penguin, London. Leader, D. 2012, What is Madness? Penguin, London.

72  Simon Clarke Mackie, B. S. 2016, Treating People with Psychosis in Institutions, Karnac, London. National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) 2003, Guidance on the use of electroconvulsive therapy, NICE, London. Parker, I. 2007, Revolution in Psychology: alienation to emancipation, Pluto Press, London. Perkins, R. 1994, ‘Choosing ECT’, Feminism Psychology, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 623–7, doi:10.1177/0959353594044023. Prior, L. 2008, ‘Repositioning documents in social research’, Sociology, vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 821–36. Rambo, C. 2013, ‘Twitch: a performance of chronic liminality’, in S. H. Jones, T. E. Adams, & C. Ellis (eds.), Handbook of Autoethnography, Left Coast Press Inc., Walnut Creek, CA, pp. 627–38. Riessman, C. K. 1993, Narrative Analysis, Sage, Newbury Park, CA. Rose, D., Fleischmann, P., & Wykes, T. 2009, ‘Consumers’ views of electroconvulsive therapy: a qualitative analysis’, Journal of Mental Health, vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 285–93, doi:10.1080/09638230410001700916. Rose, D., Fleischmann, P., Wykes, T., Leese, M., & Bindman, J. 2003, ‘Patients’ perspectives on electroconvulsive therapy: systematic review’, BMJ, vol. 326, no. 7403, pp. 1363–8. doi:10.1136/bmj.326.7403.1363. Schreber, D. P. 1903, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. New York Review of Books, 2000, New York. Short, N. P., Grant, A., & Clarke, L. 2007, ‘Living in the borderlands; writing in the margins: an autoethnographic tale’, Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, vol. 14, no. 8, pp. 771–82. Speedy, J. 2013, ‘Where the wild dreams are: fragments from the spaces between research, writing, autoethnography, and psychotherapy, Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 27–34. Stone, B. 2004, ‘Towards a writing without power: notes on the narration of madness’, Auto/Biography, vol. 12, no. 1, 16–33. Strachey, J. 1957, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volume XIV (1914–1916): on the history of the Psycho-­ Analytic Movement, papers on metapsychology and other works, ii-viii, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, London. Tolich, M. 2010, ‘A critique of current practice: ten foundational guidelines for autoethnographers’, Qualitative Health Research, vol. 20, no. 12, pp. 1599–610. Wallcraft, J. 2013, ‘Service user led research on psychosis: marginalisation and the struggle for progression’, in S. Coles, S. Keenan, & B. Diamond (eds.), Madness Contested: power and practice, PCCS Books, Ross-on-Wye, UK. Warner, R. 2004, Recovery from Schizophrenia: psychiatry and political economy, 3rd ed., Brunner-Routledge, Hove, UK. Whitaker, R. 2010, Mad in America, Basic Books, New York, NY. Winship, G. 2014, ‘Lucy, Major Tom, Bion and the psychotic vacuum’, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 282–94. Woody, J. M. 2003, ‘When narrative fails’, Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 329–45. Wright, C. 2013, ‘Against flourishing: wellbeing as biopolitics, and the psychoanalytic alternative’, Health, Culture and Society, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 20–35.

Re-Presenting Madness in the Form of a Quadrilogue  73 Wright, C. 2014, ‘Happiness studies and wellbeing: a Lacanian critique of contemporary conceptualisations of the cure’, Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, vol. 6, pp. 791–813. Wright, J. & Cunnigham, M. 2013, ‘Transitions, therapy, tensions, and testimony: written in-between’, Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 53–9. Wright, J. K. 2009, ‘Autoethnography and therapy: writing on the move’, Qualitative Inquiry, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 623–40. Wyatt, J. 2013, ‘Ash Wednesdays: an autoethnography of (not) counselling’, in N. P. Short, L. Turner, & A. Grant (eds.), Contemporary British Autoethnography, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, NL, pp. 127–37.

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Section II

Boundaries

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5 The Other-Directed Memoir Victim Impact Statements and the Aesthetics of Change Fiona Giles

The knowing self in contrast to the sovereign or representative self does not ask who am I, but how can the relations in which I live, dream, and act be reinvented through me? —Gilmore, 2001

Introduction In June 2016 a 23 year-old American woman known only by her pseudonym, Emily Doe, was invited to release her twelve page victim impact statement (VIS) anonymously to the website, BuzzFeed News, an invita­ tion she accepted (2016a). Within days it had become an international media sensation, drawing attention to the minimal six month sentencing of the Stanford University student, Brock Turner, who had been convicted of Doe’s rape after a party on campus in January 2015. Doe’s VIS not only revealed the effects of Turner’s crime on Doe to an audience counting in the millions, it also inspired widespread debate about the prevalence of sexual assault on university campuses, and ultimately resulted in a change to the rape law in California, which had formerly allowed minimal sentencing in cases where victims are unconscious or intoxicated. This essay explores questions raised by this VIS and its media coverage, its sociopolitical significance, and textual meanings. As the audience exceeded not only that for most VIS, but for most conventionally published memoirs, it explores whether the VIS may be viewed as part of the memoir genre. By reaching beyond its legally defined victims’ rights function to become an aesthetic object with broader reach, the essay explores how it may have opened out the memoir genre in unforeseen ways that benefit from internet technology to reach a diverse global audience while drawing on a history of the writing of self-disclosure. As Leigh Gilmore notes in The Limits of Autobiography, ‘innovation and experimentation have always characterized self-representational writing’ (2001, p. 18), and Doe’s VIS exemplifies this adaptability. While blogging has since the late 1990s offered unprecedented access to individuals

78  Fiona Giles diarizing their lives online to a wide audience, the precise and newsworthy framing of this particular narrative may provide an example of a highly visible, mediatized memoir that has become a ‘game changer’ (Li 2016), not only for women’s rights but for the memoir genre itself.1

Early Reception Media coverage of Emily Doe’s VIS was unprecedented. It is rare for any VIS to extend beyond a single reading in court prior to sentencing. This is partly due to the nature of most VIS, which are primarily prepared with only the judge, courtroom attendants and jury (if one is present) as the intended audience. 2,3 In some cases these are in the form of lists or notes, rather than narratives, and most are of direct interest only to the court, providing the victim with an opportunity for unmediated expression of their experience, how it has affected them, their family and friends, and sometimes the community at large.4 As a genre, the VIS straddles an interesting divide between a crie de cœur and a formal witness statement. Its oral performance therefore becomes an important facet of its delivery, as it forms part of the ‘theatre’ of law. While practices vary between jurisdictions, most VIS are submitted in writing for the court to read in silence, and in the case of the victim’s death, a close friend or family member may present the VIS. While these may be intensely moving accounts, they are not in general regarded as examples of fine writing (Myers & Greene 2004). An overly polished statement might also count against its authenticity, as some lawyers contend that VIS can be prejudicial and might therefore be suspicious of rhetorical flourishes (Bandes 1996; Berlins 2006; Booth 2005; Johnson & Morgan 2008; Stevens 2000, p. 3). The way VIS are handled also varies between jurisdictions, particularly where a death penalty could be handed down. In some jurisdictions a VIS may be taken into account in sentencing or express a view on what sentence should be given, whereas elsewhere VIS are deemed irrelevant to sentencing and may be included only as part of a process to aid rehabilitation (Booth 2005). Nor are VIS compulsory; in most cases survivors choose not to present one.5 As such, VIS tend not to be part of the public domain and are not published. However, VIS are sometimes quoted by the judge in handing down the sentence, and where the court is open to the public, it may be quoted in the media.6 It is rare for a VIS to be quoted at length, and there are very few instances of a VIS being published in full. In addition to occurring in only a minority of criminal cases, they are simply not written with a general audience in mind. When BuzzFeed published the Stanford rape survivor’s VIS, the modest audience reach of this discursive practice changed dramatically. Within four days it had received 11 million views across dozens of countries. CNN ‘Legal View’ anchor Ashleigh Banfield read the statement aloud

The Other-Directed Memoir  79 to camera almost in its entirety, devoting 23 minutes of air-time to the 7,000 word piece. It was also read aloud on the floor of the US C ­ ongress by a bi-partisan group of representatives, hosted by the ­California ­Democrat, Jackie Speier (D’Angelo 2016). Daily News in New York posted a reading by staff on YouTube, as did a group of sexual assault survivors, reinscribing its performance as theatre; it was also read in silence by individuals and shared extensively through social media as a prose text. Vice President Joe Biden sent an open letter to Doe through BuzzFeed News, honoring her courage as a ‘warrior’ and detailing her statement’s personal effect on him as well as what he saw as its sociohistorical significance (Biden 2016). And the extensive international media commentary frequently quoted from the statement directly. In November 2016 Doe was named ‘Woman of the Year’ by US ­Glamour magazine. As part of the award, Glamour published an article by Doe in which she describes the many supportive emails and gifts she received following the VIS publication, her reaction to Vice President Biden’s letter, and to other readers detailing how they’d passed her VIS on to their children to read, and her response to the inevitable hate mail. Doe also describes her disappointment on learning of the minimal sentencing of Turner, which was handed down following her reading of her statement in court (Doe 2016b). Other media continued to emerge, including a social media backlash to Turner’s father’s letter to the judge, in which he pleaded that a prison sentence would be too severe for ‘20 minutes of action.’7 A petition to change the California rape law received over 600,000 signatures, resulting in its reform in November 2016. By August 2016 over two million signatures across two petitions had also been collected, together with US$250,000 in fighting funds, to recall Judge Aaron Persky for handing down such a light sentence. Additionally, other sexual assault survivors have been inspired to speak publicly about their experiences.8 Protected by anonymity but without transactional or copyright limitations on its distribution, the statement is also highly accessible to anyone with an internet connection. It is a democratically shared document for all to read. Emily Doe has thus progressed from an anonymous rape survivor in a California Court to a high-profile symbol of law reform and women’s rights.

A Brief History Victim impact statements have existed in Western law since the 13th century when the process of bringing offenders to justice entailed plaintiffs making direct statements in court before a judge (Stevens 2000). During the Greco-Roman period, plaintiffs were represented by orators, and ‘juriconsults’ could also provide advice. Following the collapse of Rome, the Christian Church dominated canon law until the return of

80  Fiona Giles lay education in the 12th century, when the Greco-Roman model was gradually reintroduced. During the enlightenment of the 18th century, the rise of the state meant that the relationship between plaintiff and defendant shifted to one between state and defendant, as ‘crime was [regarded as] a societal interest and concern, rather than an individual interest of the victim’ (Stevens 2000, p. 2). This meant lawyers’ advocacy replaced direct statements of harm by plaintiffs to defendants. However, ‘To maintain a semblance of victim participation in the process, victims continued to make statements at some point in the criminal trial of the offender, although the state had already taken over the lead role in the prosecution’ (Stevens 2000, p. 2). From this point until the late 20th century, the legal profession was primarily responsible for representing their clients in court, mediating any discourse of harm through witness questioning and advocacy based on pre-trial briefings.9 Although there was scope for VIS, it wasn’t inscribed as a right, and even if it was not actively discouraged, it was not, nor still is, widely known to be an option (Government of Canada 2016). Most victims don’t even attend the sentencing hearing (Myers & Greene 2004). The first VIS documented in the US and used in the contemporary sense of the term, was made by Doris Tate in 1982, in Fresno, ­California. The mother of actress Sharon Tate, who was murdered by members of the Manson Cult in 1969 while eight months pregnant, along with her unborn child and seven other adults, Doris Tate remained silent until one of the offenders applied for parole in 1982. Appalled by the possibility that any of the murderers could be released, Tate formed the ­Coalition for Victim’s Equal Rights, which became instrumental in passing California Proposition 8 in the same year. An amendment to the State Constitution, this became known as the Victim’s Bill of Rights. The ‘Final Report of the President's Task Force on Victims of Crime’ states the case strongly: ‘Legislation should be proposed and enacted to … require victim impact statements at sentencing’ (1982, p. 18). The reform was startling in its speed of adoption as well as its far-reaching implications: ‘Proposition 8 made some of the most fundamental changes ever seen in the handling of criminal cases in ­California and created, virtually overnight, significant rights for victims of crime’ (Kelso & Bass 1992, p. 844). However, earlier work by feminist campaigners had set the stage for the widespread adoption of victims’ rights, as Johnson and Morgan have explained. ‘It was action on the part of feminists and rape victims, who became the first victims’ rights organisers, often under the theme of “Take Back the Night”’: Through their work in the 1970s, these issues ‘began to appear in law journals proposing that court-reforms be developed’ (2008, p. 115). In 1985 the UN passed its ‘Declaration of basic principles of justice for victims of crime and abuse of power,’ which included a statement

The Other-Directed Memoir  81 ‘Allowing the views and concerns of victims to be presented and considered at appropriate stages of the proceedings where their personal interests are affected, without prejudice to the accused and consistent with the relevant national criminal justice system’ (United Nations 1985). VIS have since been adopted internationally as an important component of restorative justice and rehabilitation, though not without legal controversy and constitutional limits in some instances (Bandes 1996; Erez 1991; Stevens 2000).

A Close Reading Emily Doe’s statement is not only unusually well-written, thoughtful, and psychologically nuanced; it also distinguishes itself by requesting permission from the judge to address the defendant directly ‘for the majority of this statement.’10 She then begins: ‘You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today.’ Although the statement then moves between first-person references to Doe’s experience and third-person references to Brock – both these perspectives encompassing the wider audience of the court – the arresting first line of her statement engages dramatically and personally with Turner himself. Doe and Turner thus become two actors alone on a stage  – their recent histories, the scene of their encounter, and the subsequent effects on both their lives unfolding in an almost Pinteresque study of uneasily intertwined characters. By constructing this pairing, and assuming the authority to place them together – expressed through her phrase, ‘that’s why we’re here today’ – the lead actors are deliberately returned to the scene of the crime. Here is an imaginative space in which may occur a replaying of events, a revisiting of their dynamic alone together, and a recovery of the agency Doe lost that night. While it is not unheard of for a VIS to address the defendant directly, Emily Doe’s statement is structured for maximum impact in expressing her intention at the outset. Doris Tate’s videotaped VIS address to ­Manson killer Tex Watson at his 1984 parole hearing, shows her putting her notes to one side, as she asks him, ‘What mercy did you show my daughter when she was begging for her life?’ And at times throughout other statements that can be viewed on YouTube, victims or survivors and their relatives may be seen addressing the cause of their distress.11 Such recordings are also striking for the close physical proximity that is revealed between the victim and the offender, and the occasional direct address of the victim toward the offender as they sit around a boardroom-­sized table or turn from addressing the judge to the defendant, and back again, while standing at the front of the court. But there is something particularly determined in Doe’s request for permission. Her intention to address Turner directly is premeditated: She is ensuring it is not interpreted as an accidental or impromptu addition to her

82  Fiona Giles carefully worded presentation. And through her deliberate use of second person address, she insists on his participation as a listener, while others watch on. Doe’s writing not only indicates that the subject of her address is primarily the defendant; she is also announcing her intention to observe his behaviour and to judge his character, as well as to explain to him why he is mistaken about the source of his criminal actions, which he has blamed on alcohol. In doing so she not only turns the tables on the courtroom’s adversarial process, which had facilitated an aggressive cross-examination of her own behavior and character prior to the crime; she also shifts the adversarial relationship into a different space, which is not yet conciliatory but seeks to establish a consensual reality where reconciliation might occur. Furthermore, the sentence, ‘You don’t know me, but you’ve been inside me’ sums up the reason that sexual assault is a criminal act, based on the moral transgression that it represents. Physical intimacy must be preceded by a shared understanding, which then forms the basis for consent. To cross the intimate borders of the subject, permission must be granted. Doe’s contention that Brock doesn’t know his victim, with the phrase ‘You don’t know me,’ even at this point of the trial, reminds readers of the reason for the trial in the first place. It is his lack of knowledge of her and his continued ‘confusion’ on this point, as Doe repeatedly reminds him, that has made his acts unlawful. Doe’s opening sentence also rejects the legal process as being one that seeks to understand her as a subject. Only by taking this opportunity to speak, freed from advocacy or questioning, can she insist on her agency, her perspective, and her sovereignty as an individual.12 Her contention, ‘You don’t know me,’ is being asserted at the penultimate moment of the trial, after extensive witnessing and cross-examination, none of which has enabled her, in her view, to be ‘known.’ Finally, the statement is remarkable for its analytical distance. Rather than emotional expressions of personal injury, or moral outrage that more usually characterize the tone of VIS, Doe calmly describes in simple language her rationale for speaking, at the same time that she cuts to the core of the crime with her baldly unguarded phrase, ‘you’ve been inside me.’ The statement that follows is loosely organized into six sections, with a structure that enables Doe to systematically consider different layers of her experience and to shape the narrative as more than a simple unfolding of events. In this way it assumes a literary status, beyond testifying in court. The piece describes not only the crime’s ill-effects – on herself, her sister, her boyfriend, her parents, the Swedish students who rescued her, and the community at large – but also the insights which have emerged for Doe since it occurred. This provides an unusually comprehensive overview of her circumstances and adds to her representation of the

The Other-Directed Memoir  83 pair as distinctive, knowable characters, trapped relationally within the amber of the law. She avoids stereotyping herself as pitifully innocent, or the assailant as unspeakably evil. Despite her anger, a psychological depth is explored, so that the writing and its delivery provides a process of discovery, rather than a mere venting of distress or indignation.13 The six sections can be summarized as follows: (a) a description of events on the evening of the assault; (b) its immediate physical and psychological effects; (c) the assault and ‘revictimiziation’ resulting from the legal process due to Turner’s not guilty plea; (d) a critique of the statements made by Turner and his probationary officer; (e) a consideration of the future; and (f) an expression of gratitude. In the first few paragraphs Doe steps back in time to tell the story of her evening at home, sharing dinner with ‘my dad … and my younger sister who was visiting me for the weekend.’ She relates her reasons for deciding to accompany her sister to a party, and her sister’s light-hearted teasing on the way, ‘for wearing a beige cardigan to a frat party like a librarian.’ After stating that ‘I let my guard down, and drank liquor too fast not factoring in that my tolerance had significantly lowered since college,’ she then finds herself in the hospital with no memory of how she arrived there. With pine needles in her hair and missing her clothes, she begins describing the materiality of her experience in concrete detail, as two nurses help her ‘to comb pine needles out of my hair, six hands to fill one paper bag. To calm me down, they said it’s just flora and fauna, flora and fauna.’ Doe then itemizes the medical invasions she underwent to record her physical injuries: ‘I had multiple swabs inserted into my vagina and anus, needles for shots, pills, and a Nikon pointed right into my spread legs.’ In addition to the unusually detailed descriptions, Doe portrays herself as bewildered, and increasingly unhinged from her body. Her vulnerability is evident as she ‘shuffled from room to room with a blanket wrapped around me, pine needles trailing behind me.’ By devoting this section to a description of her ordeal in hospital following the attack, we learn about Doe as a human being behind the victim, despite being asked ‘to sign papers that said “Rape Victim,”’ being minutely examined and photographed, and her ‘vagina smeared with cold, blue paint to check for abrasions.’ She also describes how the process creates alienation, as she too is tempted to objectify her body in order to cope. As she decides in the shower, ‘I don’t want my body any more … I don't know what had been in it … who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.’ Doe then describes the effect on her sister, boyfriend, and family as she tries to reassure them she’s ok. ‘I would see the fear on their faces, and mine would multiply tenfold, so instead I pretended the whole thing wasn’t real.’ Her identity as a member of the family also breaks down

84  Fiona Giles as she regresses from big sister to infant, ‘my mom [having] to hold me because I could no longer stand up.’ While reading the news on her phone one day at work, Doe learns about the attack after Brock had been charged, how she had been found unconscious, disheveled and half naked, ‘legs spread apart … penetrated by a foreign object by someone I did not recognize.’ Then she read something ‘that I will never forgive. I read that according to him, I liked it … I do not have words for these feelings.’ Despite her attempt to win back control by describing the material details of the assault, its aftermath in the hospital and the media, she has at this stage become the text, subject to the words of others. The second section of Doe’s statement explains her depression and withdrawal, even from her family, in the weeks following the assault and its attendant publicity. ‘I didn’t talk, I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t interact with anyone,’ she writes. This is the most conventional section of the VIS, but again there is an unusual amount of detail and an attention to the role of Turner in revictimizing her through his police statements and his lawyers. It is this which leads to her critique of Turner’s reasoning, that alcohol, not assault, was the cause of his presence in court, of his lawyers’ treatment of her in the witness stand, as though she was the one on trial, and of Turner’s insistence that she consented despite falling to the ground and remaining unconscious until three hours after being hospitalized. There is grim humor, too, as she writes: ‘According to him, the only reason we were on the ground was because I fell down. Note, if a girl falls down help her get back up … do not mount her, hump her, take off her underwear, and insert your hand into her vagina.’ Following this she systematically isolates sentences from his statement in order to refute them, performing a legal analysis because ‘somehow, you still sound confused.’ By deploying logical analysis while also describing her point of view and expressing her thoughts about Turner’s ‘confused’ state, Doe gestures toward what Foss and Griffin have termed an ‘invitational rhetoric,’ which ‘create[s] an environment that facilitates understanding’ (2009, p. 17). For example, Doe responds to Turner’s assertion that, ‘Being drunk I just couldn’t make the best decisions,’ by explaining, ‘Regretting drinking is not the same as regretting sexual assault. We were both drunk, the difference is I did not take off your pants and underwear, touch you inappropriately and run away. That’s the difference.’ Doe’s analysis segues into her account of the future, in which she again brings Turner and herself together, continuing in this invitational vein of reasoning: The damage is done, no one can undo it. And now we both have a choice. We can let this destroy us, I can remain angry and hurt and you can be in denial, or we can face it head on, I accept the pain and you accept the punishment, and we move on.

The Other-Directed Memoir  85 It is a remarkable acknowledgment of their joint fates, their common humanity, and their potential to recover through ‘development of relationships of equality’ (Foss & Griffin 1995, p. 17). Doe then proceeds to ‘address the sentencing’ to correct assertions in the probationer officer’s report, which she feels ‘have been slimmed down to distortion and taken out of context.’ It is here that she argues against a ‘mitigating sentence’ because Turner remains unremorseful in his insistence that it was an example of alcohol-fuelled promiscuity. This time she addresses the court, ramping up her logical argumentation for a legal audience: ‘By definition rape is the absence of promiscuity, rape is the absence of consent, and it perturbs me deeply that he can’t even see that distinction.’ Nor should his promise as a swimmer ‘lessen the severity of what happened to me, and should not lessen the severity of his punishment … The fact that Brock was an athlete at a private university should not be seen as an entitlement to leniency, but as an opportunity to send a message that sexual assault is against the law regardless of social class.’ To end by saying ‘thank you’ is more than a formality, since it encompasses her community, family, her lawyer, the ‘girls across the nation that wrote cards to my DA to give to me,’ and the ‘two men who saved me.’ Perhaps this, more than anything, inspired BuzzFeed to publish her statement, as Doe describes her circumstances as both universally meaningful and politically significant. It is here she becomes a protectoress, speaking to ‘girls everywhere’ of their value and invincibility.

Doe’s Statement as An ‘Autobiographical Manifesto’ In her ‘Autobiographical Manifesto,’ Sidonie Smith outlines six ‘strategies’ for the staging of identity and agency (1991, p. 189). She writes, ‘Thus within what Butler labels “this conflicted cultural field” the autobiographer can lay out an agenda for a changed relationship to identity’ (p. 189). By doing so, ‘the old inscriptions’ are contested, in order to ‘dislodge the consolidations of the Eurocentric, phallogocentric “I” through an expressly political collocation of a new “I”’ (p. 189). Smith’s six strategies are included within Doe’s VIS, and are: (1) To appropriate/to contest sovereignty; (2) To bring to light, to make manifest; (3) To announce publicly; (4) To perform publicly; (5) To speak as one of a group, to speak for a group; and (6) To speak to the future (pp. 189–95). Points 2, 3, and 4 are self-evident and may be expected to occur in most VIS, as the process is specifically designed to reveal the victim’s perspective within the public light of the court and through its performance as an oral presentation. As Smith describes it, speaking out ‘brings the everyday practices of identity directly into the floodlights of conscious display’ (p. 193). Doe’s VIS qualifies as an autobiographical manifesto through its inclusion of the other strategies Smith identifies. By looking more closely

86  Fiona Giles at how this works in relation to her points 1, 5 and 6 – elements which may not be expected to be present within most courtroom contexts – Doe’s statement can be understood as unusually multilayered, literary, and ­politically significant. A closer analysis of her statement in relation to these three strategies is outlined below. 1 ‘To appropriate/to contest sovereignty’ (p. 189): The opening sentence of Doe’s statement decisively establishes her sovereignty, and the narrative which follows describes the many ways in which her sovereignty was undermined. Doe’s insistence on addressing Turner directly reinscribes this recovery. Nevertheless her sovereignty remains contested so long as Turner refuses to acknowledge his crime and is remorseless, deflecting his failure to a problem of drinking rather than a problem of assault. Since this is an attempt to reach a place where Turner might not just acknowledge Doe’s pain, but admit that his actions were wrong, she brings them together later in the statement, coupling them metaphorically, to show how they have both been ‘ruined.’ She writes: ‘I want to show people that one night of drinking can ruin two lives. You and me. You are the cause, I am the effect … You knocked down both our towers, I collapsed at the same time you did … Nobody wins.’ While ascribing responsibility to Turner for the damage, this passage also allows a commonality that reaches beyond the two of them. ‘We have all been devastated, we have all been trying to find some meaning in all of this suffering,’ she writes. By engaging again in invitational rhetoric beyond argumentative modes of persuasion, Doe’s sovereignty becomes profoundly relational, not just through her strong links to family, but also through her indelible link to her attacker. 5 ‘To speak as one of a group, to speak for a group’ (1991, p. 193): Doe’s relational conceptualizing of her sovereignty also means that she speaks for all women, and does not view this moment as merely rehabilitating her own singularity. Instead, she writes in conclusion, ‘To girls everywhere, I am with you. On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. When people doubt or dismiss you, I am with you. I  fought everyday for you. So never stop fighting, I believe you.’ ­Additionally, her long thank you section leading up to this moment, lists the many who have supported her and whom she embraces as part of her act of writing. Doe later made her representativeness explicit in a statement to Fox News: I remain anonymous, yes to protect my identity. But it is also a statement, that all of these people are fighting for someone they don’t know. That’s the beauty of it. I don’t need labels, categories to prove I am worthy of respect, to prove that I should be listened to.

The Other-Directed Memoir  87 I am coming out to you as simply a woman wanting to be heard. Yes there is plenty more I’d like to tell you about me. For now I am every woman. (Doe 2016c) 6 ‘To speak to the future’ (1991, p. 194): In contrast to theorists of autobiography who speak of its attachment to ‘desire or the sign of anxiety,’ Smith argues that, ‘Rather the “I” writes under the sign of hope and what Helene Cixous calls “the very possibility of change”’ (Smith’s italics). It also ‘gestures forward’ she writes, in what Teresa de Lauretis calls ‘the affirmative positivity of its politics.’ Beyond documenting wrongs of the past, or despairing of the present, Doe explicitly calls forth hope and invokes her own strength as being equal to the task of regaining her self and assisting others to do the same. Addressing these others whom she wishes to aid, Doe writes, ‘The author Anne Lammott once wrote, “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save, they just stand there shining.” Although I can’t save every boat, I hope that by speaking today, you absorbed a small amount of light, a small knowing that you can’t be silenced, a small satisfaction that justice was served, a small reassurance that we are getting somewhere, and a big big knowing that you are important … you are powerful, and nobody can take that away from you.’ The relevance of Doe’s statement beyond the court is made explicit, and her cultural references become an important means to make this possible.

Conclusion By closing her statement with a vision of hope, a sense of solidarity with others who suffer, and gratitude for those who help, Doe has produced an unusually complex VIS that is both intellectually and emotionally engaging. It is neither a mere chronicle, nor simply an expression of rage or despair. Moreover, the ending of Doe’s statement is uplifting, in stark contrast to the endings and general tone of most VIS, which tend to be expressions of profound physical or psychological damage. It is unlikely that most VIS would consider any benefits of the crime, or grounds for hopefulness beyond warning others to beware. Perhaps this is intended to maximize the offender’s sentence; more likely most VIS primarily express pain because this is the dominant effect of crime. The ease with which texts can be distributed via the internet and shared through social media must also take some of the credit for the unprecedented reach of this VIS. As Gillian Whitlock observes, ‘New technologies have altered the fabric of autobiographical expression’ (2007, p. 4). Doe’s VIS is one of a range of memoirs exemplifying ‘the rumpled sites of the experimental’ in a post-blogging world (Smith & Watson,

88  Fiona Giles 2001, p. 1), ‘where changes in autobiographical practice come into view’ (Whitlock 2007, p. 1). However, it is arguable that its literary merit too, its depth of meaning, and its capacity to engage readers across classes, cultures, and genders, have also been responsible for its success. In conclusion, Doe has created a literary artifact which performs the functions of a courtroom statement while reaching out to a much wider audience, exceeding the size of even the most famous autobiographical bestsellers.14 The metaphorical richness and measured tone of Doe’s prose, the vividly recalled material details, and the careful structure, work together to create a bildungsroman: a narrative of her journey from naïveté to self-knowledge. Similar to a coming-of-age story, her work ­belongs in a tradition reaching back to romance heroines of the 19th century and forward to action heroines of the 21st. By being other-directed in its discursive strategies, problematizing sovereignty as it nevertheless insists on the value of personal experience, engaging publics through its textual references, and Turner himself through critical analysis and invitational rhetoric, it creates a living drama in which the two protagonists must face each other’s limitations in front of an audience, and consider their options for the future. ­Additionally, by alluding to other writers and other women, it performs the representative function of many memoirs, drawing a community together. As David McCooey writes, autobiography acts as an ‘extended conversation in a community too large to commune with itself’ (1996, p. 25). By reaching beyond the courtroom to millions of readers, Doe’s VIS has facilitated just such a conversation. It has inspired legal reform, heightened awareness of sexual assault, and advanced women’s rights, all the while illustrating the power of memoir to speak movingly of the personal to a diverse, global audience.

Notes 1 Throughout this essay I draw from both autobiography and memoir scholarship, using the terms interchangeably. Autobiography has been distinguished from memoir for its coverage of a life, often by a public figure in book-length form, as opposed to the frequently shorter memoir concerning an event or theme in a narrative journalism context. The feminist scholarship on life writing yields valuable insights which apply to both. 2 VIS may also be read at bail and parole hearings. 3 The terms victim and survivor are used interchangeably unless there is a clear distinction in the context. This acknowledges that some people prefer to be regarded as survivors, despite the concept of impact statements as belonging to a victim. 4 Templates provided by victims’ rights groups and governments may also direct victims into a point-based approach. 5 Canadian research shows that ‘an average of 11% of cases have VIS….42% of judges find it difficult to know whether the victim has been apprised of their right to submit a VIS…[and]…Only rarely do victims elect to make an oral presentation of the impact statement’ (Government of Canada 2016).

The Other-Directed Memoir  89 6 In sexual assault cases or crimes against juveniles, quotes must remain anonymous. 7 Turner’s father’s letter to Judge Aaron Persky became an important part of the discourse surrounding Doe’s VIS as it highlighted the moral blindness of the defendant’s supporters, and incited extensive outrage (Turner 2016). 8 See for example, Bult (2016). 9 The police also have an important role in taking statements though this tends to be background information used by lawyers rather than material quoted or presented verbatim in court. 10 All quotes from the VIS will be from the version published in BuzzFeed, as listed in the references. I have not included page numbers following quotes, as layout will vary when printed. 11 See for example, ‘Jeffrey Dahmer Trial Victim Impact Statement Highlights’; ‘Brandon Daniel Trial. Victim Impact Statements’; ‘Dontae Morris Penalty Phase. Day 1. Part 1. Victim Impact Statements From Wives Of Officers.’ 12 It should be acknowledged that a VIS can be edited by a judge to remove inflammatory or incriminating material that may unduly influence the jury. So it may be censored. In death penalty cases this has been particularly controversial, as well as those in which the primary victim has died, and different constraints may apply, including its exclusion from consideration in sentencing, or the right of the defense attorney to cross-examine the victim on the content of the VIS. 13 There is of course a wide range of speaking styles represented in the YouTube postings of VIS, which invites further research. While legal scholarship has examined jurisprudential implications, there have been no linguistic or cultural studies analyses of VIS to my knowledge, to date. Due to the anonymity protecting sexual assault victims, most VIS posted on YouTube relate to crimes other than sexual assault. 14 By June 2016, on preparing the 20th anniversary edition of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, it was reported that sales of his combined autobiographical works had reached 10 million copies.

References Bandes, S. 1996, ‘Empathy, narrative, and victim impact statements’, The University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 63, no. 2, pp. 361–412. Biden, J. 2016, ‘An Open Letter to a Courageous Woman’, June 10, viewed 21 December 2016, www.BuzzFeed.com/tomnamako/joe-biden-writes-­an-openletter-to-stanford-survivor?utm_term=.em1Y224K3L#.jlY4xx391W. Berlins, M. 2006, ‘Why victim impact statements should be axed’, The Guardian, 4 December, viewed 30 December 2016, www.theguardian.com/commentis free/2006/dec/04/comment.prisonsandprobation. Booth, T. 2005, ‘Restoring victims’ voices: victim impact statements in the Sen’, Australian Law Reform Commission Reform Journal 59, vol. 86, (Winter), pp. 59–62. Bult, L. 2016, ‘My life has been ruined without my consent’: University of Colorado rape victim releases statement read aloud to her attacker’ New York Daily News. August 12, viewed 26 December 2016, www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ read-university-colorado-rape-victim-powerful-statement-article-1.2748734. D’Angelo, C. 2016, ‘Watch Member of Congress Read Stanford Rape Victim’s Full Report’, June 17, viewed 30 December 2016, www.huffingtonpost.com/ entry/congress-stanford-rape-statement_us_5762122fe4b05e4be860e2d5.

90  Fiona Giles Doe, E. 2016a, ‘Victim Impact Statement Delivered in Court to Brock Turner’, June 3, viewed 21 December 2016, www.BuzzFeed.com/katiejmbaker/heres-­ the-powerful-letter-the-stanford-victim-read-to-her-ra?utm_term=.wrEY DDz7Mv#.jf7OPPx6ZJ. Doe, E. 2016b, ‘Stanford Sexual Assault Case Survivor Emily Doe Speaks Out’ November 1, viewed 30 December 2016, www.glamour.com/story/ women-of-the-year-emily-doe. Doe, E. 2016c, ‘I Am Everywoman’ June 8, viewed 24 December 2016, www. vox.com/2016/6/8/11887500/brock-turner-victim-anonymous. Erez, E. 1991, ‘Victim Impact Statements’, Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice, Canberra, Australian Institute of Criminology. Final Report of the President’s Task Force on Victim Rights 1982, viewed 22 December 2016, http://ojp.gov/ovc/publications/presdntstskforcrprt/87299. pdf. Foss, S. K. & Griffin, C. L. 1995, ‘Beyond persuasion: a proposal for an invitational rhetoric’ Communication Monographs, vol. 62, (March), pp. 1–18. Gilmore, L. 2001, The Limits of Autobiography: trauma and testimony, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. Government of Canada, 2016, ‘Use of Victim Impact Statements at Sentencing and Parole’, viewed 30 December 2016, www.victimsweek.gc.ca/res/r58. html. Johnson, I. M. & Morgan, E. F., 2008, ‘Victim impact statements — fairness to defendants?’, in L. J. Moriaty (ed.), Controversies in Victimology, 2nd edn, Bender and Company, Inc. Newark, New J, pp. 115–32. Kelso, J. C. & Bass, B. A. 1992, ‘The victims' bill of rights: where did it come from and how much did it do?’ Pacific McGeorge Scholarly Commons, vol. 23, pp. 843–79. Li, W. M. 2016, ‘Stanford sexual assault: how social media gave a voice to the victim’, June 10, 24 December, viewed 27 December 2016, https://theconversation.com/ stanford-sexual-assault-how-social-media-gave-a-voice-to-the-victim-60814. McCooey, D. 1996, Artful Histories: modern Australian autobiography, ­C ambridge University Press, Melbourne. Myers, B. & Greene, E. 2004, ‘The prejudicial nature of victim impact statements: implications for capital sentencing policy’, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 492–515. Smith, S. & Watson, J. 2001, ‘The rumpled bed of autobiography: extravagant lives, extravagant questions,’ Biography, vol. 24, no. 1 (Winter), pp. 1–14. Stevens, M. 2000, ‘Victim impact statements considered in sentencing: constitutional concerns’, Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 1–13. Tate, D. 1982, ‘Recording of Her VIS to Tex Watson at His Parole Hearing’, viewed 21 December 2106, https://timeline.com/the-powerful-origin-story-­ of-victim-impact-statements-696073817e0a#.6sxbgjpzl. Turner, D. 2016, ‘Read: Full Letter to the Judge By Dan Turner, Brock’s ­Father’, June 8, viewed 30 December 2016, http://heavy.com/news/2016/06/ brock-turner-father-dad-dan-turner-full-letter-statement-stanford-rapist/. UN 1985, Declaration of Victims Rights, viewed 22 December 2016 www.un.org/ documents/ga/res/40/a40r034.htm. Whitlock, G. 2007, Soft Weapons: autobiography in transit, Chicago University Press, Chicago.

6 After He Shot Arthur Calwell Peter Kocan’s Use of the Second Person Tony Davis Introduction I arrived at Lakeside Mental Hospital on the first day of 1967, accompanied by four guards, and after a two-hour drive from the gaol. My guards did not seem awed by the knowledge that they were all that stood between society and a dangerous psychopath. On the contrary, we had stopped on the outskirts of Sydney so that three of them could window-shop for new cars. I was left to sit with the fourth who, presumably, was not a car fancier. The maximum security section of the hospital, to which I was being delivered, stood in thick bushland… (Kocan 1977, p. 13) With these simple declarative sentences, the recently freed, 30-year-old would-be assassin Peter Kocan began describing his experiences as an inmate in a high-security mental hospital. The year was 1977, and the Australian journal Quadrant published the account, describing the six dense pages of prose as two chapters from Kocan’s forthcoming book, The Wire and the Wall. The headline ‘After I shot Arthur Calwell’ was applied to the piece though in fact the text also described moments prior to and during the shooting (1977, p. 13). No more of the book was ever published, and that might have been the end of the matter. Based on the extract, it would have been a fairly conventional first-person memoir, albeit covering a rare event in ­Australian life: an attempted political assassination. The intended victim was the ­Federal leader of the Australian Labor Party (and then-opposition leader) ­Arthur Calwell, who was at the time campaigning during the 1966 ­Federal election. Calwell stepped into a limousine, which was approached by the 19-year-old Kocan who was ‘trembling wildly’ and ‘could not see Mr ­Calwell, for the car-window was ablaze with the reflected lights of the Town Hall’ (1977, p. 15). He discharged a sawn-off shotgun into the window; Calwell was only mildly injured (mainly by shattering glass), and his assailant quickly arrested. Kocan was tried and convicted for attempted murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, but later declared criminally insane and transferred to Morisset Hospital on Lake Macquarie, NSW.

92  Tony Davis Kocan was held there for about a decade, and during that time discovered first the joys of reading poetry and then those of writing it. Kocan’s poems were included in prestigious journals, and he received awards while incarcerated. He also had two books of his collected poems published while at Morisset. Three years after Quadrant published an extract from The Wire and the Wall, Kocan published a very different work covering similar territory. Known as The Treatment, it was a novella about a fictional inmate named Len Tarbutt, whose age, experience, personal details, and situation closely mirrored that of the author. A second novella, The Cure, continued Tarbutt’s story and continued the radical technique of using a sustained second-person narrative. This was an extremely rare and experimental technique and remains remarkably uncommon.1 This chapter will argue that the fictional guise and the use of the inherently unstable and shape-shifting second person allowed ­Kocan to provide a far more compelling account of his imprisonment than evidenced in the work presented as nonfiction, as well as one that may have come closer to presenting the emotional truth. The cloak of fiction allows him to describe things (such as the cruelty of guards or the behavior of supervisors) as he sees them with no potential legal ramifications, and allows him to reveal things about himself (his sexual experience, his anxiousness, and insecurity, to give examples) that he might otherwise baulk at. Willa McDonald says in The Writer’s Reader (Eisenhuth & McDonald 2007, p. 148): ‘Described as an interrogation of consciousness rather than of fact, memoir is the form of the personal essay that most directly tries to explore and convey a history of the writer’s own life and e­ xperiences – a job usually done in a more disguised form by fiction.’ Kocan’s work pushes the memoir to the limits by changing names, including that of the protagonist. It is labeled as fiction but is concerned with events that match those which brought him national infamy. There are memoirs that tend towards the fictive; and novels that are closely based on fact and in many ways serve the same purpose as a self-declared memoir. I argue that The Treatment and The Cure fall into that second category.

About the Second Person A second person narrative is a ‘you narrative,’ and a good illustration is the opening of perhaps the best-known novel to use the mode in a sustained way, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984): ‘You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are…’ (McInerney 1984, p. 1). However, beyond the regular use of the ‘you,’ agreement on exactly what constitutes a second-person narrative is hard to find (Davis 2015, p. 48). Second person has been called a ‘Protean shape-shifter’ (­ Bonheim 1983, p. 79) and ‘devious’ (Richardson 2006, p. 14) because the pronoun

After He Shot Arthur Calwell  93 ‘you’ can change its form or meaning, often from paragraph to paragraph, even within a single sentence. As if to highlight the dramatic contrast in views about second-person narrative, some have passed it off as merely a sly way of writing first-person (Beach 1932, p. 281; Passias via Schofield 1998a, among others). In this scenario the reader is seeing the word ‘you’ but substituting ‘I.’ Others have argued that second person is often displaced third person (McHale 1987, p. 224; Ryan 2001, p. 138, among others). For the ‘you,’ the reader is effectively substituting a ‘he’ or ‘she’ depending on the gender of the text’s protagonist. ­Fludernik (1994) calls second person one of the most ‘non-natural’ types of narrative (p. 290). The mere repetition of the ‘you’ pronoun does not automatically make a text second person. Some writers and critics have argued that apostrophe, 2 or alternatively the practice of addressing a homodiegetic or heterodiegetic narratee (such as the famous opening line of The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger 1951), 3 constitutes second person. It has been alternately claimed that some texts widely accepted as second person are not that because they don’t exhibit dual time (Hopkins & Perkins 1981, p. 122) or multiple subjectivity (Hantzis 1988, p. 33). Matt DelConte adds to this complexity by pointing out the difficulty of making any comparison with first-person and third-person narration, simply because second-person narration isn’t defined by who is speaking but by who is listening (2003, p. 204). For the purposes of this chapter I will use Richardson’s simplified definition of second person, namely: ‘any narration other than an apostrophe that designates its protagonist by a second person pronoun. This protagonist will usually be the sole focalizer, and is often (but not always) the work’s principal narratee as well’ (p. 19). Such a definition works with Big Lights, Big City or The Treatment and The Cure, as well as sections of those texts that use the mode intermittently, such as Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979 in Italian, 1981 in English). Many researchers have agreed that second person is an arresting and compelling form of address. Kacandes (1994) has noted that the second-­ person pronoun has a built-in power to move readers, ‘causing them to feel themselves addressed and to experience the force of an unusual relationship created between the narrator and narratee.’ Marie-Laure Ryan says that, depending on the text, the second-person voice can be anything from ‘a boundary-crossing address from the narrator in the textual world to the reader in the real world’ to a broad range of other possibilities (2001, pp. 137–8). There is broad agreement that second person can be confronting, disorienting (Herman 2002, p. 345), and hard for a writer to sustain. ­K imberly Nance compares reading a second-person text to ‘reading someone else’s mail’ (1994). Marie-Laure Ryan calls second person a ‘short-lived effect’ (2001, p. 138), while many reviewers have seen it as

94  Tony Davis little more than a gimmick. Perhaps with this in mind, most writers who do use second person use it in short bursts. For Kocan, a first-time novelist, to use it in a sustained mode throughout a text could be seen as ambitious and adventurous. However, the mode can bring many advantages if it is used well, and if it is well-matched to the subject. The disorienting effect cited by Herman is among the most powerful, along with the sensation of being always watched, which is an apt effect for an incarceration story. The writer, protagonist, and reader can engage in an ontological shuffle that was alluded to by Jay McInerney’s narrator in Bright Lights, Big City, who talked ‘of watching yourself in the world even as you were being in the world’ (1984, pp. 166–7). That McInerney is self-consciously playing with the form is amply demonstrated by this and other quotes from that text. Kocan’s approach is less obviously knowing, but in his hands the mode allows the reader not only to walk inside Tarbutt’s skin, but to walk next to him at the same time, or hover above him, or move rapidly between such divergent points. In Kocan’s best passages, it reminded this reader of the sensation of walking around a sculpture and seeing it from all sides, while also benefiting from an inside-looking-out view. As Hopkins and Perkins point out, the second-person narrative ‘offers the intimacy with the character enabled by the first-person mode without the presumptuous quality of the I-narrator’ (pp. 131–2). In using it, Kocan created a more rounded portrait than was achieved using solely the first-person narrative mode, as evidenced in the extract from his earlier memoir. While it is true that free indirect discourse third person can achieve some of the same effects as Kocan achieves with his second person narrative, the reader is rarely as ‘inside’ the character. Furthermore, Kocan at times uses free indirect discourse with second person to create another layer of distinct effects. Certainly the second person may be seen as a gimmick and can irritate readers. It can also repel them with its inaccessibility, its claustrophobic nature, or by the way it apparently tells people ‘what to do,’ in the process making them complicit in acts or thoughts they may find repulsive (Davis 2015, p. 51). Yet for certain works, such as Kocan’s, it can be precisely the right option, and its perceived limitations – particularly those of disorientation, claustrophobia, and the feeling of a lack of agency that a ‘bullying’ narrator can bring – can be turned into advantages and help demonstrate an effect of second person cited by Morrissette, ‘that are unobtainable by other modes or persons’ (1965, p. 2).

Two Texts Compared In ‘After I shot Arthur Calwell’ there is no ambiguity to the narration. It is a familiar first-person memoir in style, and the events are simply and precisely described. The Treatment and The Cure are far more impressionistic and more concerned with the memoir-like ‘interrogation

After He Shot Arthur Calwell  95 of consciousness’ noted by McDonald above. The Quadrant extract is by-lined Peter Kocan and told in what the reader, by convention, takes to be Kocan’s voice. In contrast, The Treatment and The Cure present Kocan at a double remove. He is stood in for by the fictional character Len Tarbutt and by a technique where a disembodied voice is addressing Tarbutt, the protagonist, as ‘you.’ The Quadrant extract relates the events in first person, past tense while the novellas proceed in second person and present tense. In several ways the present tense heightens the effect of the second person, and this will be dealt with later in this chapter. In both renderings, the text begins with a 19-year-old prisoner being transferred from jail to a mental hospital. A major difference is that the serious crime that led to his sentence is hinted at though never fully explained in The Treatment and The Cure. Indeed that volume’s indents page (unnumbered) declares: ‘All characters in this book are entirely fictitious, and no reference is intended to any living person.’ However, as the paratext has details of Kocan’s crime and subsequent sentence within the biographical information, the reader will tend to see the work as autobiographical in nature even if not a conventional autobiography or memoir. Kocan writes the following in the Quadrant version on discovering the food was much better than in jail, and that the wardens actually served it to the inmates: The sumptuousness of all this, and the fact of having ‘staff’ to wait upon us, seemed, after the rigours of prison life, to be almost too good. I felt slightly guilty, as though I were enjoying privileges to which I was not entitled. (Kocan 1977, p. 13) In The Treatment and The Cure the approach is very different: You eat carefully, with your eyes down, as if you want to show that you understand the food is too good for the likes of you and that you don’t deserve to be waited on and that you aren’t gloating about it or anything. (Kocan 1984, p. 11) The first passage gives the impression of a 30-year-old man looking back, with experience and a certain remove. The latter, in present tense and in one apparently rambling sentence, reads as far closer to how a scared 19-year-old might have felt at the time of the incident. Similarly, for a man just out of jail, it was a surprise that the hospital had a swimming pool. The Quadrant version relates: To one side of the vegetable gardens was a very pleasant-looking tiled swimming pool. This pool had been installed by the mental health

96  Tony Davis authorities in an inexplicable burst of generosity … I was to learn that this pool served the authorities as a prime item of propaganda. (Kocan 1977, p. 14) The narrator is not coming new to this pool or its significance. Everything in the retelling appears to be colored by a cynical air and by judgments long since made. The reader can’t know how the 19-year-old prisoner really felt when he first saw the pool, and of course the writer of The Treatment and The Cure may no longer truly remember. But there is an attempt to capture that initial feeling: To one side of the vegetable gardens is a lovely-looking tiled swimming pool, shining all white and blue and cool. The water is shimmering in the sunlight. You stand gazing out over everything, partly because it’s so beautiful and partly because you don’t know what else to do. (Kocan 1984, p. 7) This version displays none of the cynicism or thinly veiled contempt of the first. It is imbued with wonder, naivety, and uncertainty: an interrogation of the emotions that accompanied that first sighting. When Kocan swims in the pool, the Quadrant version reads, ‘For the next half-hour we sported in the cold blue chlorinated water. The pool had the effect of bringing many of the men out of themselves’ (Kocan 1977, p. 15). There is further description of ‘splashing … ducking … and general horseplay,’ but the first-person narrator is a distant observer. By contrast, when ­Tarbutt swims in the pool in The Treatment and The Cure, the reader shares his sensations: ‘For thirty minutes you float in the cool blue chlorinated water or join in a rough game of water-polo, or sunbake, hardly able to believe you’re really in the madhouse you’ve heard such awful tales about’ (Kocan 1984, p. 20). This was a false dawn and at least some of the awful tales were justified, but in the novellas readers learn about the horrors at the same time Len Tarbutt (apparently) does. The opening paragraph of The Treatment is also instructive: Down a long road, all sun and shadowy with trees overhead and a slow look from cows across a fence and you’re there. You see buildings with barred windows and a few people in old grey clothes. There’s the Main Kitchen. There are trucks outside being loaded with steel dixies for the wards and a reek tells you that today must be stew or cabbage. Then you see a nurse in a blue dress leading a little flock of inmates beside the road. They’re all small, like little boys or shrivelled old men, and are shambling and dribbling after her in a single file strung out for fifty yards. She turns and shouts for them to mind the car. (Kocan 1984, p. 3)

After He Shot Arthur Calwell  97 It is the final two words of the first sentence – ‘you’re there’ – which alerts the reader to the fact this is not a conventional narration. It is a compelling opening, in turn gentle, naïve, involving, confronting, and nervous. If it were written in a more conventional style for a novel – which is to say in third person, past tense, with an omniscient narrator, or first person, past tense – it would likely read similarly to the second and third paragraph of the Quadrant extract (the first paragraph deals with that diversion to a car yard that is not mentioned in The Treatment). The maximum security section of the hospital, to which I was being delivered, stood in thick bushland somewhat apart from the hospital proper, and was surrounded by a twenty-foot high wall. The iron gates were opened at our tooting by a grey-uniformed nurse who waved us through and then locked up again behind us with a clang…. I was led to the Charge’s office and briefly interviewed. A few personal particulars were taken while the Charge nurse directed shrewd professional glances at me to gauge the extent of my insanity. (Kocan 1977, p. 13) Again, compared with The Treatment, this first-person account relays a more worldly, reflective, and cynical voice. It lacks the immediacy; the tension about what might happen is lessened by the fact that the action is not unfolding in ‘real time,’ as implied by the present tense, second person approach. Instead, it is apparently being retold years after the event by a writer who seems in control of the narrative, who knows exactly how things pan out, and who has put a spin on events reflecting time and experience. In the present tense of the novellas, notwithstanding the irony that they were written even longer after the events being described, the emotional truth of the exact moment seems more authentically captured, while the range of things that could happen next appears greater. The conceit is that the story is now, that there is no time to put a spin on the events, that the action is unfolding at the same time for the reader, the protagonist, and even the writer. If the intention is to exacerbate the insecurity and paranoia that Tarbutt increasingly feels in the linked novellas, it works well.

Mental Illness Richardson has argued that second person is an effective tool in ‘revealing a mind in flux’ and in helping dramatize the mental battles of an individual ‘struggling against the internalized discourse of an oppressive authority’ (2006, p. 35). The shifting ‘lens’ that the mode provides – the zooming in and out – is particularly helpful. At times the Kocan reader is hovering almost

98  Tony Davis completely outside the main character and observing him much like a prison warden might. Sometimes the reader seems to be almost completely inside his skin, with him as one. At others the reader is lost in what is clearly ‘his’ (and not ‘your’) internal monologue, making the voice the character’s alone and functioning like interior speech ­(Hopkins & ­Perkins 1981, p. 126). A scene depicts Tarbutt remembering himself standing in front of the mirror, pre-incarceration, posing with his gun: ‘It was a new self you saw: the set of the shoulder, the curve of the cheekbone, the elbow cradling the gun, all seemed suddenly significant. You felt a kind of hum coming from inside yourself, like the hum of a live bomb’ (1984, p. 32). Fisher recognizes that: …the simplicity of this language and point of view is far more disturbing in second person, with the reader part of the voice, than it is in first person: ‘I felt a kind of hum coming from inside myself, like the hum of a live bomb’ is trite and absurd … second person introduces a paranoid menace, a sense of cold calculation, and something not quite right. (Fisher 2008, pp. 9–10) This view of the protagonist looking back at his younger, wilder self (present tense memory, in effect) is in line with Morrissette’s claims about the second person: that it can deliver a ‘complex series of perspectives’ and ‘multiple angles’ (1965, p. 2), as well ‘moralizing tonality in a rhetoric of self-judgement’ (p. 13). In another glimpse of earlier times, there is a reflection on the cinema, where ‘you could float out of yourself into the bodyless world of feeling on the screen. To stop being yourself was lovely, it was happiness’ (p. 35). This provides another strength of the second person in capturing the true emotions of a disturbed young man: It gives an unsettling and frustrating feeling of being trapped within the ‘you.’ Tarbutt had seen Dr Zhivago for the seventh time and ‘…you’d gladly have died right there in the seat rather than return to yourself and face the street outside with its squalor of traffic and people’ (p. 36). Fisher says the phrase ‘return to yourself’ powerfully demonstrates Tarbutt’s madness and dissociation. ‘It is almost palpable to the reader in second person. The reader is walking with Len on the precipice of insanity’ (2008, p. 10). We don’t have for comparison the section from The Wire and the Wall dealing with the same scene (should it exist), but, as with the gun scene, it would be difficult to make a simple replacement with either ‘I’ or ‘he’ and achieve the same complex effect. Kocan’s second-person text encourages the reader to inhabit a split role, feeling sensations with Tarbutt but also seeing him from a distance. Despite the very specific characterization and circumstances of Kocan’s protagonist, which might exclude the reader from identification,4 this

After He Shot Arthur Calwell  99 reader had no trouble maintaining empathy. To use Margolin’s reasoning, a person recognizes an intended audience and may choose to deictically relocate into the slot (1990, p. 438). Another good example of the depiction of disassociation and mental illness in The Treatment is found in a long passage of internal dialogue (‘You imagine what they might be saying,’ pp. 22–4), a second-person stream of consciousness in which Tarbutt tries to explain to the guards why he (‘you’) is not insane, while obviously making logical leaps that suggest he is certainly very mentally troubled. Although at times this dialogue is slightly comical, it displays obvious paranoia on Tarbutt’s part, which readers see, but he, apparently, does not. This scene delves deep into a spiraling thought process that feels authentic, yet, like the gun scene, might seem slightly ridiculous or trite if articulated in the first person.

Who Is the ‘You’? The biggest quandary in a second-person narrative is often fixing the identity of the ‘you.’ In The Treatment and The Cure does the ‘you’ refer to the character Tarbutt, the author Kocan, the reader (who stands in for the protagonist), or is the ‘you’ perhaps a narratee (ideal or otherwise)? Narrative theory suggests several possible narrative transmissions on the homodiegetic plane (with the narrator a participant in the story), or the heterodiegetic plane (with the narrator outside the story). These could include: 1 An external narrator explaining things to a ‘you’ (either within or outside the text), filling you in on details because of your limited self-knowledge or trauma. 2 The ‘you’ involved in an internal monologue or talking aloud to himself or herself. 3 The older ‘you’ re-explaining past events to the younger ‘you’ with the benefit of later experience and broader knowledge. 4 An external agent (perhaps fate) relating the inevitable, unchangeable path of the character’s thoughts and actions. 5 The ‘you’ merely being a disguised ‘I’ or ‘he.’ Each of these elements is plausible in different parts of the two novellas, giving the most plausible sixth explanation: the ‘you’ is not a fixed entity at all, but one that is constantly shifting. The ‘you’ appears at various times to be the real author, the protagonist, the reader, and occasionally various combinations thereof, simultaneously. Richardson says authors regularly play on the ambiguity of second person (2006, p. 14). Kocan does this. Dennis Schofield (1998b) uses the term ‘automatic narration’ (which he elsewhere attributes to Genette 1980, p. 217) for ‘…the narrator

100  Tony Davis simultaneously “acting” in and narrating the scene with no gesture toward the verisimilitude of establishing how the narration is being “told” or transcribed’ (pp. 147–8). Fludernik (1993) uses the label ‘simultaneous narration’ for events being ‘narrated (or – really – reflected) simultaneously with their occurrence’ (p. 242). Schofield (1998b) calls this automatic narration an ‘impossible’ narrating situation (p. 148), while Bonheim (1983) had earlier noted ‘the present tense makes it hard to believe in the narrative situation’ (p. 74). Further, Schofield (1998b) says the use of this present tense ‘in the phenomenological present of the “you”-protagonist’ is not enough to prove a heterodiegetic narrator. As he puts it, ‘The narrator and character may yet … be identical’ (p. 148). Put another way, Schofield argues Kocan’s work is neither mimetic nor truly second person; it is merely a different and unconvincing way of writing first person. Despite such an assertion, this chapter has already shown that a replacement with first or third person would not achieve the same effects. To tackle the question of mimesis, it would seem a reasonable counter that almost all art requires some suspension of disbelief. American novelist Richard Yates suggested: ‘All fiction is filled with technique. It’s ridiculous to suggest one technique is any more realistic than any other’ (Bradfield 1992). All good memoir is also filled with technique, even when the author works hard to make it appear otherwise. The narrative combination Kocan chose – second person with present tense – has myriad effects. During the stream of consciousness sections the reader sees Tarbutt as he apparently sees himself. As the second-­ person ‘lens’ moves further away, there is a clearer picture of Tarbutt as he is attempting to show himself to others. The present tense also gives the impression that the author (and his stand-ins, Tarbutt and, most importantly, ‘you’) is not in control of the retelling, that the action presented to the reader is in no way modified by the narrator.

Conclusion Kocan used the second person to produce within his text something Morrissette labelled ‘effects in the fictional field that are unobtainable by other modes or persons’ (1965, p. 2). In Kocan’s hands the second person brought a series of advantages to his two novellas that could not necessarily be achieved by either first or third person, or perhaps even by a combination of the two. Combined with the present tense, it enabled him to represent his story as it unfolded, with the fear and insecurity of the moment. He could thereby create a broader and more nuanced ­canvas – and, I argue, a more effective memoir – than he did in The Wire and the Wall. A reader can’t know how closely The Treatment or The Cure records actual events, thoughts, and impressions, irrespective of the author’s

After He Shot Arthur Calwell  101 intentions on the matter (the same is true, however, for the interior life presented in The Wire and the Wall). However the novellas broadly ­m irror major events in the author’s life, and this similitude allows readers, and perhaps even compels them, to read the novellas as memoirs, knowing that the author is intimately familiar with the world involved. The reader of Kocan is experiencing split (and arguably multiple) ­subjectivity, suggesting fear and disorientation. A ‘mind in flux’ is revealed along with a struggle against the ‘internalized discourse of an oppressive authority’ (Richardson 2006, p. 35). In this sense Kocan is a pioneer in matching the technique to a story of incarceration in a mental institution. The claustrophobic and unsettling nature of second person intensifies the feeling of being locked up, of mental instability, and of the restricted agency that comes with being in a potentially dangerous place and closely observed. The sections of The Wire and the Wall that deal with the most traumatic incarceration experiences have not been published, but, based on the sections that can be compared, the fictional ­second-person, present tense narrative reads as a more mimetic recitation of the experiences and emotions involved. Kocan’s novellas are more arresting and immediate as a direct result of his unusual narrative choices, and the substitution of ‘I’ or ‘he’ would likely have made for a different and less rich reading experience. Kocan has pushed the limits of memoir and has produced a unique and compelling work in the process.

Notes 1 There could be as few as three other sustained second-person novels originally written in English and issued by major publishers prior to The Treatment. I searched extensively for earlier and later examples and found remarkably few. They include: How Like a God (1929) by Rex Stout; La modification (1957) by Michel Butor; known in English language as A Change of Heart (Simon and Schuster, US, 1958), and Second Thoughts (Faber & Faber, UK, 1958) respectively; No End to the Way (1965) by ­Neville Jackson (a pen name of Australian G.M. Glaskin); A Pagan Place (1970) by Edna O’Brien. Georges Perec’s Un homme qui dort was written in 1967 but not published in English until 1990 (as A Man Asleep). 2 As defined by Merriam-Webster online dictionary (merriam-webster.com): ‘the addressing of a usually absent person or a usually personified thing rhetorically ’. 3 ‘If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.’ 4 As claimed for example by Fludernik (1994). She argues that, when the protagonist becomes too specific, ‘the quality of the presumed address to an extradiegetic reader in such text evaporates’ (p. 287).

102  Tony Davis

References Beach, J. W. 1932, The Twentieth Century Novel. Appleton Century Incorporated, New York. Bonheim, H. 1983, ‘Narration in the second person’, Recherches anglaises et americaines, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 69–80. Bradfield, S. 1992, ‘Follow the long and revolutionary road’, The Independent, Saturday 21, November 1992. www.tbns.net/elevenkinds/bradfield.html ­[Accessed 1 July 2012]. Davis, T. 2015, ‘What can you do for the reader? The literary effects of the second person narrative mode’, PhD thesis by Anthony Davis, Macquarie University. DelConte, M. 2003, ‘Why you can’t speak: second-person narration, voice, and a new model for understanding narrative’, Style, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 204–15. Eisenhuth, S. & McDonald, W. 2007, The Writer’s Reader. Understanding Journalism and Non-fiction, Cambridge University Press, New York. Fisher, J. 2008, ‘Creating disconcerting uncertainty through sustained ­second person narrative voice: second person narrative voice in the fiction of G.M  Glaskin and Peter Kocan’, The Australian Association of Writing ­Programs. www.aawp.org.au/files/Fisher.pdf [Accessed 10 Feb. 2011]. Fludernik, M. 1993, ‘Second person fiction: narrative you as addressee and/ or protagonist’, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanisti, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 217–47. Fludernik, M. 1994, ‘Introduction: second-person narrative and related issues’, Style, Fall 1994, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 281–311. Genette, G. 1980, Narrative Discourse, Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Hantzis, D. M. 1988, ‘“You are about to begin reading”: the nature and function of second person point of view’, Dissertation, Louisiana State University. Herman, D. 2002, Story Logic: problems and possibilities of narrative, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London. Hopkins, M. F. & Perkins, L. 1981, ‘Second-person point of view’, in F. N. Magill (ed.), Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Salem Press, New Jersey, pp. 119–32. Jackson, N. 1965, No End to the Way, (Jackson is a pseudonym of G. M. Glaskin; first published by Barrie & Rockliff, London, 1965), 1967 edition, Corgi Books, London. Kacandes, I. 1994, ‘Narrative apostrophe: reading, rhetoric, resistance in M ­ ichel Butor’s La modification and Julio’, Style, vol. 28, no. 3, Northern I­ llinois University, DeKalb. http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=5c64dd49c0bc-4ab7-8dc0-098fa6c3d426%40sessionmgr11&vid=1&hid=8&bdata= JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=lfh&AN=9503311232 [Accessed 1 Sept. 2012]. Kocan, P. 1977, ‘After I shot Arthur Calwell’, Quadrant, August 1977, vol. XXI, no. 8, pp. 13–18, Quadrant Magazine Co., Sydney. Kocan, P. 1984, The Treatment and the Cure, Sirius Quality Paperbacks edition (incorporates The Treatment 1980, The Cure 1983). Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Margolin, U. 1990, ‘Narrative ‘you’ revisited’, Language and Style, Fall 1990, vol. 23 no. 4, pp. 425–46. McHale, B. 1987, ‘Chapter 14: Love and death in the postmodernist novel’, from Postmodernist Fiction, Taylor & Francis (Routledge), London, pp. 217–32.

After He Shot Arthur Calwell  103 McInerney, J. 1984, Bright Lights, Big City, Vintage Contemporaries, New York. Morrissette, B. 1965, ‘Narrative “you” in contemporary literature’, in ­C omparative Literature Studies, vol. 2, Penn State University Press, ­University Park, PA, pp. 1–24. Nance, K. A. 1994, ‘Self-consuming second-person fiction: José Emilio ­Pacheco’s “Tarde de agosto” (“August afternoon”)’. Style, vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 366–77. http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=3&hid=104&sid=e3979bf3-71 82-4d25-a3fc-f117ce8dba19%40sessionmgr110&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWh vc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=aph&AN=9503311237 [Accessed 5 May 2011]. Richardson, B. 2006, Unnatural Voices: extreme narration in modern and ­contemporary fiction, Ohio State University Press, Columbus. Ryan, M.-L. 2001, Narrative as Virtual Reality: immersion and interactivity in literature and electronic media, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Salinger, J. D. 1951, The Catcher in the Rye, 1994 reprint, Penguin, London. Schofield, D. 1998a, ‘Beyond the brain of Katherine Mansfield: the radical potentials and recuperations of second-person narrative’, Style, Spring 97, vol. 31, no. 1. http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=e922940d-946c4e51-955a-acaa8e9fe2b2%40sessionmgr12&vid=1&hid=12&bdata=JnNp dGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=lfh&AN=99371 [Accessed 3 Mar. 2011]. Schofield, D. 1998b, ‘The second person: a point of view? The function of the second-person pronoun in narrative prose fiction’, Submitted for Doctor of Philosophy (Literature), Faculty of Arts, Deakin University.

7 Memoir for Your Ears The Podcast Life Siobhán McHugh

Introduction In 2014, technological innovation and experimental audio storytelling serendipitously collided: Apple embedded a native app in its smartphone and an independent US radio team packaged investigative journalism online as gripping episodic narrative, called simply ‘Serial’ (2014). ­Serial took advantage of the untrammeled nature of the podcast ecology to play with the form: Unlike public radio, there were no restrictions on explicit language or content; episodes could follow a natural narrative arc rather than be overly condensed or forcibly strung out to suit a broadcast clock; and the presenter, Sarah Koenig, did not have to sound like a public radio brand – she came out of the ether unmediated, speaking directly to listeners. Her fans became companions on her quest, sharing her ups and downs as she tried to figure out if high school student Adnan Syed really had killed his former girlfriend Hae Min Lee, a charge of which he had been convicted. Unwittingly, by bringing together a range of factors – high quality audio production standards, an innovative narration style, strong investigative journalism and, crucially, the ability to be heard at the touch of a smartphone button via the new Apple app – Serial became an instant hit, clocking up five million downloads in the first month (more than double those of This American Life (1995), its begetter). By October 2016, Series One and Two of Serial would have achieved an astonishing 250 million downloads. Serial’s popularity triggered a podcasting boom (Berry 2015; Bonini 2015; Larson 2015) as media organizations scrambled to emulate its success. But it also caused a shift in how ‘podcasting’ was perceived: from being merely a technology, it moved to being viewed as a distinct media genre, following the ‘genre’ definition proposed by Lüders et al. (2010, p. 947) which suggests that emerging genres can be ‘both medium and outcome of textual practices.’ The podcast genre is characterized by a strong host–listener connection and a narrowcast delivery style that engenders an unusual level of empathy (Berry 2016). But it also trades on radio’s long-established ability to trigger listeners’ imaginations and

Memoir for Your Ears  105 have them co-create their own mental pictures – a quality shared by the best literary journalism. As critic James Wolcott observes: Podcasts are essentially radio on the installment plan, a return to the intimacy, wombed shadows, and pregnant implications of words, sounds, and silences in the theater of the mind. (2016) Podcasting also allowed journalists to move away from the news-­centric confines of traditional journalism into what Deuze and Witschge (2017) describe as a more entrepreneurial phase that is ‘beyond journalism.’ In this space, journalism is preoccupied with broader societal concerns: what Schudson (2003, p. 11) defines as ‘the business or practice of producing and disseminating information about contemporary affairs of general public interest and importance.’ Three journalistic podcast formats have come to the fore: the crafted narrative, the ‘chumcast,’ in which two or more experts or pals riff on a theme, and the performative interview (McHugh 2016a, b). Whether these shows are expressly created as podcast-only, or delivered online as time-shifted radio programs, intimacy and authenticity are the podcast genre’s commonly described and sought-after qualities. Critic Jonah Weiner (2014) describes ‘the [podcast] form’s special sense of intimacy’ in the context of an ‘empathic partnership,’ which arises partly because ‘we tend to trust voices instinctively.’ Prominent radio/podcast journalist and author John Biewen (2017, p. 2) concurs: ‘… radio and podcasting boast humanity’s oldest storytelling tool: the human voice.’ Thus it is hardly surprising that among the flurry of podcasts that would number 350,000 on iTunes by 2016, a growing genre of ‘Personal Journal’ emerged: a form of audio memoir, delivered in first person and other forms, which as two later case studies will show, can both draw on and depart from journalistic conventions such as truth, accuracy and objectivity. Maras analyzes the complex history of objectivity in journalism: For some, objectivity is the cement of good journalism… For others, objectivity is a kind of deception, obscuring cultural, capitalistic or national bias behind talk of a neutral point of view; promoting faith in an external truth or ideal, an individualistic viewing position that doesn’t exist. (2013, p. 1) From the 1960s, objectivity in journalism was forcefully challenged by the emerging movements of Literary Journalism and New J­ ournalism, exemplified by authors such as Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Norman Mailer. As Norman Sims, an early scholar of the form, wrote: ‘Unlike standard journalism, literary journalism demands immersion in complex, difficult subjects. The voice of the writer surfaces

106  Siobhán McHugh to show readers that an author is at work’ (Sims 1984, p. 2). In the ensuing decades, longform narrative journalism that borrows the tools of fiction to write compelling non-fiction has occupied the pages of magazines from Esquire and Vanity Fair to Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. It also extended to American podcasting in S-Town (2017), a seven-hour exploration of small town Alabama by journalist Brian Reed and the Serial team that achieves the masterly evocations of place and character of Capote’s (1965) ‘non-fiction novel’ In Cold Blood. Slate’s culture writer, Katy Waldham (2017), called S-Town ‘something more like aural literature… meanders between Gothic unease and poetic melancholy,’ while US podcast critic Nicholas Quah (2017) links it to literary journalism: S-Town emerges as the latest iteration of what is shaping up to be the Serial team’s broad principal legacy: how it carries to podcasting the torch of New Journalism, that blend of reportage and literary technique that remains honest to how the personal experience of the journalist is intermingled in the production of a story. S-Town is an epic work that sits on the spectrum of podcasting-as-­ literary-journalism – a genre uncommon in the US but which crafted audio storytelling features from Europe, Australia, and elsewhere have arguably colonized for decades, as will be seen. Much more common in recent years are talk-driven podcasts that mirror the steady growth in confessional and personal journalism described by Rosalind Coward (2013) as originating in the literary journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s. These hosts often share the concerns of subjectivity, which Sims describes: ‘The new journalists of the 1960s called attention to their own voices; they self-consciously returned character, motivation, and voice to nonfiction writing’ (1984, p. 3). Where these podcast hosts exhibit characteristics of literary journalism in order to create an aural memoir, the podcast personal narrative or memoir can thus be seen as a subset of the literary journalism cultural form. In this essay, I propose that to understand and critique this proliferating audio memoir form, it is necessary to examine the unique strengths of the audio medium and the characteristics of audio storytelling, including those audio feature programs that may be considered a form of literary journalism. I  will contextualize these factors via two case studies that show how a curated, slice-of-life story can leverage the power of audio to achieve unique force as a podcast memoir.

Audio as a Medium Audio is first and foremost a temporal medium. Unlike film, you can’t freeze-frame it: it only exists in real time. Unlike print, you can’t easily skim a passage and jump ahead. This perforce listening-in-real-time

Memoir for Your Ears  107 creates a pact of intimacy between speaker and listener and an accompanying sense of ‘liveness’ not found in print. Richard Fidler, who hosts an interview-based podcast that is the most listened-to podcast in A ­ ustralia, is a superb exponent of audio’s capacity for empathy and intimacy. But he also warns that the ‘liveness’ element means that, as those who write audio scripts know, what is being communicated has to be understandable in one pass: There is no chance in radio for the listener to review a passage.1 … radio is much more linear than literature; you can’t expect the listener to go back a few pages and remind themselves that Gisli is the brother of Thorkel, who is married to Thorgrim, who hates Vestein, who is actually Gisli’s best friend. (Fidler in Australian audio guide 2016) Audio encourages revelation. Like print, and unlike video, audio liberates speakers from being judged on appearance: The overweight, the old, the bald, the beautiful, are made more equal, while factors such as visible disability or racial origin can attract less judgment. This encourages interviewees to open up and feel more comfortable about telling deeply personal stories. Audio is also distinguished by its portability and porousness. As the seminal media scholar Walter Ong notes: ‘Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer’ (Ong 2007, p. 71). Unlike video or print, which require static attention, audio accompanies us, in the car, in the kitchen, in our headphones: sound ‘envelops us, pouring into us, whether we want it to or not, including us, involving us,’ notes American radio scholar Susan Douglas (2004, p. 30). Sound is subjective: As the English media studies theorist Michael Bull and sociologist Les Back note, ‘Sounds are embedded with both cultural and personal meanings; sounds do not come at us merely raw’ (Back & Bull 2003, p. 9). Audio feature makers (and producers of well crafted podcasts) use sound itself to tell a story. Acclaimed UK audio producer Alan Hall declares, ‘for the [audio] feature maker, sound – pure sound – is as potent a substance as any carefully weighed word or well-chosen musical figuration… no sound is innocent’ (Hall 2017, p. 128). Thus, for an audio feature on a returned, chain-smoking Iraqi war veteran and musician, Hall uses the sound of a match being struck or a Zippo cigarette lighter being flicked on, and the accompanying inhalations and exhalations as the veteran draws on the cigarette, as a leitmotif that pulls the listener towards a subliminal understanding of the man’s persona. It became a key understanding of character – not just of Will himself, the soldier-musician, but of any weary soldier pictured with a cigarette hanging from his lips. And also of any musician in a smoky

108  Siobhán McHugh jazz club… Beyond that, this banal sound came to represent something else: the action of smoking, inhaling and exhaling, came to signal that Will was present, he was breathing, he was alive – amid the devastation of Baghdad and New Orleans – and he was taking time out to reflect upon where he had been, what he had seen, and what now lay before him. (Ibid, p. 127) Hall concedes that this ‘metaphoric elevation’ of smoking a cigarette might not be consciously acknowledged by the listener. But it has been heard and processed, and in Hall’s view, ‘each association and resonance can be released, like Proust’s madeleine moment, by the right trigger, the right key’ (Ibid, p. 128). Just as no two readers will envisage a character in fiction in the same way, no two listeners will have exactly the same mental picture when they hear a sound. But besides soundtrack and words, the listener has more to go on: They are hearing an actual voice. Tone, timbre, modulation, and accent color the impression those words make, and the listener can also discern something of the speaker’s age, class, regional provenance. Further meaning is embedded in the non-verbal sound: A gulp, a pause, a sharp breath, a quaver, can inflect the moment more powerfully than any phrase. This was most clearly demonstrated to me in my own experience as both a non-fiction author and radio documentarian when I interviewed Australian journalist, Jan Graham, who had spent ten years reporting for wire agencies on the Vietnam War. Among many horrific events she recounted, one story was almost unbearably moving: her description of how, when she was ‘embedded’ with a US army unit, she witnessed a GI step on a mine and instinctively ran to his side, to ‘cuddle him,’ as he bled to death in her arms. In the telling, her emotions seethe and surge behind the at times faltering, at times angry, voice; she sobs, sniffles, exhales, pauses, regains momentum, moves from fast, clear recall to dreamy reenactment of his last moments, when she was forced to act as the wife he had been going home to, that very day – he went into shock and thought Jan was her. This act of usurped intimacy still haunted her. Jan’s account had three iterations: one as three and a half minutes of raw, virtually unedited audio (McHugh 1993a) and two as print versions of a book (McHugh 1993b, 2005). The loss of impact of her story on the page troubled me. My first print version was etiolated, leached of power, compared to the audio. I tested this at conferences and with students: Invariably, they rated the print version as having much less ­impact – around 40 percent of the audio. In many cases, the audio impact was visceral: People cried. When another edition of the book came out, I used white space on the page to approximate Jan’s speech rhythms, much as would be done with a poem. This gave it greater force – but

Memoir for Your Ears  109 nothing could approach the primal gut-punch of listening to her tortured, tearful account. It was only much later, having researched the affective power of sound, that I was able to articulate via an audio-print analysis why that was so (McHugh 2012). Affect is a quality that has been studied in fields as varied as neuroscience, psychology, and media studies, but it is perhaps most succinctly described by cultural studies theorist Eric Shouse (2005): ‘affect is what makes feelings feel.’ Affect is the emotional charge, the mute but transmitted vibe behind much spoken ­communication – and the audio medium is a superb vector for it. When the lure of narrative and finely tuned scripting for audio is combined with the affective qualities of sound itself and the highly connective act of listening, as in the best podcast memoirs, the resulting audio story engenders a profound response. To unleash the audio medium’s power to the full, it is necessary to understand the principles of audio storytelling.

The Principles of Audio Storytelling Film, whether as art house feature, blockbuster, or documentary, uses well-recognized grammar: We are all familiar with flashbacks, voiceover, and the impact of varied camera angles. The best longform audio narratives have a similar creative logic, but it is one that is only beginning to be articulated. The anthology, Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound (eds. Biewen & Dilworth 2017), contains essays by noted international audio producers and podcasters in the Americas, Europe, and Australia, who deconstruct what they do and how they do it. While the latest edition includes diverse voices such as the Peruvian writer ­Daniel Alarcón, producer of Spanish-language Radio ­A mbulante (2012), and Glyn Washington, the African-American host of the storytelling ­podcast Snap Judgment (2012), most of the contributors originated in the still overwhelmingly white world of US public radio. Historically, despite exceptional productions by luminaries such as N ­ orman Corwin and Studs Terkel, this audio sector lagged behind Europe and Australia in imaginative non-fiction audio storytelling. There, with the advent of portable tape recorders in the 1960s, radio producers escaped the studio to gather found sound and make ‘acoustic films’ (Braun 2004). These audio feature works could be cerebral and sensory at the same time, triggering what radio scholar Seán Street calls ‘a partnership between memory and imagination’ (Street 2014a). In the US, National Public Radio (NPR) began adventurously in 1970 before lapsing into a more formulaic current affairs idiom. Then, in 1995, Ira Glass famously reinvented the genre with what would become This American Life (TAL), returning the focus to personal storytelling and a signature style of studied informality and vernacular narration – but with a deeper purpose: ‘TAL stories tend to lead to epiphanies of the sort found in literature…’ (Biewen 2017, p. 7).

110  Siobhán McHugh Before focusing on individual personal storytelling podcasts, it is instructive to consider further the core elements of the audio storytelling form. Online journal RadioDoc Review (2014) was founded by the author in order to develop critical analysis and scholarship in this nascent field (McHugh 2014). Its international editorial board is comprised of acclaimed practitioners and audio scholars who nominate audio features from around the world for review. The journal offers reviewers a framework for analysis – essentially a shortlist of the key characteristics of effective audio storytelling. These include storytelling strength, originality, and innovation; emotiveness, empathy, and audience engagement; depth of research and complexity of character portrayal; craft, artistry, and dramaturgical coherence (RadioDoc Review 2016). In audio, producers use concepts such as dramaturgy and choreography to compose with sound in much the same way that a conventional literary journalist would employ a ‘chaptered’ narrative structure and detailed, reconstructed scenes and description. Listen to a Prix Italia winner such as France ARTE Radio’s ‘Qui a connu Lolita?/Who killed Lolita?’ (Ahoudig, Apprill and Batard 2009), about the discovery of the bodies of a Cape Verde immigrant and her two children in a Marseilles apartment, dead from starvation, and you will recognize many literary journalism tropes: evocative scenes (not recreated, but recorded as audio vérité); multiple voices and shifting perspectives; a murky mystery whose gripping plot and cinematic sense of place leaves the listener deeply affected. The Canadian practitioner Chris Brookes (2015) has mused on how the impressionistic audio feature differs from the more informationalist audio documentary. In a four-decade career, he has moved past the rendition of aural reality to probing how layered sound can create a heightened, imagined form of reality. ‘It is trying to say the unsayable or express the inexpressible. It is not about the words – it’s about the force fields between the words’ (Brookes in Street 2014b, p. 91). As an example, for the ABC radio series, Minefields and Miniskirts, I interviewed a nurse who had served in the Vietnam War and was officially diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This could be triggered by the sound of helicopters, she told me; the often horrifically wounded Australian soldiers she treated were rushed in from the field via helicopter. Around her words, I wanted to place the sounds of whirring helicopters, to evoke the turmoil in her mind. But recordings of helicopters of the era sounded strangely unidentifiable. So I worked in studio to layer and mix the helicopter sounds until they acoustically resembled the way she had described them – as menacing, insistent rhythms she could not escape. I argue that this aural ‘reconstruction’ based on interview detail is comparable to the way a literary journalist such as Capote or Didion builds a scene from research. Such composition through sound is practiced in diverse ways, but the effect, as with the best literary journalism, is to immerse the audience

Memoir for Your Ears  111 in another world. As Biewen (2017, p. 4) notes of the best contemporary audio storytellers: ‘These trends towards the DIY documentary and the self-narrated story are relatively new strategies in pursuit of an old, old impulse – to explore human experience in all its naked complexity.’

Podcasts as Memoir The vaunted intimacy of podcasting is not new. Back in the 1930s, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his famous radio ‘fireside chats’– presidential addresses to the nation delivered as though he were speaking individually to everyone listening at home. As McLuhan (1994, p. 299) noted: ‘That is the immediate aspect of radio. A private experience.’ This capacity for powerful one-to-one communication applies perhaps even more strongly to podcasting, given that many people listen via headphones, so that the podcast host is literally speaking into their ear. This and other factors, as Lindgren (2016) shows, link the increase in personal narrative journalism in recent years to the rise in podcasting. Lindgren focuses mainly on personal stories told to a journalist, who crafts them as narrative – a format widely pursued since the mid-1990s via models such as This American Life (1995) and now being reworked by independent podcast networks such as Radiotopia and Gimlet in the US and Falling Tree Productions and Somethin’ Else in the UK. Shows such as Heavyweight (2016), Criminal (2014), and Short Cuts (2012) are good examples of this genre, distinguished by fine writing and high standards of audio production. First-person memoir podcasts that are well produced (not just spoken word audio blogs) are less common. Millennial (2015), in which Asian-American host Megan Tan examines her own experience of being twenty-something, is one, but by the end of Season One (ten episodes), she has exhausted the material provided by her own life and sensibly moved on to reporting about others of her generation. Not By Accident (2016) has a tighter focus. It tells the story of host Sophie Harper’s decision to become a single mother via IVF – and is disarmingly introduced by three-year-old Astrid, the result of that decision. Season One telescopes some five years and one hundred hours of recordings into twenty deeply personal episodes, starting with Harper’s attendance at an IVF clinic, interwoven with expository narration and scenes with her family. This is the biggest story of my life… It is primarily an emotional journey, contained by the framework of real world events: maternity leave in Australia, returning to work in Denmark, childcare, balancing work and single motherhood, isolation from family and friends, moving home to Australia after six years away… and the impact on my daughter and me of making this series. (Ibid)

112  Siobhán McHugh Not By Accident works best when Harper includes beautifully recorded acoustic scenes, as she journeys through pregnancy, back in time to her realization that she was a lesbian, to her close relationship with her parents, sisters, and extended family, and her colleagues and students in Denmark, where she teaches documentary. In recording these scenes, Harper encountered the same ethical dilemmas of any memoirist: how to represent real people fairly yet squarely. For me, the hardest part has been figuring out how to tell my story with openness and honesty, without hurting others who were involved in the events, or damaging relationships. Not everyone wants to be a character in my story, particularly if my one-sided telling doesn’t make them look good. I feel I have an ethical responsibility to the subjects, to the audience and to my own creative vision in making this project. (Harper 2016) Other recommended programs include ‘Mei Mei, A Daughter’s Song,’ in which Dmae Roberts deconstructs the difficult cross-cultural relationship between herself as an Asian-American woman and her traditional Taiwanese mother (Roberts 1989; Fukui 2017); and ‘Losing Yourself’ (2016), an episode of John Biewen’s Scene on Radio podcast in which a young woman records her life following a diagnosis of leukemia. One unusual trauma memoir-podcast, is ‘Marija’ (2016) in which a ­Pakistani-American woman reflects on being a victim of female genital mutilation. It began as a written essay and was adapted for audio by a team at The Heart, a Radiotopia show specializing in gender and sexuality topics. The podcast Radio Diaries (1996), in which invited subjects keep audio diaries which the producers artfully craft as narrative, is also notable; stand-out episodes include ‘Thembi’s AIDS Diary,’ a moving story of a young South African woman’s experience of living with AIDS, and ‘Majd’s Diary,’ in which a young Saudi Arabian records how she negotiates family, study, and matchmaking over a two-year period. Other formats, which may be considered as performative memoir, include the growing number of live ‘true life’ storytelling events, repackaged as podcasts: The Moth (2008, US, Australia), Confession Booth (2015 ­Australia), Spark (2007 UK), to name a few. An episode of Spark (2015) that featured London sex workers describing their philosophical approach to the job was at times ribald, enlightening, and memorable. The following analysis considers two shows that offer contrasting first-person approaches to audio memoir.

Strangers: Love hurts, Episodes 1–4, Lea Thau (Strangers 2014) Strangers is a podcast from the Radiotopia network, which launched in 2014 as a network of ‘extraordinary, story-driven podcasts,’ co-founded

Memoir for Your Ears  113 by PRX (Public Radio Exchange) and the high-profile podcaster Roman Mars, host of 99 Percent Invisible, which features stories related to design and architecture. Strangers is hosted by Danish-born Lea Thau, now in her early forties and resident in California. The series, which bills itself as a show that is ‘a shot of empathy in the arm,’ usually tells well wrought personal stories that feature Thau as a sympathetic and empathetic interviewer. In 2014, she broke the mold to interrogate her own life for a four-part series, Love Hurts (2014). The series focuses on a period when Thau split from her partner a month before the birth of their baby after learning he was having an affair and was subsequently single for four years – the first extended time in her adult life she had been without a partner. Her tone in the opening minutes is open, honest, and conversational: When my ex decided he didn’t want me, it was the first time in my life that I lost control of the narrative. I went from being engaged to be married and pregnant and looking for houses every Sunday to being eight months pregnant, alone in an apartment, discarded and devastated. (Love Hurts 1) Thau dated men she met online, but no relationships ensued. So for the series, she decides to ask some of these failed dates why they thought it didn’t work out: A potentially excruciating encounter with a peculiarly American element of perverse narcissism, except that Thau is not ­A merican, and her savvy self-reflexivity saves the show from toppling into self-indulgence or masochism. In Episode One, one date, Robert, now happily in a relationship, tells Thau that it was just poor timing – there was only a three-week window when he would have been open to a relationship, and she missed it. In Episode Two, Thau runs into another former date, John, at a school function she is attending with her young son. Two years on, John has met another woman and they have a child – conceived one month after they met. ‘Long enough to know that this was a good person, we were both very much in love and there was a baby that was going to come… we just threw all our chips in the pile and just went for it,’ says John (Love Hurts 2). Thau ruminates on the pros and cons of diving straight into commitment. Because the curse of online dating is that we have so many options. It’s also the beauty of online dating. But like many things in this modern life, there’s a fine line between the beauty and the fucking curse of it. Most of us wouldn’t give up all the options we have now; I wouldn’t. But sometimes you can’t help thinking that a tiny dose of necessity or some kind of external urgency would help us as we waffle our way through singledom. (Love Hurts 2)

114  Siobhán McHugh In print, this looks banal. As audio, inflected over acoustic musical pauses, and with emphasis and expressiveness added through voice, along with a self-chiding laugh as she says ‘fine line’ and ‘fucking curse,’ it draws the listener closer. Episode Three sees Thau talk to two ‘experts’ about her failed attempts to find a relationship. One, described as ‘a love coach,’ milks the vulnerability of single women to sell her book. It’s hard to listen to, as if you’ve stumbled onto Judge Judy when you were expecting National Geographic. But Thau deepens it by framing herself as a rookie interviewee, not used to being questioned. Her recounting of how she feels abandoned and betrayed as she is about to give birth is genuinely moving, and she is clear-eyed about her naïve expectations of her former partner. Episode Four features Joe, a man Thau rejected – who is interviewed by her on this topic at his request. She begins the episode by addressing head-on the premise of turning the spotlight on her own life: Welcome to Strangers… I’m Lea Thau - and if you’re sick of hearing about me, you can just turn this off. I’m a bit sick of talking about myself, so I get it. And I’ve been on the fence about whether I should do this final installment of Love Hurts, because there have been some angry iTunes reviews, saying ‘enough with the most pathetic love life already – this is unlistenable!’ And you know, they do sting. But for every one of those, there have been hundreds of comments, saying I’m in Mumbai, I’m in Sweden, I’m in Wisconsin: thank you for making me feel less alone. (Love Hurts 4) Thau received so many messages related to Love Hurts that she created a follow-up program from the voicemails – a meta-commentary on her own experience and surely one of the more interesting differences between memoir as a written publication and memoir as an online experience to which listeners can respond and even become part of. Three years on, Strangers has 185 ratings on iTunes, of which 180 are the maximum five stars, four are four stars and one rates it three, complaining of ‘far too much moralising and commentary tacked on.’ There is no sign of angry comments; on the contrary, the reviews consistently praise Thau’s friendliness and seductive storytelling. It is probably significant that Thau had built a strong host relationship with listeners before she turned to her own story. As an autobiographical slice-of-life series, Love Hurts is at times cringe-inducing, but it retreats from being a public self-mortification due to Thau’s insight into her own situation and her jolts of self-deprecating observation. ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’ she tells us, as she goes to see Robert. The intimacy and empathy potential of the podcast genre buttress Thau’s skillful writing, and her raspy, lived-in voice adds credibility and warmth. Though it does not display complex production, and is mostly based around voice rather than sound-rich storytelling, it is well crafted,

Memoir for Your Ears  115 with adept use of music as punctuation and mood-setter. Following the series, Strangers reverted to non-memoiresque shows – until 2016, when Thau introduced the new man in her life and informed listeners that they were considering moving in together with their respective children, and even getting married. At that point, this listener did feel like tapping Thau on the shoulder and giving some gentle advice: switch off the mike.

‘When I grow up’: David Holthouse. Audio Memoir, Part of ‘Slow to React,’ Episode 425, This American Life (Holthouse 2011) This 23-minute audio memoir formed part of an episode of This American Life themed around people who had belatedly taken action following significant events in their life: hence the title, ‘Slow to react.’ The narrator and writer, David Holthouse, opens thus: This time last year I was plotting to kill a man. This time last year I had a gun, and a silencer, and a plan. I had staked out the man’s tract home in the Denver suburbs. I had followed him to and from his job in a high tech office park. I was confident I would get away with murder because there was nothing in recent history to connect me to him. Homicide investigators look for motive and mine was buried 25 years in the past. The man I was going to kill was the one who raped me in 1978 when I was seven years old. (Holthouse 2011) The story continues as tautly and tensely as it opens. It reveals how the teenage son of Holthouse’s parents’ best friends had violently raped him one evening while his parents played cribbage and drank wine upstairs. Over the next 25 years, Holthouse had dreamed of revenge and tortured himself with fears that as part of the ‘vicious cycle’ theory of pedophilia, he too would molest children. He could not bring himself to tell his parents, considering suicide instead, staged to look like an accident, to spare their feelings. In his early thirties, working as a journalist, he finds that his attacker is living nearby and plots his murder. Then fate intervenes, when his mother discovers his childhood diary entry. If you have a secret you want to keep, never write it down. I know that now, but I didn’t when I was ten, the summer between fourth and fifth grade when I sat down with a pen in my Garfield the cat diary. The entry is dated June 1981. And while I have no memory of writing it, the penmanship is unmistakably my own. There between accounts of my grandfather dying and a game-winning double I hit in little league is an account of my being raped three years before.

116  Siobhán McHugh Taken by surprise, Holthouse confirms what happened to his mother. She rings the perpetrator’s parents and reads out a statement, advising them to keep their son away from children – by now he has his own. Holthouse narrates in a bald, flattened style that suits the Chandleresque noir style of his writing. The only accompaniment to his voice is music, which is faded in and out at key points, to underline, or allow a section to sink in, as happens following the account of his mother’s call: She told them that she wished them to have good lives, but to never contact her or my father again. No Christmas cards, nothing. She told him she hoped their son eventually got caught and spent the rest of his life getting raped in prison. Then she hung up. The denouement occurs when Holthouse writes to his attacker and demands a meeting. Again, the writing is stark and vernacular, the narration bloodless and uninflected. He showed up wearing jeans, a grey t-shirt, and a Colorado Avalanche cap. When I saw him standing on the corner anxiously trying to pick me out of the crowd, I realized the moment I had written about in my diary in 1981 had arrived. We were both grown men and I was meeting him on the street. I didn’t punch him in the face. I did shake his hand. But neither of us pretended that nothing had happened. We were afraid of one another. I was so jacked up on adrenaline I was shaking. He was sweating like he’d just run a mile. ‘Nervous,’ he said. I nodded. ‘Me too,’ he said. The liberation for Holthouse is that in facing up to his tormentor, he loses the need for physical revenge. As a slice-of-life audio story, ‘When I grow up’ is powerful indeed. But it turns out it was written seven years earlier under the title ‘Stalking the bogeyman’ (Holthouse 2004) for an Alaskan newspaper, Westword, where Holthouse was then employed. The texts of ‘Stalking the bogeyman’ and ‘When I grow up’ are about 80–90 percent identical. Holthouse’s strippedback, conversational writing style translates almost seamlessly to audio, but some changes have been made in deference to This American Life’s public radio audience. A graphic description of the rape is excised, along with confronting details of the assailant torturing a cat. Other descriptions are omitted or toned down; even the mild term ‘dogshit’ is bleeped. In keeping with audio’s need for economic writing that can be understood at one hearing, some sections are cut back and/or rewritten more plainly. Unanswered questions raised by the newspaper article are addressed in the TAL version, such as when Holthouse meets his assailant in a ‘cheap-suit

Memoir for Your Ears  117 department store’ when he is 21. In both versions, we learn that Holthouse does nothing because he is with his mother. In the audio version, we get vital additional information on how the rapist reacts to being in the company of his now adult victim: ‘the bogeyman gave a weak smile and made small talk with my mom while I was pretending to look at cuff links on the other side of the store.’ But while the story is tighter in some ways as audio, it does not achieve its full potential. To conform to TAL’s three-act formula around a theme (‘slow to react’), it sits weirdly alongside a chirpy prologue about a woman who does not realize she is pregnant until she goes into labor and is followed by a story of romantic love and of surviving cancer. Host Ira Glass back-announces the Holthouse piece with almost indecent haste; classic audio production technique would let music run on after Holthouse’s last words for at least a phrase or two, to allow the whole story to settle and sink in. The use of music throughout is underwhelming and formulaic: Glass (2016) has clearly described the role he wants music to play in This American Life, introducing it to signify ‘rising action’ and using it as a bridge to allow the text to ‘breathe’ – to signify a paragraph or chapter change in the story. This is standard, but the actual music used could have had a subtler and more potent effect in setting and reflecting mood, as is expertly done in the TAL spin-off, S-Town. Further, the audio treatment of a high-action, deeply emotive narrative such as this would have benefited from the ‘imagined reality’ of Brookes, a more creative literary journalism approach that could, for instance, have taken us inside the frightened child’s head; counterpointed the incongruity of social banter happening alongside the vicious rape scene below; explored Holthouse’s later risk-taking behavior (he goes mountain climbing alone and without ropes, as a kind of death wish); and let our ears linger on the emotionally explosive moment when Holthouse’s mother confronts the rapist’s parents. Holthouse may have felt these frustrations. He revisited the story for theatre. In 2014, his play, ‘Stalking the bogeyman’ became a New York Times Critic’s Pick. In the UK, The Guardian (Gardner 2016) was less positive: ‘Three scenes have real power, in particular David’s mother’s phone call to the parents of the rapist, but the characters are sketchily drawn and we never get sufficiently inside David’s head.’ In the right hands, getting inside David’s head is exactly what a creative audio feature treatment could do for this memoir.

Conclusion This article has demonstrated that well produced audio formats, delivered as podcasts, offer strong potential for autobiographical storytelling and memoir. Numerous other examples can be found in the ‘Personal

118  Siobhán McHugh Journals’ category in iTunes and on other podcast platforms. The trend to tell personal stories for an audio medium so as to capture its affective force and ability to stimulate the imagination continues to grow: the introduction in 2017 of a ‘Personal Lives’ category to the New York Radio Festival international awards is one manifestation of this. Lea Thau’s ‘Love Hurts’ series on her podcast Strangers illustrates how podcasting can enable aural memoir as a form that deliberately dissociates itself from the restrictions of mainstream journalism. As Thau notes: I’m just me. This is MY podcast; it’s not representing any institutions. This is not NPR, where you have to be fair and balanced. It’s not journalism in that sense; it’s my show and if you don’t like it, you can just not tune in. And so you have a bit more license to give your own opinions, whether they be political or personal, and share your own stories. But I also think you have to do that to a degree because people expect that in this medium. (Thau in Rosenthal 2014) Holthouse’s ‘When I grow up,’ on the other hand, demonstrates how an aural memoir can exploit key characteristics of longform narrative journalism, described by Ricketson (2014, p. 243) as an account that ‘incorporates facts, atmosphere, emotions, context, texture and meaning.’ Holthouse’s print version of his experiences, ‘Stalking the bogeyman,’ does not elicit elements such as atmosphere, emotions and texture as effectively as the audio format, because of the audio medium’s stronger affective capacity and its use of layered sound and temporality to enhance meaning. However both versions espouse literary journalism motifs in service of memoir, by drawing on ‘elements of literary practice that are customarily associated with but not owned by fiction, such as characterization, dialogue, scene-setting and authorial voice…’ (Ibid). In the past, the appeal of audio memoirs was limited by the ephemerality of radio, but podcasting has changed that. A podcast is at least as permanent as an e-book. It provides an excellent vehicle for the audio memoir, where sound can be ‘a kind of portal through which a deeper, often inarticulate consciousness can be glimpsed’ (Hall 2017, p. 129). If voice is the most compelling aspect of memoir, the podcast memoir lets us hear that voice with naked clarity, narrating its life story straight into our ears.

Note 1 While podcasts allow the ability to rewind and even speed-listen, there is scant research on how much this is done. In crafted formats, where placement of sound is a crucial aesthetic, a social media survey by the author suggested speed listening would be considered heresy.

Memoir for Your Ears  119

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8 The ‘I’ and the ‘Eye’ Mediated Perspective in the Documemoir Kathleen J. Waites

Making documentary films means… choosing how to see something. Editing is the most obvious way of manipulating vision, and yet the camera sometimes sees what you don’t – a person in the background… or an object… moving in the wind. —The Blazing World: A Novel

The documemoir is an intriguing hybrid, given the documentary’s ontological obligation to objectivity and the subjective nature of autobiography, adding another wrinkle to ‘life narrative’ (Smith & Watson 2010, p. 4). Consistent with what Philippe Lejeune coined the ‘autobiographical pact’ (1989, pp. 3–30), if the controlling ‘I’ of the film narrator’s consciousness is synonymous with that of its author and protagonist (5), how are we to account for the camera’s ‘Eye’? Is the viewer to assume that the identity of ‘I’ and ‘Eye’ are inseparable? If so, is the viewer then witness to a compounded subjectivity, or is the camera lens an unwitting witness and mediator of the reality presented, thus complicating the autobiographer’s perspective and narrative intention? In spite of their varied artistic methods and the differences in their respective moments in cultural history, Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (1985), Barbara Hammer’s Tender Fictions (1996), and Beyonce Knowles’ Life Is But a Dream (2013), illustrate how the camera’s ‘Eye’ sometimes perceives what the ‘I’ does not own. Although the memoirist–documentarian wields the film’s Eye/camera – or the various Eyes/cameras – to persuade the viewer to align with and ‘see’ the subjectivity under construction in light of the life event(s) recalled, the camera may also be telling an unauthorized story. In the service of autobiography, therefore, the documentary method and the cinematic Eye remind us of the complexity, as well as the hazards of filmic self-representation. Critics, such as Susanna Egan, have waded into these hybrid waters, claiming that ‘the autobiographical subject… lacks even the degree of control that the writer enjoys’ (1999, p. 85): Technologies of film… become extensions of particular perspectives and contribute to the pluralities within… autobiography. They also

124  Kathleen J. Waites introduce technical… challenges and opportunities for each autobiographer, becoming part of the struggle to establish…some prior if not autonomous self. (1999, p. 227) Whatever the dialogic and pluralities expressed in the text, the function of memoir remains unchanged – for the filmmaker to harness and shed light on his/her identity. A subgenre of autobiography, memoir is distinguished by its intention to tell a story woven from a life rather than a chronological accounting of a life, such as that of a notable political figure (Couser 2012, pp. 20–3). Identity claims however, are at the core of both (Couser 2012, p. 89). Autobiographical documentaries tend to fall into the former category, and ‘the interaction of the… electronic media and the human self forces a cinematic subject to emerge that has its base in the ontological world’ (Lane 2002, p. 30). However unstable or contradictory this subjectivity or self, as John Paul Eakin reminds us, it is expressed in both ‘the I-character and the I-narrator’ as well as ‘in the identity narrative as a whole’ (2016, p. 220). An assertion of the ‘self,’ the end game is to reveal ‘a’ truth about one’s life or identity, or arrive at a new perspective on one’s life to share with the reader/viewer. Exactly what that perspective is, how it is achieved, and what it means are functions of the reflective ‘I’ and, here, the ever-observant ‘Eye.’

McElwee’s Camera-Subjectivity Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons and Proliferation appeared in the mid-1980s, an era characterized by Gary Wills as ‘­Ronald Reagan’s America’ owing to his ‘rhetorical dismissal of the Soviet Union as an evil empire’ (Thompson 2007, pp. 3, 4). Against this unsettling backdrop, the anxiety-prone filmmaker Ross McElwee returns to his southern roots, camera in hand, to retrace General Sherman’s war-­ ending march through the South. The film opens with a close-up of the South on a wall-sized US map, highlighting Sherman’s ‘path of destruction.’ Following a brief history of the march in voiceover from a third-person narrator, the film shifts to the ‘I’ voice as McElwee embarks on his search for grounding in an era of nuclear proliferation. Susanna Egan explains the ‘transformative’ possibilities of cinematic autobiography in which: ‘Making one’s self visible or mapping identity are not only tropes for recovery of understanding… but… can provide activities of interpretation in which. . . the reader is compelled to join’ (1999, pp. 226–7). Having received a film-grant to fulfill his aim of retracing Sherman’s march, McElwee contemplates his future after his girlfriend has, unexpectedly, ended their relationship. This turn of events sets the stage for

The ‘I’ and the ‘Eye’  125 his alternative journey, as well as the film’s self-reflexive method  that is expressed in a variety of ways. For instance, at various junctures the filmmaker positions himself in front of his camera and speaks to the viewer in a confessional way as one would in a diary. As a result, we are privy to McElwee’s insecurity, sleeplessness, and fear of annihilation after having witnessed an H-bomb test over the Pacific ‘the eve of’ his ‘13th birthday’ during a family visit to Hawaii, or what he refers to as ‘Uncle Sam’s birthday candle.’ We are also constantly aware of his camera. For example, McElwee frequently uses reflective surfaces or mirrors by which he films himself in the act of filming, thereby displaying what Jay Ruby describes as a ‘reflexive self-consciousness… the ability to see ourselves… as perceiving subjects and the simultaneous objects of others’ perceptions’ (1977, p. 4). Such scenes build on the documemoir’s reflexive method and confessional tone. Both tropes are established in the opening, in which an agitated McElwee pauses his sweeping in an empty and dimly lit New York City loft to examine a near-empty refrigerator, the images aptly reflecting the void in his life. In voiceover, McElwee explains that he intends to film Sherman’s path through the South and, simultaneously, recover from his romantic break-up. Before he begins, he travels to Charlotte, North Carolina for an extended-family get-together, where he receives relationship advice from family members and meets eligible women, setting the course for his other film-mission: pursuing women with his camera to deflect his own angst and unmooring, mockingly alluded to in the DVD title frame. At the bottom of this frame, we see a parade of animated female figures, while a magnified cartoonish image of Sherman glares down at them voyeuristically with bulbous eyes. While at the gathering, McElwee concedes that his family hopes he will get on with his life by coupling with a ‘nice southern girl,’ implying that his forlornness is indicative of the fact that he has lost his ‘southern’ way owing to his northern lifestyle. Armed with his handheld camera, and ‘miniature Nagra SN’ audio recorder (MacDonald 1988, p. 19), the reluctant suitor proceeds to interview a series of women with his camera as if he were amenable to a romantic search. His sister instigates his mission, lecturing Ross who sits across from her in a rowboat on a lake. He remains unseen, filming her in medium shot, while she assesses his dilemma and offers him relationship advice, ultimately suggesting that McElwee use his camera as ‘a conversation piece’ and a mechanism for ‘instant rapport’ with women. As it turns out, McElwee requires little urging to use his camera for engaging women. It becomes increasingly clear that Sherman’s march is little more than a ruse for McElwee’s more capricious mission of flirting with, and then deflecting, suitable mates. Indeed, although McElwee explores historical march-related sites, most of his camera time is devoted to ogling women. To varying degrees, the women succumb – not so much to him – as to the seduction of the

126  Kathleen J. Waites camera that he seems unable to put down, even when implored to do so by his friend, Charleen, as well as by former college girlfriend Karen: ‘Stop filming,’ Karen finally complains, ‘It’s cruel.’ Other self-reflexive scenes find McElwee’s camera in the foreground, virtually concealing his face, thus dominating the frame and standing in as subject, so that to some extent the camera functions as protagonist while the narrator is the author/filmmaker. McElwee’s romantic curiosity consistently sidetracks him from his documentary-mission. For instance, McElwee stalks Pat, an aspiring actor that he has met at the gathering. He follows her to Atlanta, where he videotapes her packing a suitcase to move to Hollywood for a movie role. In voiceover, he tells us that he has been unsuccessful in convincing Pat to give up her bit part for a ‘starring role’ in his life. This establishes an ironic pattern in the film, since McElwee pursues women with no interest in him, while declining those who are eligible and interested. The camera is his security blanket, and, less an instrument for the protagonist’s engagement with the world, it actually facilitates distancing or disengagement. Here, ‘the narrator is more eye than I’ (Hampl 1996, p. 64) – more interested in looking at the world through a lens than in interacting with it. In this fashion, McElwee’s camera acts as a stand-in, producing an alternate ‘subjectivity’ and telling an alternative story. Camera shots augment this point. In the Atlanta bedroom, for example, McElwee cuts to a long shot of himself in the foreground through a bedroom mirror, while Pat packs her suitcase in the background. The camera looms large, obscuring his face in the frame. A similar self-­ reflexive shot, in which the camera takes primacy, occurs with Wini Wood, whom McElwee has encountered on Ossabaw Island. Sidelined once again from Sherman’s trail, McElwee pauses to have a fling with Wini. In the sequence, he has just returned from a film-editing job after several weeks away from the island, to find that Wini is no longer interested in him. In the scene, McElwee queries Wini with his camera while she washes clothes in a tub outside her cabin. On the right side of the frame, through a small mirror attached to the cabin, we see (and hear) Ross interrogating Wini about why she has left him for Michael. Again, as McElwee puzzles over Wini’s rejection in voiceover, the camera lens dominates the frame. Shortly afterwards, McElwee films rival Michael who is astride of Wini, giving her a backrub. Although jealous and unhappy about this romantic reversal, in voiceover the narrator recognizes that he sabotaged the relationship by having left Wini – symbolically, one might argue – for his camera. At one point, McElwee acknowledges his video camera fixation. Seemingly frustrated with his unsuccessful romantic exploits near the end of his march, for instance, McElwee ponders the ruins of the Old Sheldon Church, burned by Sherman’s army, in Beaufort. Mirroring the opening scene in the loft, in voiceover he confesses: ‘it seems I’m filming my life in order to have a life to film’; and he considers the validity of Charleen’s

The ‘I’ and the ‘Eye’  127 observation that ‘filming’s become the only way I can relate to women.’ When Charleen brings this obsession to his attention, McElwee explains that it reflects his ‘reverse camera shyness.’ This explanation suggests he is shy behind rather than in front of the camera, and yet his camera is anything but shy. For instance, in addition to Pat, his camera stalks disinterested former girlfriend, Jackie, who demonstrates discomfort with both the ‘Eye’ and the ‘I’ behind it. Clearly trying to avoid him in one scene, she is sprawled in a banked rowboat some distance away from him. His camera draws closer in an intrusive and dominating high angle shot from behind her, ultimately settling on her torso. Abruptly, she sits up, and yet he continues to badger her with his camera while talking to the back of her head. As with Karen, while the ‘Eye’ registers her discomfort, the ‘I’ clearly does not. There is more than a hint of disingenuousness in McElwee’s reverse camera-shyness claim. Moreover, the camera that brings him in intimate closeness with his subjects also functions as a distancing mechanism. While he appears to use it to find a suitable partner, the camera serves to thwart that very ambition. In her New Yorker article, ‘Hiding Behind the Camera,’ Jessica Weisburg notes that autobiographical filmmakers don’t aim so much for ‘self-expression’; ‘rather,’ they ‘question the capacities of their medium’ (2013, p. 2). However, the task of the memoirist is not to hide but to reveal the self. In this case, what McElwee reveals is what he also hides (with his camera): how his camera protects and lives for him.

Hammer’s Performer-Subjectivity Barbara Hammer explodes the very notion of an autobiographical subject in her 1996 postmodernist film, Tender Fictions, with its presentation of shifting identities. She moves from disobedient child, to daring young woman traveling around the world on a motor-scooter, to out-­ lesbian-protestor and avant-garde artist. As with McElwee’s film, we may see another subjectivity observed by the Eye and not entirely owned by the ‘I.’ This performance-artist subjectivity, observable in Hammer’s exhibitionistic performances, may be traced back to her mother’s thwarted ambition for Hammer to be a child-star like Shirley Temple. A product of its era, Tender Fictions incorporates digital technology, collage, home and professional video, as well as ‘re-photographed… family photos,’ producing an artful memoir that challenges cultural as well as aesthetic assumptions, or, ‘truth-making in non-fiction films’ ­(Hammer 2010, pp. 242–3). Characterizing common themes that emerged in artistic production of this era, Colin Harrison asserts: In a climate of… media conglomerates… it was inevitable that the loss of independence and the need of alternative viewpoints would

128  Kathleen J. Waites become common preoccupations. Hence, the search for spaces of opposition and critique constitute a major theme… (2010, p. 34) In addition to a dazzling array of images, Tender Fictions consists of a discordant soundtrack with multifarious, at times distorted, voices. The images appear and disappear with startling rapidity, often challenging the viewer’s ability to recognize what she is seeing. In an early home video clip, for example, a youngish Hammer sprawls on a bed in an unfocused medium shot. She places a Fedora on her head, lights her cigarette in a masculine gesture, and picks up a prop barely visible on the lower left of the screen. Unidentifiable because of the out-of-focus lens, the image of an overly large, erect dildo takes shape as Hammer cups the roundish tip and brings it towards her face. The dildo obscures ­Hammer’s face, until she leans back and places it between her legs, apparently simulating sex to scat singing on the soundtrack. It takes several viewings to register Hammer’s appropriation of the penis in her masculine pose, one that is echoed in the scene in which she dresses up as Charlie Chaplin for a Halloween party and talks about trying on her father’s clothing when she was a girl. This scene supports the constructed nature of subjectivity, the postmodernist notion that resonates throughout the film, through ‘scratchy home videos; snapshots; overdubs from academic texts; interviews; skewed television programs, reminiscences by Hammer, family and friends, and a string of ex-girlfriends’ (Morris 1996, p. 2). Interspersed among them are artifacts, comprised of Hammer’s childhood composition books, a journal-notebook filled with drawings and scribbled notes, and legal documents, such as an official license attesting to her domestic partnership, and shockingly, Hammer’s social security card. ‘Autobiography,’ the male voiceover narrator tells us, quoting theorist George Gusdorf as a close-up of Hammer’s social security card appears on the screen, ‘is the literary consequence of the rise of individualism as an ideology.’ Recognizing the double-edged sword of individualism codified into law, and yet restricted by prescriptions relating to sex and gender, Hammer’s film is both an expression of her quirky individuality and a defiance and destabilization of authorized social categories. Hammer’s cinematic approach to autobiography takes a page from Helen Cixous’ observation – expressed in a faux child’s voice – that the woman artist ‘draws her story into history,’ and it is not ‘simple or linear.’ Although Tender Fictions opens with photos of her Ukrainian-­ immigrant grandmother, and attests to Hammer’s birth in 1939 in ­Hollywood, ­California, her film entertains such a chronology only to toy with it. Instead, Hammer mines childhood memories, her failed marriage, engagement with the 1970s counterculture in California, and a problematic relationship with her mother, creating a tapestry of her ‘self.’

The ‘I’ and the ‘Eye’  129 She recasts these memories in a circular manner, the strands folding back and forth and over one another like a wave. Characteristically, ­‘Hammer employs a rapid handheld movement and quick cutting’ (Kleinhans 2007, p. 183). Along this dizzying, circuitous, and at times repetitious route, the viewer is challenged to find a constant, reliable subject. In characterizing Hammer’s documentary method, Kleinhans explains that the ‘experiential present overtakes a dialogue with the past’ (2007, p. 183), and the truth is elusive. The filmmaker’s aim seems to obstruct this expectation when she says, in voiceover, at multiple points in the film: ‘I promise NOT to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’ Here we have a thumbing of the nose at Philippe Lejeune who sees truth-­telling as confirmation of the autobiographer’s identity and ‘referential pact’ with her audience: ‘I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’ (1989, p. 22). Moreover, just as the courtroom relies on the testimony of the witness under oath, so too, does the viewer expect the autobiographer’s account of her life to be valid or truthful. With the aim of making ‘the viewer into archeologist’ who must ‘decide what was true and what was fiction and bring a type of agency to the encounter,’ however, Hammer sabotages this expectation: ‘I digitally manipulated educational movies on 1950s family life. I rifled and re-photographed the family photo album… I put them together without chronology, objective narrator, establishing shots, reinforcing music, or authoritative interviews’ (2010, p. 243). Hammer declines to tell the ‘truth’ and suggests the viewer must determine what is, and is not, true. Hammer’s poststructuralist method is most evident in a series of scenes toward the end of the film. In one sequence, we see close-up clips from a black and white television program, as referenced above, featuring a middle-aged woman in a 1950s-style housedress, her image presented in a split screen as though she were divided into two persons. This shot echoes a scene earlier in the film, during which feminist Susan Friedman’s quote is recited in voiceover: ‘Women develop a dual consciousness: the self as culturally defined and the self as different from cultural prescription.’ In this later scene, a female interviewer is superimposed over the image of the homemaker. Filmed from behind, Hammer’s image repeatedly appears and disappears. The videotaped TV show is compounded by Hammer’s video cameras, one focused on the screen, and the other on her. On the soundtrack, the expert-interviewer, addressing the woman featured on one side of the split screen, discusses the topic of how life takes on meaning when women have ‘a role.’ This is a poignant comment given the traditional expectations of women challenged by feminism’s Second Wave in the 1960s–1970s when Hammer was growing up. Clips of Hammer’s involvement in social protests in San Francisco, and her engagement with lesbian-identified activities, such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, attest to her rejection of traditional femininity. As a result, like other ‘autobiographical subjects… in

130  Kathleen J. Waites the American autobiographical documentary,’ Hammer’s rebelliousness and lesbian subjectivity emerge ‘from the interaction of history and the self’ (Lane 2002, p. 26). Hammer challenges the ‘femininity’ championed by her mother, and the TV expert, who observes, ‘We’re struggling with this question that if I’m not a wife and mother, what is my identity?’ As the interviewer drones on, the camera cuts to a behind-the-shoulder shot of Barbara, whose unfocused image is superimposed over the snowy screen image, behind which we see a nun. Hammer’s head bobs back and forth over the nun’s face. After Hammer mimes kissing her, spliced filmstrips roll down the screen like film titles, featuring Barbara in color and close-up, leaning over and cradling her editing machine. The effect is discombobulating. Mocking those who presume to limit people to proscribed roles, Hammer presents herself as an elusive presence – an editor who splices together whimsical frames of her identity. Following this sequence, the film cuts to grainy images of Hammer’s lover in close-up. Mugging for the camera, Florence repeatedly puts on, and takes off, a hat, the camera finally cutting back to Hammer in a medium black and white shot. Seated in her office-studio she smiles and makes exaggerated faces at the camera. Resembling the TV screen, the camera lens is snowy. Hammer leans in and places her blurry face, and then her eye, directly on the stationery camera lens that is trained on her, before pulling back. Again, Hammer makes faces while the TV expert drones on. Eschewing the expert’s views, Hammer also subverts ‘Identity’ associated with traditional autobiography, or ‘the hegemonic narrative that implies truth, not fiction’ (Hammer 2010, p. 242). Instead, she offers the viewer ‘tender fictions.’ Such meta-narrative abounds in the film. For instance, in an even more telling self-reflexive black and white video, Barbara is depicted in long shot standing on the pavement outside a plate glass window of an office building. The image is blurry; she is holding a video camera aimed at the camera that is filming her, her image appearing and disappearing behind the frame separating the panes of glass in a sleight of hand-like series of shots. Conscious of the viewer, she seems to be saying ‘I see and record you as you watch my recording of me.’ In voiceover, she quotes George Gusdorf: ‘Autobiography is not a timeless process but is embedded in ongoing history and the search for the identity of the individual and the communities in which she lives.’ On both the diegetic and nondiegetic levels therefore, and contrary to her claims of resistance to a stable identity, the filmmaker here seems to be asserting authorial control as well as a particular subjectivity, that of performer for an audience. In fact, in contrast to McElwee who uses the camera as a mechanism for distancing, Hammer uses it to express her repressed and quirky performance-­ identity. Patricia Hampl claims that autobiographical film is not so much the story of a ‘personal self’ since the ‘self is not a source or a subject;

The ‘I’ and the ‘Eye’  131 it is an instrument’ (1996, p. 57), and Tender Fictions reflects this idea by revealing how the filmmaker uses her camera to see, construct, and tellingly, be seen on film. Photographs of Hammer as an adorable child crosscut with photos of Shirley Temple attest to her mother’s thwarted ambition for her. One frame, in which they are posed side by side, smiling with bows in their hair, attests to Hammer’s awareness of this expectation, which she claims to have rejected. Having grown up in the land of movie stars, Hammer’s mother groomed her for the role of child star. She received tap, elocution, and horseback riding lessons. She was dragged to auditions, interviewed by an unnamed studio head, and introduced to Lillian Gish. But her mother’s plans come to naught, purportedly due to ­Hammer’s lack of professional acting lessons. This childhood association with Temple in Hammer’s memory, as expressed in numerous scenes in the film, is fraught with unease, alluding not only to her failure to fulfill her mother’s ambition but also to her own perhaps unconscious desire to be, like Shirley Temple, the center of adoration. Following the title frame in the film’s opening, for example, is a high-­angle close-up of Hammer’s black shoes tap-dancing atop Shirley’s ­Temple’s star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Hammer repeats, in a childlike singsong voice: ‘Shuffle, step, step, shuffle, step, step; heel, toe, heel toe…’ In voiceover Hammer observes: ‘I was born at a time when Shirley Temple was making more money than any other female in the US. I was taught early to perform, and perform I did.’ She does not perform as originally planned. Instead, Hammer played the part of misbehaving child, receiving severe punishment for wetting the bed, peeling off wallpaper, and stealing flowers from the neighbor’s garden. Hammer discounts an association with the child star’s achievement, instead claiming to have ‘modeled’ herself ‘­after Charlie Chaplin who, unlike Temple, was a man of action.’ ­Ironically, however, in successive frames she obsesses over Temple. Smiling and performing for the camera, she repeats the tap dance atop Shirley’s sidewalk star in long shot, and through the window of her car, she searches for Temple’s residence using Hollywood’s map of the stars. Pausing at Shirley’s star on Hollywood Boulevard in a high-angle shot conveying her dominance, Hammer tries to fit her own adult shoes, and then her hands, into the mold of Shirley Temple’s, while asking in a plaintiff voice, ‘Do I fit, Shirley? Do I fit?’ Hammer does not fit the traditionally feminine mold. In this same sequence, Hammer discusses the birth of the ­Hollywood star system, echoing media critic Richard deCordova who viewed the star as ‘a particular production in circulation of knowledge’ (1991, p. 17). While the ‘star’ may have ontological grounding, the star-identity is manufactured, a clue not only to the image versus the person of Shirley Temple, but also to Hammer’s own autobiographical rendering. The subjectivities or ‘fictions’ represented in Hammer’s memoir are diametrically opposed to the image of America’s adorable sweetheart.

132  Kathleen J. Waites Hammer hints at a strained relationship with the mother she disappointed, and who disappointed her, and with her alcoholic and absent father. Hammer also admits that she agreed to marry only because the man promised to take her around the world on his motorcycle. ­Following their aborted trip, she divorces her husband, grateful that his sperm count was low because she does not want to be a mother or housewife. She also brags about her promiscuity after becoming an ‘out’ lesbian and joins the counterculture, ultimately carving out an avant-garde career in which her homosexuality is central to her identity as filmmaker, evidenced in her award-winning 1992 experimental documentary, Nitrate Kisses. Hammer’s creative combination of digital technologies and images is impressive, reflecting Egan’s assertion that ‘Technologies of film… become extensions of particular perspectives and contribute to the pluralities within each autobiography’ (1999, p. 227). These pluralities are shifting fictions recalled and rendered with tenderness. Of these fictions or subjectivities, Hammer, as performer, is consistent, and her performing-self is displayed in her persistent mugging for the camera. In an autobiographical film, the viewer expects the author’s image to fill its frames. However, how she fills the frames is significant, as the ‘Eye’ reveals. Moreover, although Hammer’s penchant for performance in front of the camera serves the self-reflexive nature of her film, it also betrays a lack of awareness regarding her exhibitionistic tendencies and longing to be a ‘movie’ star. For example, a home video finds a youngish Hammer at an outdoor café during what appears to be a street festival. Dressed in a red bikini top and casual pants she is clowning around with another woman clad in white. Both are oblivious of their surroundings, and particularly of three elementary school-aged children seated at a table just behind them. The women perform in the foreground of the frame, for two to three seconds the camera notices the stunned children in the background, aghast at the spectacle of the women’s performance. In many ways, this fleeting shot of the children’s reaction, detected by the ‘Eye,’ reflects the viewer’s bemusement at Hammer’s performances peppered throughout her film. Hammer’s proclamation, ‘I promise NOT to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ is ironic, since the double negative suggests quite the opposite, and the ‘truth’ of Hammer’s subjectivity as star-performer in her own film is clearly identified by the camera lens.

Beyoncé’s Star-Subjectivity Where Ross McElwee and Barbara Hammer are skilled, self-conscious documentarians that bend the camera to their unique autobiographical visions, Beyoncé is a performer-superstar and skillful image-­creator for the camera. In a technological age of ‘Generation eXposure’ when ‘everyone manages a public image’ (Batchelor 2009, p. xxi), the one she has

The ‘I’ and the ‘Eye’  133 constructed has made her a popular culture phenomenon. In her 2013 documemoir, she steps behind the camera, having written, executive-­ produced and co-directed it. In spite of a crew of technicians for sound, visual effects, cameras, editing (IMDB), Life Is But A Dream is a ‘deeply micromanaged documentary,’ according to former Times critic Margo Jefferson (Schneier 2015, p. D3). Moreover, it demonstrates that while Beyoncé has reached the stratosphere of artistic achievement, she is also a regular person who struggles with being famous. Her celebrity, of course, accounts for the documentary’s popularity. Quoting The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone reported that the film’s TV premier garnered 1.8 million viewers. (‘Beyoncé Documentary…’ 2013). ­Nevertheless, a more commercially produced film than Sherman’s March and Tender Fictions, Beyoncé’s film betrays a similar dissonance between the ‘Eye’ and the ‘I.’ The film opens with a tracking shot of her home in an upscale neighborhood with trees and manicured lawns, interspersed with home video of Beyoncé and her sister as children playing, with the performer in ­Beyoncé already evident. In voiceover, Beyoncé immediately establishes autobiographical authority. Nostalgically recalling childhood summers, she quickly turns the focus to her father: ‘my dad knew that I needed his approval’ and ‘pushed me’ and ‘didn’t give it to me, which only served to make Beyoncé ‘better and stronger.’ This statement borders on a non sequitur given the opening shots of her idyllic, suburban childhood, but it sets the stage for Beyoncé’s autobiographical project and evolving ­identity, from ambitious young woman eager to please her taskmaster father to self-driven, reflective woman. According to theorist John Paul Eakin, as Colin Harrison reminds us that, the ‘self’ in contemporary autobiography is not so much a discrete entity but ‘more… a kind of awareness in process’ (2010, p. 54). To a lesser degree than McElwee’s and ­Hammer’s self-reflexive autobiographical films, Beyoncé’s film acknowledges a ‘self’ ‘in process,’ while asserting her essentially driven nature. Following the opening sequence, the camera cuts to a long shot of Beyoncé, nestled on a white couch and holding a pillow, with sunlight streaming through the window. The mise-en-scène suggesting she is at home in herself, her work, and her space. A close-up finds her in minimal makeup, presented not as glamorous, gorgeous star, but an ordinary human being. Speaking with the interviewer in a confiding, casual voice, Beyoncé attempts to showcase her authenticity. Throughout however, she is in full command of the scene, the interview, the interviewer, her image, and the film. In a subsequent behind-the-shoulder eye-level shot of Beyoncé, partially revealing the inconsequential interviewer, she confides that, having terminated her father’s management of her career, she is ‘learning not to be so… critical of’ herself. Beyoncé then sets up the film narrative as a kind of bildungsroman, by which she traces her development

134  Kathleen J. Waites from daddy’s little girl, who made it big in the music industry as the front-woman of the R & B group Destiny’s Child under Matthew Knowles’ expert management, to a more successful self-managing solo artist. ­Beyoncé is a product of an era defined by social media. She is a megawatt African American female pop star – a diva with a thirdwave feminist twist that celebrates her sexuality and independence. Jody Rosen observes that ­B eyoncé learned the ‘art of image-making and image-­management’ from her father, a ‘dogged tutor’ (2013). Speaking of ­Beyoncé’s inclusion in ‘The 2013 Time 100’ most influential people in the world, screenwriter-producer-director Baz Luhrmann observes: She’s gone… beyond being a pop-cultural icon. When Beyoncé does an album… it’s an event, and it’s broadly influential. Right now, she is the heir-apparent diva of the USA – the reigning national voice. (2013) Beyoncé’s autobiographical rendering is a self-conscious assertion of independence, from her father as well as from the double-edged sword of fame. ‘But I am a human being,’ she protests in voiceover, while on the screen we see a bird’s-eye shot of her being whisked away from an arena to the safety of her waiting limousine. Here, as elsewhere in the film, hordes of fans descend upon their idol who is just ‘a human being,’ or so Beyoncé asserts, failing to acknowledge how the iconography of the scene suggests otherwise. Although the film includes clips of highly produced footage of B ­ eyoncé’s celebrated performances, including the 2011 Billboard Music Awards ‘Run the World (Girls)’ performance, it supports her claim to a ‘human’ identity by relying mostly on unpolished home video footage and grainy smartphone and laptop computer video. She treats her laptop like a diary, as McElwee does with his video camera. Functioning as confidante, it attests to the most ‘real’ and intimate moments in Beyoncé’s private life. For example, her laptop camera captures a profile of her pregnant belly in her bathroom mirror, and she confides her excitement about her first pregnancy while relaxing in her darkened bedroom. In another scene on a whirling helicopter at night, she scrolls through her phone while husband Jay-Z sits across gazing out the window at the glittering city below. They appear to be a tired, disconnected married couple rather than the reigning pop king and queen. Later, Beyoncé uses her laptop to reflect on the painful miscarriage following the Billboard show, using the experience to illustrate the difficulty of contending with the public’s perception of celebrities’ lives as perfect. While there is no question that such moments as the loss of a child are extremely painful and celebrities do lead private lives, her documemoir does little to support this. As the film title suggests, her life is more dream than reality and her star image so dominant that it displaces the real in favor of the ‘dream’ lived largely on stage and in the imagination of the public. Commenting on popular culture, Baudrillard explains: ‘Reality

The ‘I’ and the ‘Eye’  135 itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatilized…’ (1988, p. 145). Through her performances, Beyoncé has carefully designed and marketed her hyper-real image, while simultaneously pleading for normalcy and privacy. In one scene, she complains about attention to Nina ­Simone’s private life and people’s ‘addiction to images’ while neglecting the singer’s art or voice, but she fails to acknowledge her responsibility for creating and feeding her own larger-than-life image, and in what ways she has become more image than real. If autobiographical documentaries are ‘preoccupied not with telling a life story but with conveying perception itself’ (Hampl 1996, p. 57), then Beyoncé’s documentary demonstrates that she perceives her life through a camera lens, finding a magnified image of herself at the other end. The story the ‘I’ proposes to tell of her ‘private’ self then, is challenged by another one that the ‘Eye’ detects, as illustrated in the scene at Columbia Records. Having just unveiled her newest album, 4, to the adulation of her producers, an exhilarated Beyoncé prances from the meeting and walks down a hallway, whose walls are peppered with framed photos of other successful recording artists. Ecstatic at her album’s reception, she pauses, and the camera zooms in for a low-angle medium shot, emphasizing her significance. Beyoncé smiles broadly, telling us in voiceover that she feels ‘disoriented’ with happiness. On the right side of the frame, we see a photo of Adele from the cover of her mega-hit album 21. The iconography here is telling for two reasons: It certifies Beyoncé’s assertion of her iconic status in the pantheon of performance super artist-stars, erasing any claims to an ordinary life, while simultaneously making an unwitting comparison to an artist celebrated for her realness and authenticity. The contrast is glaring, since Adele prioritizes her private life over her star-image and career. The Washington Post’s Soraya Nadia McDonald opines that Adele is ‘a person first, not a brand’ (2015). Later, depicted in long shot on a sailboat, with sunlight streaming over her and glinting on the surface of the crystal blue Caribbean water, Beyoncé chirps, ‘life is perfect.’ For this star ‘brand,’ life indeed, is but a dream.

Conclusion Telling one’s life is a bold and hazardous enterprise, at once a leap of hubris and of faith. All genres of autobiography put forth an identity at great risk, inviting the audience not only to ‘see’ and judge this self but also to identify with the seeing self. The camera is the instrument through which these three culturally divergent memoirists propose to tell their distinctive stories-selves, and they share another commonality: The documentary method intensifies their risk since the camera, too, has a mind/Eye of its own, freeing viewers to see beyond the telling ‘I,’ and from a perspective that complicates and mediates the reality presented.

136  Kathleen J. Waites

References Batchelor, B. 2009, The 2000s: American popular culture through history, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, pp. xviii–xxii. Baudrillard, J. 1988, ‘Symbolic exchange and death’, in M. Poster (trans.), M. Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: selected writings, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, pp. 119–48. ‘Beyoncé documentary earns record ratings for HBO’ 2013, Rolling Stone February 13. viewed 28 November 2016, www.rollingstone.com/music/news/ beyonce-documentary-earns-record-ratings-for-hbo-20130220. Couser, G. T. 2012, Memoir: an introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford. deCordova, R. 1991, ‘The Emergence of the star system in America’, in C. Gledhill (ed.), Stardom: industry of desire, Routledge, New York. pp. 17–30. Eakin, J. P. 2016, ‘What are we reading when we read autobiography?’, in A. Chamsky & E. Hinchpin (eds.), The Routledge Autobiography Studies Reader, Routledge Press, New York, pp. 214–21. Egan, S. 1999, Mirror Talk: genres of crisis in contemporary autobiography, Routledge Press, New York. Hammer, B. 2010, ‘Tender fictions’, in Hammer: making movies out of sex and life, The Feminist Press, New York City, pp. 241–46. Hampl, P. 1996, ‘Memory’s movies’, in C. Warren (ed.), Beyond Documentary: essays on non-fiction film, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, pp. 51–77. Harrison, C. 2010, American Culture in the 1990s, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Hustvedt, S. 2014, The Blazing World: a novel, Simon and Schuster, New York. Kleinhans, C. 2007, ‘Barbara Hammer: lyrics and history’, in R. Blaetz (ed.), Women’s Experimental Cinema, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, pp. 167–87. Lane, J. 2002, The Autobiographical Documentary in America. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. Le Jeune, P. 1989, On Autobiography, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 52, trans. K. Leary, J. P. Eakin (ed.), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 3–30; 119–37. Life Is But a Dream 2013, DVD, Beyoncé, ICM Partners & Parkwood Entertainment U.S.A. Luhrmann, B. 2013. ‘Beyonce: the 2013 Time 100.’ Time.com, viewed 28 ­November 2016, http://time100.time.com/2013/04/18/time-100/slide/beyonce/. MacDonald, S. 1988, ‘Southern exposure: an interview with Ross McElwee’, Film Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 13–23. McDonald, S. N. 2015, ‘How Adele gets away with defying every rule of pop music domination’, Washington Post, October 28, viewed 1 December 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2015/10/27/ how-adele-gets-away-with-defying-every-rule-of-pop-music-domination/?utm_ term=.7acf2bbedac0. Morris, G. 1996, ‘Tender fictions: “Barbara Hammer’s truth club”, Bright Lights Film Journal, 1 September, viewed 4 August 2016, pp. 2–4, http: http://brightlightsfilm.com/tender-fictions-barbara-hammers-truth-club/#. WY3gmq2ZOgQ

The ‘I’ and the ‘Eye’  137 Rosen, J. 2013, ‘Her highness’, New Yorker February 20, viewed 29 November 2016, www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/her-highness. Ruby, J. 1977, ‘The image mirrored: reflexivity and the documentary film’, Journal of the University Film Association, vol. 29, no. 4, pp. 3–11. Schneier, M. 2015, ‘Beyoncé is seen but not heard’, New York Times August 19. p. D3, 28 November 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/20/fashion/ beyonce-is-seen-but-not-heard.html Sherman’s March 1985, motion picture, Ross McElwee, First Run Features U.S.A. Smith, S. & J. Watson 2010, Reading Autobiography: a guide for interpreting life narratives. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Tender Fictions 1996, DVD, Barbara Hammer U.S.A. Thompson, G. 2007, American Culture in the 1980s. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Weisburg, J. 2013, ‘Hiding behind the camera’, New Yorker, February 12, viewed 28 August 2016, pp. 1–6, www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/ hiding-behind-the-camera.

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Section III

Sites

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9 Eco-Memoir Protecting, Restoring, and Repairing Memory and Environment Jessica White In the southwestern corner of Australia, bordered by ocean and arid land, lies an island-like area, the South West Australian Floristic R ­ egion (SWAFR). Canvassing some 300,000 kilometers, it is old, weathered, and nutrient-deficient, and yet is home to an incredible diversity of species. In 2000, it was listed among twenty-five global biodiversity hotspots, areas listed for conservation because they are biologically rich and yet also under threat (Myers 1990). Scientists are undertaking important work to draw attention to the diversity of this region and in the last few decades they have made remarkable leaps forward in the discovery, collection, and description of new plant species in the region (Hopper & Gioia 2004, p. 623). However, the area is jeopardized by its exposure to European land-use practices such as land clearing and is suffering from habitat loss and fragmentation, invasive weeds, and salinity. The region now has more species of threatened plants than other Australian states and most countries of the world (Hopper & Gioia 2004, p, 640). In consequence, as noted by Professor Stephen Hopper, former director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in England and now Chair of Biodiversity at The University of Western Australia, and Paul Gioia of the Western Australian Herbarium, ‘Fundamental changes in attitudes toward land use and the intrinsic value of plant life are needed to go hand in hand with a commitment to protect, repair, and restore native vegetation in the face of uncertainty’ (2004, p. 644). Science plays a critical role in illuminating environmental impacts through quantifiable measurements. Other means of imparting information, such as memoir, also play an important part in conveying the importance of our natural world. Where data shows a decline in species, or an increase in salinity, so too do a writer’s memories convey how a ­country is changing. This chapter examines Tim Winton’s My Island Home (2015) and Kim Scott and Hazel Brown’s Kayang and Me (2005). By comparing work by one non-Indigenous Australian and one I­ ndigenous Australian, this chapter explores how the rendering of memory can express the loss of an environment and also, crucially, its recovery.

142  Jessica White

Memory and Materiality Writers, like the canary in the coalmine, have begun to express anxieties about extinction, climate change, and the pressure of swiftly growing human populations. In fiction this has coalesced into a genre known as ‘cli-fi,’ or climate change fiction, a term first used by Dan Bloom in 2008 (Holmes 2014). Life writing, too, has seen a dramatic increase in the autobiographical expressions of the human self’s interaction with its environment. Micah Edlich indicates that this corpus of writing is too large to contain within a neat, singular definition, but ventures the term ‘ecobiography’ by way of a loose categorization (2011, p. 932). As Edlich notes, the term was first referenced by Cecilia Konchar and Philip Snyder in 1996 in an essay which compares the expression of self and nature in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991). Farr and Snyder describe ecobiography as ‘a life-story constructed according to a pattern divined internally through the Self’s interaction with the external environment, especially Nature, the multiple exchanges of which (re)present a kind of ecosystem of the Self’ (1996, p. 198). In these life stories ‘it is impossible to tell where the Self ends and Nature begins or where Nature ends and the Self begins: ego and eco are inextricably intertwined’ (1996, p. 203). In ­Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson outline a number of ways in which ecobiography has been deployed, from describing a place of retreat in which a new self might be developed, to creating manifestos of caring for our environment, to contemplating places of belonging. Significantly, many ecobiographies also detail Indigenous people’s intertwining with their environments, offering an alternative to national narratives of colonization (Smith and Watson 2010, pp. 160–1). Despite mounting critical attention to these renditions of self and environment, an account of the role which memory plays in shaping such texts has been largely overlooked. As there is neither a category nor definition for the term ‘eco-memoir,’ an exploration of what this form encompasses is timely. As Smith and Watson relate, the term ‘memoir’ derives from the French word for memory, mémoire. Traditionally, the mode was understood as ‘recollections by the publicly prominent who chronicled their social accomplishments’ (2010, p. 3). It often dwelled upon ‘one moment or period of experience rather than an entire life span and offered reflections on its significance for the writer’s previous status of self-understanding’ (Smith & Watson 2010, p. 3). Contemporary expressions of memoir retain this focus on interconnected experiences of a life (Smith & Watson 2010, p. 275) but are also self-referential in a literary way, yoking ‘the author’s standing as a professional writer with the work’s status as an aesthetic object’ (Smith & Watson, p. 3). An eco-memoir represents the literary expression of the interlacing of memory and the natural environment.

Eco-Memoir  143 Articulations of such a form are sparse. In Australia, works which might be categorized as eco-memoir are Tim Winton’s Island Home (2015) and Mark Tredinnick’s The Blue Plateau (2009). Both texts are subtitled A Landscape Memoir. Saskia Beudel’s A Country in Mind: Memoir with Landscape (2013), describes her walking journeys following her father’s death, predominantly to the ochre gorges of central Australia. In 1998, American nature writer Barry Lopez mused on how hands and houses could prompt recollections of one’s environment in About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory. A decade later, his compatriot Jerry Wilson published Waiting for Coyote’s Call: An Eco-Memoir from the Missouri River Bluff (2008) which chronicles the writer’s efforts to live sustainably on 160 acres of prairie and woodland near the Missouri River. As the form is still gaining traction, critical attention to it is somewhat scant. Jessica Ballantine examines Tredinnick’s notions of belonging for non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians in The Blue Plateau by using a framework of cognitive and non-cognitive ways of perceiving (that is, the framing of a landscape versus existing in it). Ecocritic Tom Lynch presented early research on Waiting for Coyote’s Call in 2016, although he did not address how eco-memoir’s focus on memory shapes or inflects this work, focusing instead on the ecopoetics of the text. He cites Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) as early versions of eco-memoir, but does not explicitly state how they might be read as examples of the form. Diane Freedman, in her essay ‘Maternal Memoir as Eco-memoir,’ focuses upon the ‘ecology of the womb’ in Sandra ­Steingraber’s Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood (2001), Lauren Slater’s Love Works Like This (2002), and Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance (1995). These writers contemplate how external factors such as chemicals from antidepressants can affect their unborn children. The concept of an ecology of the womb is a neat metaphor for the way in which environment shapes our selves even before we are born. ‘Environment’ stems from the French word environnement, meaning the ­‘action of surrounding something’ (Oxford English Dictionary 2017). We are surrounded by our mother’s material body, and memory is ­‘always implicated in materiality, whether it be the materiality of sound, stone, text, garment, integrated circuits and circuit boards, or the materiality of our very bodies – the synapses and electrons of our brains and our nervous systems’ (Smith & Watson 2010, p. 27). Yet we are also surrounded by our cultural body, of memories which are imparted to us through storytelling. Astrid Erll explains, ‘no memory is ever purely individual, but always inherently shaped by collective contexts. From the people we live with and from the media we use, we acquire schemata which help us recall the past and encode new experience’ (2008, p. 5). When it comes to memory and environment, memories are shaped not only by sensory input from that world, but also by a culture’s attitude to nature.

144  Jessica White

Transplanted Memory In Australia, Tim Winton writes, ‘Geography trumps all…Everything we do in this country is still overborne and underwritten by the seething tumult of nature’ (2015, p. 17). Themes of place pervade his 28 works of fiction and nonfiction. His memoir Island Home (2015) focuses explicitly upon the intertwining of the natural world with different stages of his life. The book is structured in pairs of essays, the first narrating an encounter in a particular time and place, and the second opening up to muse more generally on the ideas presented in the first. ‘Northam, 1995’ recounts Winton’s flight with aerial photographer Richard Woldendorp. The paired essay ‘The downward view’ meditates upon Winton’s first flight in an airplane at age 21 and his thoughts on the aerial view as a means of commodification, as well as a new way of observing and comprehending ecosystems. The effect of this structure is the extrapolation of specific, individual memories to a wider, often national context. The pairing of the first two essays in the volume situate Winton as a non-Indigenous Australian. The opening piece, ‘County Offaly, 1988,’ describes an environment that is identifiably British, with references to a stile, hedge, drystone walls, and a cottage with a ‘waiting fire’ (2015, p. 3). Inside this cottage are ‘snapshots of home pinned to the wall. All the sun-creased faces of friends and family. Daggy hats and bare chests. Dogs in utes. The endless clear space behind people, the towering skies and open horizons’ (2015, p. 4). These images contrast with the ‘[b]lack sky down around our ears’ (2015, p. 3) which Winton and his son negotiate as they make their way to the cottage with the fire, signaling Winton’s home as the place with its vastly different qualities of light and space. In the essay twinned with this, ‘The island seen and felt,’ Winton returns thematically to this Australian home and dwells upon how his provenance from ‘the world’s largest island’ (2015, p. 9) has shaped his sensory palette, imagination, and expectations (2015, p. 10). In Europe he finds it difficult to adjust to new scales, ‘constantly and instinctively searching for distances that were unavailable, measuring space and coming up short’ (2015, p. 12), and he is disturbed by ‘the inescapable mark of culture and technology’ (2015, p. 12) on landforms. Winton’s subjectivity has been formed by his landscape of Western Australia: Space was my primary inheritance. I was formed by gaps, nurtured in the long pauses between people. I’m part of a thin and porous human culture through which the land slants in, seen or felt, at every angle: for each mechanical noise, five natural sounds; for every built structure a landform twice as large and twenty times as complex. And over it all, an impossibly open sky, dwarfing everything. (2015, p. 18)

Eco-Memoir  145 Nature multiplies in sound, size, and space, seeping through culture and influencing its inhabitants. Winton’s passage echoes Smith and Watson, who write that ‘life narrative inextricably links memory, subjectivity and the materiality of the body’ (2010, p. 49), for memory can only be recovered by a somatic body, and memory itself is shaped by the way this body ‘perceives and internalises the images, sensations and experiences of the external world’ (2010, p. 49). Winton feels uncomfortable in Britain because his subjectivity has been formed in one place, and he finds it difficult to adjust to another. Yet, while in his first essay he writes from the home of his Kentish and Irish forbears and claims the island continent of Australia as his home, by opening his volume with Britain he signals the indelible print of Western culture upon his consciousness. This is evident in his use of the term ‘landscape’ to describe his environment. Originating from the Dutch word landschap, it signified ‘a unit of human occupation, indeed a jurisdiction, as much as anything that might be a pleasing object of depiction’ (Schama 1995, p. 10). The first practical advice, in book form, of how to create a landskip (the English version of the word), came from Henry Peacham in the 17th century in his drawing manual Graphice and his book of emblems Minerva Britannia (Schama 1995, p. 10). The latter invested the landscape with symbolism, and country life was perceived as an arcadia, counterposed to the ills of the city (Schama 1995, p. 11). Landscape became an image that was designed and framed. As Schama writes, ‘it is culture, convention and cognition that makes that design; that invests a retinal impression with the quality we experience as beauty’ (1995, p. 12). It takes time to acquire this perception or manner of framing, as it takes time to learn any aspect of culture. In his memoir, Winton’s memories of his boyhood have little sense of his seeing the environment as an object, for he is indivisible from it. Children, Winton relates, are more connected to their environment than they are as adults: When I watch my infant granddaughter as she chants quietly in the mottled shade of a melaleuca and reaches for the purple-pink blossoms as if she’s conjured them that very moment, I remember the fugue-like afternoons I spent staring at water, when the ripples across the shallows were private enough to be brain waves or respiration. (2015, p. 60) The patterns of nature become the patterns of the mind, while the child’s chanting suggests an unconscious rhythm present in all things, both human and non-human. This intuitive absorption of nature becomes more intellectual when Winton is a teenager. He writes, ‘At thirteen or fourteen I had only the fuzziest apprehension of the natural world, but this is where my reverence for it began’ (2015, p. 76). It started with surfing, which involves

146  Jessica White hours of waiting ‘for the next set, for the wind to change or the tide to turn’ (2015, p. 75). In this time, Winton had ‘thousands of hours in which to notice things around me’ (2015, p. 75), and he observes how beaches, seashores, creeks, coastal heaths, and forests are all linked: ‘Forefront and backdrop, wave and shore, tree and stone it was all network and linking’ (2015, p. 75). At this time, the teenage Winton felt himself to be part of this ecosystem in which ‘surf was old energy transformed. And so were granite monoliths or karri trees. Everything I saw was an unfinished and perpetually open-ended process’ (2015, p. 76). As the adult writer creating this memoir, Winton uses words to frame what he sees, and his language carries not only his continuing connection to nature, but also the imprint of his cultural memory. Landscape, as Schama explains, ‘is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as layers of rock’ (1995, p. 7). It is a tradition ‘built from a rich deposit of myths, memories, and obsessions’ (1995, p. 14). Winton has inherited this tradition, as he writes, ‘Colonial stigma doesn’t evaporate overnight, especially while we keep finding new ways to reproduce it, and perhaps it’s deeper in our communal psyche than I care to think’ (2015, p. 139). He describes his forbears’ fear of the bush and how they envisioned it as Gothic or grotesque. Marcus Clarke described the ‘dominant note of Australian Scenery’ as a ‘weird melancholy’ (1983, p. 3) akin to that found in the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, who dwelled upon the subject of terror. Winton echoes this terror when he describes the apprehensive faces of his forebears, who in photographs ‘narrow their eyes defensively at the camera’ (2015, p. 142). Their melancholy came not only from a fear of the strangeness and power of their environment, but also an awareness of the ‘darker legacies of settlement’ (2015, p. 141), when Indigenous Australians were killed for their land. These memories, Winton muses, inflected what they saw: Consider the colloquial terms for two plants – ‘man fern’ for Dicksonia Antarctica and ‘blackboy’ for Xanthorrhoea preissii. Both are compact and upright and grow commonly in groups. In a lightly ­populated – ­indeed, as it frequently would have been, a d ­ ep­opulated – landscape, the human eye can’t help but see likenesses and the mind draws on a well of communal memory. (2015, p. 141) Kim Scott, in Kayang and Me (2005), relates an incident from the early days of Swan River (now Perth) which captures this precisely: One diarist records two men wrestling a tree a little way from the track he was walking along. Red-faced, panting, they were trying to tear it from the ground, and when the diarist asked what was going on, they told him that they walked past this same spot every day,

Eco-Memoir  147 and every day the tree spooked them. Every day they mistook it for a native, one of the blacks, watching them, about to attack. (pp. 198–9) These two men contribute to the communal memory of the bush as a punitive place, and this carries through in Winton’s writing some two centuries later: To stand in a tingle forest in even a moderate breeze is to experience a force no research can prepare you for. With their giant, fire-­hollowed buttresses and restless crowns, these trees creak with enough pent-up energy to make your flesh crawl … Whether you’re at war with them or you come in peace, trees can be genuinely malevolent presences. In a high wind they’re dangerous and at dusk they’re untrustworthy. It’s not just when they’re spitting embers that they seem carnivorous. The fires of yesteryear have left them riven with gaping, grinding mouths that can snap shut and bring down the night sky in a moment. (2015, p. 144) The tingle trees to which Winton refers (Rate’s tingle, Eucalyptus brevistylis; Red tingle, Eucalyptus jacksonii; and Yellow tingle, Eucalyptus guilfoylei) grow in cool, wet forests between Walpole and Denmark and are part of the SWAFR. The adjectives which Winton uses – m ­ alevolence, dangerous, untrustworthy, carnivorous – imply that these trees are threatening to humans. Their huge, snapping mouths recall the ­G erman woods evoked by the Brothers Grimm, ‘a place of firs and beeches and monstrously deformed oaks, gnarled and twisted like Kolbe’s [a German etcher] devouring vegetable monsters’ (Schama 1995, p. 107), while their ability to make one’s flesh crawl evokes the Gothic. This suggestion of hostility has implications for the ecology of southwest Western Australia, in that when European colonists invaded the area, they set about cutting down trees to ‘tame’ the Great South Land, to echo the title of William Lines’ history of ecological devastation in Australia. They ­ estern European also cleared land because they were ‘wedded to the W belief in the relationship of property and land cultivation to civilisation’ (Morgan 2015, p. 17). Land was thought to be a source of wealth, and cultivation made the land valuable (Morgan 2015, p. 17). However, rainfall in southwest Western Australia has declined since the mid-1970s due to this land clearing (Kala, Lyons & Nair 2011, p. 123) as well as anthropogenic climate change (Morgan 2015, p. 181). Nor is this weakening of the environment’s resilience limited to southwest Western Australia. Bruce Pascoe, in his seminal work Dark Emu, about Indigenous Australians’ cultivation of their environment prior to colonization, observes how ‘The fertility encouraged by careful husbandry of the soil was destroyed in just a few seasons. The lush yam pastures of Victoria disappeared as soon as sheep grazed upon them’ (2014, p. 17).

148  Jessica White Although Winton’s memoir of his natural environment is complicated by the cultural memory of his forbears, his anxiety and messages about habitat loss are resonant. From being ‘neither particularly activist nor politically vocal during the first two decades of his career’ (Rooney 2009, p. 160), Winton’s stance on political matters shifted abruptly when he was galvanized to campaign against the building of an environmentally destructive resort on Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia. He has since become involved with a wide range of environmental issues, including anti-logging and anti-whaling (Rooney 2009, p. 162). Winton’s concern for the environment also manifests in his writing. Rooney reflects on his anti-whaling stance in his novel Shallows (1984), while Island Home reveals his anxiety about ecological loss. In the chapter ‘Settlers at the edge,’ for example, Winton describes with vivacity the swamp at the end of the street in which he grew up. ‘A great wild netherland that drew everything down to it eventually,’ it harbored kids rafting ‘from the upturned roofs of old cars,’ lost toddlers, long-necked turtles, dogs, bikes, and waterbirds that ‘rose from it in clouds’ (2015, pp. 41, 43). ‘Now,’ he writes as an adult, ‘that wildness is gone…Now it’s just a place of remnants and memories’ (2015, p. 43). This sense of loss differs to the beliefs of Indigenous Australians in the persistence of country as a living entity. Ethnographer Deborah Bird Rose writes that Indigenous Australians describe country: …in the same way they would talk about a person: they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel sorry for country and long for country. People say that country knows, hears smells, takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy […] country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness and a will towards life. (1996, p. 7) Although, as Bruce Pascoe (2014) and Bill Gammage (2011) have written, Indigenous Australians have a long and intimate history of taking care of and shaping country through fire, as the Dutch shaped their landschaps, they do not necessarily perceive their country as landscape. Rose explains in Nourishing Terrains, ‘Country must also be contrasted with landscape, as that term has developed in some arenas, for the term ‘landscape’ signals a distance between the place, feature, or monument and the person or society which considers its existence’ (1996, p. 10). With Winton, this process of distancing occurs as he grows from a boy embedded within his environment to a man whose perceptions are altered by his culture. The connection of Indigenous Australians to country has persisted for some 60,000 years, evolving into what Bill Gammage describes as ‘planned, precise, fine-grained, local caring’ (2011, p. 2). This long history has resulted in a deep cultural memory, conveyed through stories interwoven with land. Kim Scott and Hazel Brown’s Kayang and Me,

Eco-Memoir  149 with its description of a long connection to country that is disrupted – but not destroyed – by European colonization, is an apposite text to contemplate alongside Winton’s. It reveals that, although there has been much psychic, physical, and environmental loss over the past two centuries in southwest Western Australia, memories of how country was used and cherished before colonization offer the possibility of restoration, not only for the country itself, but also for Indigenous Australians.

Recovery and Repair Kim Scott is an award-winning novelist of the Noongar people, whose traditional home is in southwest Western Australia. His Indigenous father died in his thirties and Scott knew few members of his extended Indigenous family and little of his cultural heritage. When he sets out to remedy this, he connects with Kayang, or Aunty, Hazel Brown. Using his own and others’ tape recordings, he transcribes Kayang Hazel’s oral history. Into this, he weaves his own musings of how colonization has molded his place within his history, publishing the intertwined accounts as Kayang and Me. Scott and Brown’s work represents memory in a number of ways: It signals the long history of Noongar memory in the south west; it uses non-Indigenous Australians’ memories to challenge negative judgments of Noongars, demonstrating that they were people of curiosity, intelligence, and strategy; it details the dispossession of Noongars from their country to remind readers of the impact of colonization; and it adopts memoir’s characteristic of rendering private lives in a public realm to raise awareness of these issues. Each of these uses of memory is bound with Noongars’ relationship to country. Collaborative life writing is not unusual for Indigenous Australians. Life writing scholars Colmer and Whitlock note that Indigenous autobiography ‘often calls into question the assumption that to speak autobiography is to speak on behalf of an individual history rather than a collective one’ and that such autobiographies are often told ‘with a deeply felt sense of community’ (2005, p. 856). In Kayang and Me, the braided strands of autobiographical narrative inform one another, reflecting Scott’s growing closeness to his country, family, and community, and how their cultural memory slowly becomes his. Winton’s memoir opens with a confident stance, signaling his certainty about his lineage and what constitutes ‘home.’ So, too, does Kayang and Me, with Hazel Brown narrating where and when she and her parents were born. She describes her people’s association with the wilomin, or curlew. ‘Wilo, that’s us. We’re Wilomin. A long-legged people. Well, we weren’t all long-legged, but that’s what they called our people’ (2005, p. 10). Scott’s entrance into the narrative, however, gestures to his uncertainty about his history: ‘My name is Kim Scott. Not long-legged at all, I’m following even further behind Aunty Hazel’ (2005, p. 10).

150  Jessica White Scott describes his lack of knowledge about his Indigenous heritage and how, by running a cultural field trip for Noongar students, he was referred to Hazel Brown who, he came to learn, was his father’s cousin. During this search, and while writing his first novel Benang (1999), Scott also carried out research in historical archives. He found pieces of memory in records by early colonists, such as surveyor Septimus Roe’s descriptions of Indigenous guide Bobby Roberts which show how ‘Bobby Roberts is no dumb, silent presence in Roe’s journal’ (Scott & Brown 2005, p. 46). Rather, Roe invests Roberts with authority and knowledge of country. Scott quotes from Roe’s dairy: ‘Our native said good water was always procurable here by scratching a small hole in the sand’ (2005, p. 40). By highlighting interactions such as these in the archives, Scott works to shift entrenched cultural prejudice. Noongars are not a vanquished people, but are part of a ‘confident and generous’ (2005, p. 54) culture with a long memory of their environment which they drew upon to assist the colonists. This memory is highlighted from Kayang Hazel’s opening line, ‘I remember when they used to go hunting’ (2005, p. 7), indicating Kayang Hazel’s recollection of a time when she and her forbears interacted with the land using practices which had been ‘happening for thousands of years, down our way. That was always handed down’ (2005, p. 30). These practices, as Hopper and Gioia write, enabled Indigenous A ­ ustralians to live ‘sustainably with most biodiversity’ and to pass this on to future generations (2004, p. 641). However, they were disrupted in 1826 when Albany was annexed for the British Crown, and the rest of the state was slowly colonized. Noongars’ food sources were disturbed, their land taken from them and their people massacred. Much of Kayang Hazel’s oral memoir details the repercussions of this: the hardship she and her family faced in being forced to live on reserves, in not being permitted to access adequate medical services, nor to be paid well for the work they did. She also describes a massacre of Scott’s forbears at Cocanarup and the silence that surrounds the events because ‘they covered it up, you know, the white people covered it up and they didn’t want to tell other white people what went on, see’ (2005, p. 65). These memories are important because they relate to land: Indigenous Australians were dislocated and disparaged so that colonists could use their country. Scott writes: I read a newspaper headline: Link as timeless as land they love. What group of people do you think the article was about? ‘I wanted to bring my kids up in the bush and give them the same special upbringing I had.’ It’s what many Aboriginal people might also say in English, but it’s not Aboriginal people speaking, it’s pastoralists. They’re understandable sentiments, but in the context of the duration of pre-­colonial Indigenous presence, let alone that of our shared ­history – the land theft, dispossession, racist oppression, and the hysteria induced by Native Title – I hear the shrill calls of the desperately jolly swagman’s

Eco-Memoir  151 descendants; insecure thieves, wanting to really belong, yet only beginning to understand what that might mean. (2005, p. 200, italics are Scott’s) In this sense Kayang Hazel’s oral testimony is a memorial: It reminds non-Indigenous readers of a history they would prefer not to remember and on which they are often silent.

Forceful Memory In her 2016 Barry Andrews address, Melissa Lucashenko questioned how Winton, in Island Home, could fail to acknowledge the country’s prior inhabitants: ‘There’s no doubt that Winton loves the country he has grown up on, or that he has acted to protect it most notably in the case of Ningaloo Reef. But what does it mean to love the country if there is little or no explicit recognition of Aboriginal ownership?’ (Lucashenko 2016). The amnesia in Winton’s memoir speaks to a wider forgetting among non-Indigenous Australians, most notably articulated by the Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner in his 1968 Boyer lectures. Stanner uses the phrase the ‘great Australian silence’ (1969, p. 27) to describe his survey of texts that scarcely refer to Indigenous people and their culture. This silence is not mere absent-mindedness, but is ‘a simple forgetting of other possible views’ which has turned into ‘a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale’ (1969, p. 25). Despite his forgetting and elisions, however, Winton does recognize the importance of I­ ndigenous knowledge through his association with elder David Mowaljarli. His awareness of Indigenous Australians’ ­perspectives is also apparent through his representations of animism. The tingle trees through which he moves have energy and force, and in this his worldview approaches that of Indigenous Australians,’ as he writes, ‘The animated landscape of Aboriginal Australians is not fanciful. Landforms, plants and bodies of water possess the sort of power that’s palpable to even an heir of industrialized scientism like me’ (2015, p. 144). This tension between love and fear of the natural world stems, perhaps, from Winton’s childhood immersion in his environment and the European cultural memory which perceives this environment as a threat. It leads Lucashenko to describe her experience of reading Island Home as making her feel ‘a bit seasick’ (2016) and is also highlighted by scholar Brigid Rooney in Literary Activists: Winton’s wounded white male characters encounter otherness and spiritual healing in wild nature, wild shorelines. Submitting to, entranced by these landscapes, they are able to find themselves again. They establish themselves in place, with the briefest of nods to ­Aboriginal presence and claims. (2009, p. 180)

152  Jessica White Yet Winton’s allusion to the menace of the non-human world suggests a longer nod, an understanding that it is alive and has agency. Indigenous Australians recognize this agency, and they care for non-human forms as though they were kin. Rose writes, ‘like relations among kin, there are obligations of nurturance. People and country take care of each other’ (1996, p. 49). This is a very local relationship with particular people and groups caring for particular areas. In her essay ‘On History, Trees, and Ethical Proximity,’ Rose relates an incident on a station in the Northern Territory where a stand of white-barked eucalypts, designated Dreaming trees (that is, part of the creation story of the Indigenous people of that area) were cut down. The senior Indigenous man who was responsible for this part of the country and its inhabitants was devastated. Those trees were ‘his kin and his responsibility,’ and the deaths that he witnessed were the deaths of sentient beings who were close to him (1996, p. 161). In Kayang and Me, Kayang Hazel recounts how some Noongar parents were evicted from a mission and required to ‘live under the trees again. Well, there weren’t any trees, just bushes. I guarantee there wasn’t a tree at that reserve that was as high as a kitchen table. So really, they had no home’ (2005, p. 118). Scott also reflects on Noongars’ clearing of paddocks for the colonists: ‘It must have been a bitter experience to fell the trees of your country’ (2005, p. 121). Kayang Hazel returns to this later in the book, referring to her brother Stanley, who used to drink because he was troubled, especially as he was forced to bulldoze his home. Stanley says to Kayang Hazel, ‘I’m driving this effing machine over the ground I know we walked on. And girl, you should see it now. If you go back there…These trees where we used to sit under, where Mummy used to be pegging the skins out…we went right over that’ (Scott & Brown, 2015, p. 222). Scott further illuminates this pain through a comment in an interview with scholar Anne Brewster: ‘You’re the same, you and your country’ (Brewster 2012, p. 230). The harm done to country is harm done to self.

The Persistence of Language The bond between Indigenous people, country and memory can survive destruction. As Kayang Hazel says to Scott, ‘There’s a lot of our places that have been destroyed by white people, by farms and things like that. But the waterholes and some of our places are still there. And I always say, they can destroy our country but they can never destroy the memories of it’ (2005, p. 129). Scott finds this when he and his Uncle Lomas visit a crevice that is dry by day, but filled with fresh water by night: The sky was overcast and bruised, and gravel crunched under our feet as we walked away from the car until our footsteps became muffled and the trees whispered above our heads. ‘Nidja kwel maya wangin,’ I said. The sheoaks are talking. (2005, p. 221, Scott’s emphasis)

Eco-Memoir  153 The bruised sky echoes the damage done to the water source by a non-­ Indigenous surveyor who set explosives to make it a permanent source, but the susurration of trees, and Scott’s receptiveness to them, indicates that the land and his connection with it continues yet. This, too, is evident in Uncle Lomas’ comment that ‘They reckon it’s starting to work again. Come here night-time, and there’s good water like it a bit further up’ (Scott & Brown, 2005, p. 221). The consciousness of these trees, indicated through their speech, points to the blurring of human and non-human in Noongar stories about landforms. In a story of Kayang Hazel’s, an elderly Noongar is left with his brother’s hunting dogs, which he adds to his own pack. When he hunts, there are so many dogs that they eat their prey and don’t leave any for the Noongar. Fed up, he waits until the dogs are sleeping, then makes a ring of fire around them. To escape, the dogs jump over a cliff into the sea, and turn into seals. When the N ­ oongar climbs up the cliff to look, he too is transformed, but into stone. Kayang Hazel closes the story with a meditation on the shifting of the story’s selves: Dwoort baal kaat – dog his head. That’s how you say seal, unna? Head like a dog. Seals are supposed to be related to dogs. You ever hear them singing out? Like barking. When you look at a seal, their eyes are similar to a dog. But they got no feet, and they got flippers. (Scott 2005, pp. 216–7) When Scott hears this story and retells it, he becomes ‘one among a people’ because ‘it’s about recovery in both senses of the word: reclaiming a heritage, and restoring health’ (2005, p. 217). In these stories, silence gives way to sound, and Scott weaves himself back into an environment by learning the memories of a vibrant, conscious country. Significantly, these are carried to him through writing itself. One of the first stories which Kayang Hazel tells Scott after the account of the massacre of his forebears at Cocanarup is of a Noongar boy who might have been an orphan. Hearing a strange sound as he camps, he investigates and comes across a family djaanak, a mob of ‘devil women.’ They knock him out and the mother cooks him over a fire and eats him, leaving his bones. However, ‘[n]ear the mouth. Just like his tongue was moving, a few words circling around his mouth, his lips’ (2005, p. 235). Bit by bit he comes back to life, then walks off to find his family. This story of regeneration, Scott notes, lies in language itself, for language is tied to country. In his interview with Brewster, he explains: there is something really deep and conceptual in these Noongar terms. As there is in boodjar for earth; and boodjari also means

154  Jessica White ‘pregnant’. Ngangk is ‘sun’ as well as ‘mother’. Bily (or bilya in some dialects) is river and it’s also navel or umbilical chord. So there’s a lot more complexity in these concepts of connection and interrelationship than there is in the world-wide use of a term like ‘mother earth.’ There’s an interrelatedness … there’s the human form and other life forms latent in the landscape’. (Brewster 2012, p. 244) By learning Noongar through Kayang Hazel, the country enters Scott and enlarges his self. He writes ‘[s]ometimes it’s as if, learning to make the sounds, I remake myself from the inside out. As if, in making the sounds of the language of this land, I make myself an instrument of it’ (Scott and Brown 2005, p. 236). And in speaking Noongar, in articulating the depth of the words, the long memory of the land – its deep time – is made manifest.

Deep Time, Deep Memory No longer the preserve of kings, queens, and public notaries, ‘contemporary memoir has been a threshold genre in which some previously silent populations have been given voice for the first time’ (Couser 2012, p. 12). Through Scott and Brown’s rendition of their relationship with country, we hear it speak to us in a voice of deep time, or geologic time, which spans millions of years. Historian Tom Griffiths writes, ‘travelling in deep time serves various purposes for the historians of Australia’ (p. 23). He offers the ­example of William Lines, who uses deep time to emphasize the sharp, sudden destructiveness of Western industrialization and colonization in Taming the Great South Land (1991) and contrasts Lines with Tim Flannery, who stresses the common humanity of Indigenous and non-­Indigenous Australians in The Future Eaters (1994). If, as Griffiths observes, I­ ndigenous Australians at first ‘misjudged the resources of the continent then learned to adapt and were able to establish an impressive sustainable civilisation there, then new settlers might, over time, learn to do the same’ (2001, p. 23). In contemplating the ecological significance of the SWAFR, it is difficult not to identify with Lines and to shiver at the thought of the destruction of such biodiversity. Winton echoes this in his words, ‘it often seems that just as an ecosystem excites our interest and we start to notice its complexity, it’s already collapsing’ (2005, p. 112). At the same time, his expression of this ecological degradation through his writing mirrors his activism to raise awareness of conserving what we have. Scott and Brown’s memoir also offers hope. Their story illustrates the attempted genocide of Indigenous Australians and of their survival and recovery through the memory of their country. Of Kayang Hazel and

Eco-Memoir  155 her brother and sister, Scott writes, ‘I’d seen how the land ignited their memories, and how language and place and culture went together’ (2005, p. 248). In giving these memories literary expression in Kayang and Me, the authors demonstrate the restorative power of memoir and, through this, the potential to repair and protect our environment.

References Ballantine, J. 2014, ‘Belonging in the mountains: Mark Tredinnick’s The Blue Plateau’, New Scholar, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 127–40. Brewster, A. 2012, ‘Can you anchor a shimmering nation state via regional Indigenous roots?: Kim Scott talks to Anne Brewster about That Deadman Dance’, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 18, pp. 228–46. Beudel, S. 2013, A Country in Mind: memoir with landscape, UWA Publishing, Crawley. Clarke, M. 1983, Stories, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney. Colmer, J. & Whitlock, G. 2005, ‘Life writing (Australia)’, in E. Benson & L.  W. Conolly (eds.), Encyclopedia of Post-colonial Literatures in English, 2nd edn, Routledge, London, New York. Couser T. G. 2011, Memoir: an introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Edlich M. 2011, ‘Autobiographical ecocritical practices and academic environmental life writing: John Elder, Ian Marshall, and Catriona ­Mortimer-Sandilands’, Literature Compass, vol. 8, pp. 929–40. Erdrich, L. 1995, The Blue Jay’s Dance, HarperCollins, New York. Erll, A. 2008, ‘Cultural memory studies: an introduction’, in A. Erll (ed.), Cultural Memory Studies: an international and interdisciplinary handbook, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 1–18. Farr, C. K. & Snyder, P. A. 1996, ‘From Walden Pond to the Great Salt Lake: ecobiography and engendered species acts in Walden and Refuge’, in E. ­England & L. F. Anderson (eds.), Tending the Garden: essays on Mormon literature, Signature Books, Salt Lake City, UT, pp. 197–212. Flannery, T. F. 1994, The Future Eaters: an ecological history of the Australasian lands and people, Reed, Port Melbourne. Freedman, D. P. 2008, ‘Maternal memoir as eco-memoir’, ISLE, vol. 15 no. 2, pp. 47–58. Gammage, B. 2011, The Biggest Estate on Earth: how Aborigines made Australia, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest. Griffiths, T. 2001, ‘Deep time and Australian history’, History Today, Vol. 51, No. 11, pp. 20–25. Holmes, D. 2014, ‘“Cli-Fi”: could a literary genre help save the planet? Interview with Dan Bloom’, The Conversation, viewed 5th May 2017, http://­ heconversation.com/cli-fi-could-a-literary-genre-help-save-the-planet-23478. Hopper, S. D. & Gioia, P. 2004, ‘The Southwest Australian Floristic Region: evolution and conservation of a global hot spot of biodiversity’, Annual ­Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, vol. 35, pp. 623–50. Kala, J., Lyons, T. & Nair, U. 2011, ‘Numerical simulations of the impacts of land-cover change on cold fronts in south-west Western Australia’, Boundary Layer Meteorology, vol. 138, no. 1, pp. 121–38.

156  Jessica White Leopold, A. 1949, A Sand County Almanac: and sketches here and there, ­Oxford University Press, New York. Lines, W. J. 1991, Taming the Great South Land: a history of the conquest of nature in Australia, Allen and U ­ nwin, North ­Sydney. Lopez, B. 1998, About This Life: journeys on the threshold of memory, Knopf, New York. Lucashenko, M. 2016, ‘I pity the poor immigrant’, Barry Andrews Memorial Lecture presented at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference, Canberra, Australia, 6–9 July. Lynch, T. 2016, ‘Eco-memoir, belonging, and the settler-colonial poetics of place identity’, paper presented at the International Conference on Ecopoetics, University of Perpignan Via Domitia, Perpignan, 22–25 June. Morgan, R. A. 2015, Running Out? Water in Western Australia, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley. Myers, N. 1990, ‘The biodiversity challenge: expanded hot-spots analysis’, Environmentalist, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 243–56. Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Oxford, viewed 21st April 2017, www.oed.com. Pascoe, B. 2014, Dark Emu, Black Seeds: agriculture or accident?, Magabala Books, Broome. Rooney, B. 2009, Literary Activists: writer-intellectuals and Australian public life, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia. Rose, D. B. 2008, ‘On history, trees, and ethical proximity’, Postcolonial Studies, vol. 11, pp. 157–67. Rose, D. B. & Australian Heritage Commission, 1996, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness, Australian Heritage Commission, Canberra. Schama, S. 1995, Landscape and Memory, A. Knopf, New York. Scott, K. 1999, Benang: from the heart, Fremantle Arts Press, Fremantle. Scott, K. & Brown, H. 2005 Kayang and Me, Fremantle Arts Press, Fremantle. Slater, L. 2002, Love Works Like This: moving from one kind of life to another, Random, New York. Smith, S. & Watson, J. 2010, Reading Autobiography: a guide for interpreting life narratives, 2nd edn, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Stanner, W. E. H. 1969, After the Dreaming, the 1968 Boyer Lectures, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney.Steingraber, S. 2001, Having Faith: an ecologist’s journey to motherhood, Perseus, Cambridge. Tredinnick, M. 2009, The Blue Plateau: a landscape memoir, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia. Williams, T. 1991, Refuge: an unnatural history of family and place, Pantheon, New York. Wilson, J. 2008, Waiting for Coyote’s Call: an eco-memoir from the Missouri River Bluff, South Dakota Historical Society Press, Pierre. Winton T. 1984, Shallows, Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Winton T. 2015, Island Home: a landscape memoir, Hamish Hamilton, Melbourne.

10 ‘Stories’ Social Media and Ephemeral Narratives as Memoir Kylie Cardell, Kate Douglas, and Emma Maguire In late 2016, the photo-sharing social media app Instagram introduced ‘Stories,’ a function that enables users to post content with a twenty-four hour lifespan. The storyteller can add to their story during the day – structuring a chronological though fragmented snapshot of the day, and friends can view the story as many times as they like, but after twenty-­ four hours the story is automatically deleted. ‘Stories’ emulates the popular feature of rival social media platform Snapchat, on which the video tool, ‘My Story’ allows users the opportunity to share fragments across a ‘day-in-the-life’ for an anticipated readership and to add filters or text that further personalizes the images shared. More recently, Facebook messenger developed the ‘Day’ function, which has been described as the ‘third clone of Snapchat stories’ (Frier 2017).1 Each of these in-app functions amplifies the role of the autobiographical in connection to social media content – evoking traditions like self-­ portraiture, memoir, diary, and autobiography and foregrounding the first person as a privileged and default position for users on these platforms. What is particular about the kind of autobiographical narration and self-­ representation that social media apps like ‘Stories’ produce, however, is a centering of visual storytelling over written text (which is supplementary), and the transitory, ephemeral nature of these as acts of life documentation. As such, these locations for self-representation speak to the broadening and hybridized context of ‘life writing’ more generally and to a collapsing or evolution of this field in regard to its historical generic boundaries. G. Thomas Couser (2012), for example, observes that memoir is first and foremost a cultural practice, a way of living in the social world: [a]mong genres or art forms, memoir is perhaps uniquely embedded in widely shared human practices and fundamental cultural assumptions. Even in the age of memoir, relatively few people write their life stories, but in our culture nearly everyone is considered to have a story, and nearly everyone tells personal stories – lots of them … unlike most literary or artistic genres, memoir is a particular, highly developed form of a very broad-based human activity: the narration of our real lives. (p. 26)

158  Kylie Cardell et al. In this paper, we argue that the self-representative practices and rituals that individuals undertake over social media platforms like Instagram or Snapchat should also be understood as part of a broader cultural value for the narration of autobiographical experience. In seeing Instagram and Snapchat as locations where life narration and acts of memoir are both elicited and reimagined, we also attend to how the technological affordances of the platform intersect with various generic representations of self. For example, the original appeal of Instagram as a relatively static archive of photographic self-representation (and where the collection of photographs constructed over time accrues retrospective significance) is shifting. New features have opened up a possibility for the platform to function as a mode of asynchronous self-broadcast and to amplify behaviors of attention and ‘following’ already embedded in the site’s social structure (and business model). Features like Instagram ‘Stories’ seem to recall some of the early motivation behind online media such as webcams to ‘live stream’ the daily events and experiences of individuals online; here ephemerality is a value that also confers authenticity (Kitzmann 2015, p. 274). 2 Ultimately, the perceived ephemerality in the content produced offers to reward an audience who consume and follow content in ‘real-time’ and serially, over time. As autobiography, the affordances of this production, however, require that we reframe some of the value traditionally given to autobiography as a mode of self-­ documentation that requires and works from ‘traces of the self.’ What kind of self-document or ‘memoir’ is a disappearing Instagram story? The qualities of what Philippe Lejeune (2014, pp. 249–50) calls ‘speed and fusion’ appear to characterize this kind of contemporary autobiographical narration, in that the material here is hybrid (visual and textual and verbal) as well as diffuse and fragmented, characterizing both a method of production and a contemporary experience of autobiographical identity. New forms and technologies of autobiography remediate genres of self-representation. ‘Could it be,’ wonders Lejeune, ‘that our “accelerated” world has found the forms demanded by our new “narrative identities,” be they paper or electronic?’ (p. 257). Instagram users who share stories of their day or experience participate in social acts of narration that are also acts of memoir; they are produced through curation and selection in relation to memories and moments, and they are presented with a sense of audience. In this chapter, we ask what kind of act of autobiography a social media story is by looking at two examples of image-based social media apps. Who are producing these representations, and for what effect? How are we to account for and understand the centrality of visual representation to modes of online autobiography, and what is significant about this? We explore the significance of social media ‘stories’ alongside a discussion of how platforms like Instagram and Snapchat might be understood to function more generally as memoir, as self-conscious

‘Stories’  159 acts of autobiographical narration that seek to establish, indeed craft, the self in relation to others and to personal as well as collective memory. We consider too the significance of ephemerality and ‘deletion’ that emerges in relation to the fast-moving acts of memoir that constitute self-representation in this context, and we frame this practice through a particular demographic: by far, the primary content-creators on social media are young people (Lenhart et al. 2010). We think here about the ways in which young people draw on traditions of memoir and diary to offer new types of (transient, fast-changing) self-representations in digital spaces that by turns reimagine and subvert conventional understandings of these genres.

Memoir on Instagram Over the past ten years, social media modes have offered a plethora of different formats for self-representation from MySpace to blogs, Facebook and Twitter, to Instagram and Snapchat, and we argue that these representations and the texts they create should be considered a type of memoir for the digital age. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2010, p. 274) remind us that, historically, the memoir has been a mode of life narrative: ‘that situated the subject in a social environment, as either observer or participant,’ and that memoirs take ‘a segment of life, not its entirety… focussing on interconnected experiences.’ Thus, memoirs are about locating the narrator within a social context and historical moment, and this encourages audiences to ‘read’ the text within these contexts. Memoirs are also about communicating with others (via a life story) and noting the importance of relational lives (the ways in which the lives of others necessarily appear in an autobiographical narrative) in our own storytelling (Couser 2012, p. 20; Smith & Watson 2010, pp. 278–79). Memoir has long been considered one of the more experimental subgenres or methods of auto/biography, often challenging the limits of narrative, memory, subjectivity, selfhood, and the ‘I,’ as well as truth (Smith & Watson 2010, p. 275). Memoir genres have unsettled some of the traditional modes and subjects associated with autobiography. For instance, memoir has often been the life narrative practice chosen by marginal subjects (for instance, women, or non-Western writers) to write their lives into the public spheres (Gilmore 2001, p. 2; Smith & Watson 2010, pp. 3–4). So, then, it is possible that certain texts and practices we see emerging within social media might be usefully understood within larger shifts in cultural and literary traditions for self-representation. Social media platforms have been important sites for young people to construct and circulate stories about their everyday lives, and currently, Instagram and Snapchat seem to have the lion’s share of young ‘produsers’ in Western contexts (Bruns 2008). 3 What we focus on in

160  Kylie Cardell et al. this discussion is where the two modes might arguably offer something new and complementary to young life narrators. What is of interest to us here is how, for example, Instagram offers a medium to construct miniature life-narrative photographic projects or how Snapchat offers a more ephemeral method for life narrative production through its transient ‘snaps’ (the photograph that forms the basis of the conversation in Snapchat) and ‘stories’; Instagram has more recently tried to tap into the ephemeral by creating its own ‘stories’ function. So, we first consider the more stable traditions of Instagram and discuss the ways that young people have engaged in Instagram as a mode of life narrative in order to contextualize the rise and function of more ephemeral self-­representative modes like Snapchat. Writing for The New Yorker, Valeriya Safronova (2015) recently offered a summary of how Instagram has become a memoir practice for a generation of social media produsers: For a certain generation, Instagram has become a calling card, a life résumé of sorts: ‘This is me. This is my life. Jealous?’ A scroll through a typical feed is likely to reveal improbable images of just the right artisanal pizza, attractive couples drunk in love and eyebrows ‘on fleek,’ all captured in perfect light and enhanced with various editing tools. Life becomes a never-ending junior varsity ‘Vanity Fair’ shoot, and the pressure among Instagram’s regular users to present idealized images of themselves has only increased as celebrities have inundated the platform with their own envy-evoking posts. According to Safronova, 92 percent of US teenagers ages 13–17 go online daily; half of these use Instagram. Instagram is a storytelling medium: It engages users in acts of narration through selection and juxtaposition. For most users, it is also a nonfiction mode: Kris Fallon observes that there is a convention for Instagram content to be representative of an individual’s real lived experience, however selective or ‘filtered’ that representation then becomes within the highly-aestheticized space of the platform. Fallon (2014) observes both the usefulness of situating ­I nstagram into a history of photographic practice and the unique social context of the platform; for example, on Instagram: users see the work of others, adapt their own in direct or indirect response to it, and post images seen in turn by others. The result over time is that many of the images begin to take on a homogenized aesthetic, an effect only exacerbated by the inclusion and widespread use of the app’s filter function […] in Instagram, one expects the images to be manipulated (58)

‘Stories’  161 Aimée Morrison (2014, p. 119) uses the term ‘affordance,’ developed in ecological psychology and integrated into industrial design, to describe the effect of the platform infrastructure in ‘coaxing’ particular kinds of content and representations from users. In social media environments, this is apparent in ‘emerging cultural conventions as well as in the particular built site affordances.’ Thus the affordances of Instagram, which enable and even impel image manipulation, are not at odds with an expectation for autobiographical or real content, and this is important. Similarly, the speed of social media heightens the impression of ‘immediacy’; social media content has cachet as impromptu even when it is not. For example, Sophie Kleenman (2015) reports that Caroline Calloway recently gained media attention for her ‘Instagram memoir,’ an account delivered over time, as per the medium’s platform’s conventions, but that is curated from a pre-planned structure: Posts are ‘not delivered in real time, like most people’s; her Instagram life is roughly a year behind her actual life … Calloway is an aspiring memoirist, and her posts are intended to read like individual chapters.’ While Calloway’s project is overt as an act of self-conscious memoir-making, of personal branding, it is presented on the platform as a spontaneous narrative. Crystal Abidin and Mart Ots (2016, p. 155) have observed that the power of Instagram as a platform for celebrity and other ‘influencers’ means that a market value is attached to delivering content in highly covert ways, as real and natural, and so that it appears more authentic to audiences. Though influencer content is highly strategic, a perception that Instagram is characteristically a site of impromptu behavior remains strong and defines the culture of content sharing on the platform. Correspondingly, anxiety about the unforeseen consequences of online content also characterizes discourse about social media like Instagram. This is particularly visible in relation to subjects who are presumed to be more ‘impulsive’ in their online behavior – primarily, this concern is directed towards young people (Keenan 2008, pp. 37–50; Knefel 2015, p.  42). An ephemerality built into the affordances of technology like ‘Stories’ adds diversity to the Instagram affordances, but it is also positioned as desirable in a different way: Users who ‘regret’ a post can easily delete it, or they can wait for the time-limit to elapse. Either way, the story content is no longer public or available once twenty-four hours have passed. Social media content with a limited lifespan is converse to the interests of biographers or other archivists and to theories of self-­ representation that emphasize the primacy of documentation and trace in assessing and understanding acts of life narration (Arthur 2009; Cox 2008). But on Instagram, ephemerality is a value that supports the elicitation of autobiographical material and that rewards users who both follow and produce content in this way. In recent times, and despite stereotypes such as those described above, young Instagram users have come to use the app and its storying tools to

162  Kylie Cardell et al. perform and construct content that reflects an awareness of their publics and the potential implications of content sharing. For example, we are currently engaged in qualitative research on adolescent use of Instagram in the Australian context, and our preliminary observations are that many teenaged users adhere to cultural norms, patterns, and aesthetics for Instagram: you should only display six photos at a time (all other photographs should be deleted), or you should not have any photos older than six months on your feed. The internet is full of ‘tips’ for increasing your followers, or at least not annoying them. But perhaps more significantly, young people absorb the social media norms of their local cultures (friendship groups, schools, universities) which influence the sorts of life narratives they choose to share. Many young users, particularly young women, have two accounts: one for a larger public, friends and acquaintances – school friends, work friends, and extended ‘friends-offriends’ networks (the latter group is a very significant way in which young people build their social networks); and the variously called ‘Priv’ (private) accounts for a smaller group of close, trusted friends – usually fewer than 50. In a November 23, 2015, article for Australian news website News.com.au discussing the phenomenon, Vanessa Brown (2015) explains that, Created mainly by teenagers and young adults, Finstagrams are intimate platforms where the user posts images intended for specific friends only. They are locked accounts, so users are able to screen their followers. Priv accounts are colloquially referred to as ‘finsta’ (fake insta), ‘spam,’ ‘backwards,’ or ‘sass’ accounts. Such are used to ‘spam’ friends: to share a larger quantity of photographs than the other account with a (presumably) less judgmental public who will not be annoyed should you break the conventions of the moment on Instagram (for instance, posting too many photos, posting too many ‘throwback’ or old photographs). The photos on ‘priv’ accounts are often more spontaneous, showing everyday life. These are the photographs that did not make the cut for the more actively curated public Instagram page (‘What parents need to know about Finsta/Spam Accounts’ 2016).4 ‘Priv’ accounts are: ‘where you can post ugly selfies, private jokes, personal rants, pictures of outfits you’re genuinely seeking advice on, screenshots of funny family group texts, pictures of yourself in the middle of a good cry, that sort of thing, to a relatively sympathetic audience’ (‘What parents need to know about Finsta/Spam Accounts’ 2016). As commentators have noted, these socalled ‘fake’ Instagram accounts promise the opposite: a more everyday, less constructed version of a life narrative. Of course, we should approach such promises with skepticism (because life narrative is always constructed in light of the norms of the medium and the anticipated

‘Stories’  163 publics). But the act of creating and differentiating between two different life narrative texts made on the same social media platform is significant for what it reveals about life narrative as a practice and its perceived relationship to truth and reality. For instance, the Priv account seems, at least in some respects, to be a reaction against a dominant genre of Instagram: the perfect picture of an ideal life. The Priv marks a ‘hack’ against Instagram’s norms (ironically, one that the app has, in turn, embraced. Perhaps not surprisingly, Instagram has altered the app to allow for quick switching between accounts (Suverna 2016)). This is a strong example of the ways that young people are driving changes to self-representation apps. Having only a smaller number of followers (who are also friends) promises a more intimate interaction (not affected by online abuse or trolling) and is antithetical to the mainstream goal inherent within most social media pursuits: to build as big a ‘friend/ follower’ list as possible (Safronova 2015). Journalist Vanessa Brown (2015) muses: ‘In an age where 14 million Australians are on Facebook, 2.8 million on Twitter and over 5 million on Instagram, it’s hard to imagine who has the time or the energy for an additional account.’ But, it’s not about ‘time’ but inclination. Young people are more aware than ever of the varied means for shaping and sharing their stories and self image, and Instagram provides a means for sharing different types of self – different stories – different fragments from life for diverse audiences. Priv accounts are an example of how young people are using social media to construct different life stories for different audiences (and the medium responds positively, inevitably to the medium’s advantage; it is to Instagram’s benefit to offer such flexibility to users). Priv accounts seem to say, ‘there is no one account, no singular narrative that can adequately represent “me”; the story’s style, structure and subject changes in anticipation of who I am telling my story to.’ These texts (perhaps consciously, and sometimes unconsciously) reflect an awareness of the constructedness of the self and indeed the autobiographical ‘I’ – the different versions of the self that we might choose to project publically and the subject’s sense of themselves as ideologically interpolated (to borrow Smith and Watson’s (2010, p. 76) Althusserian reading). The narrators, to varying degrees, come to understand that any narratives they produce online are influenced by the various institutions, cultural values, and norms that the narrator has invested in (whether consciously or not) (Smith & Watson 2010, pp. 71–2). Priv accounts are, thus, an important example of the ways that young people’s social media use is testing the limits of self-representation in the digital age. It is highly likely that this is a trend that will be invisible within a year or two – replaced by a new practice; what this tells us is that there are effectively no limits to how we remember and share stories and memories in the digital age. Daniel Patterson notes how the Priv trend reflects young people’s moving away from adult-dominated social media

164  Kylie Cardell et al. platforms (like Facebook and Instagram) by becoming early-adopters of new social media apps or hacking others (Patterson 2016). The aim here is to create spaces in which to form and express identities. New modes of self-representation often have few rules or norms attached to them, or the norms are up for grabs. This is both exciting and concerning: exciting because of the possibility for new modes of self-representation and personal expression to emerge; concerning because of the potential for young people to be vulnerable in these contexts. This is the context that frames our discussion of Snapchat: a mode of communication and self-representation that builds upon the social media texts and behaviors for self-representation that we have observed so far. Young people seek to remake the self via social media and are doing so by testing the limits of social media genres in the context of self-representation.

Self-Deleting: Streaks, Stories, and Snapchat Instagram is a premier image-sharing social media platform, but it is not the only popular app that allows users to share photographs. Image messaging app Snapchat offers users the chance to drastically limit access to the images they choose to share, something that sites like Instagram (which, other than Stories also has profile pages and newsfeeds), does not. Snapchat began as an image messaging application with a difference. The intention was that users could take an automatically self-deleting picture that would disappear after twenty-four hours. Further, when opened, the image could only be viewed by the recipient for between one and ten seconds, a time limit being preset by the sender. Once the image was viewed it could not be ‘replayed’ (without modification of the app). This kind of self-destructing message was particularly suited to the prospect of exchanging sexually explicit content – users could enjoy sexting without worrying that the images they sent would be stored or circulated without their knowledge. Since the app’s release in 2011, it has also included a screenshot notification function, so that users will know if the person they send a photograph to ‘saves’ it by taking a screenshot on their mobile phone. This affordance purports to protect the ephemeral and intimate nature of image sharing in the app by discouraging behaviors that threaten to violate the promise of the self-deleting image and asking for user accountability. But the opportunity to send and receive fleeting images has been taken up for a much broader range of uses, and, in fact, the early adopters who drove Snapchat’s popularity were young people who used the app during school hours. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel explains that the app ‘gave [the students] the ability to pass visual notes during class – except, even better, the evidence vanished’ (Colao 2014, p. 2). The user base for the app has broadened, but it continues to be positioned as an app used predominantly by young people,

‘Stories’  165 and research does show a higher level of engagement by users under twenty-four (Ballve 2014; Statista, Inc. 2016). Privacy and audience management emerge as key factors in why young social media users have flocked to an app that allows them greater control over who sees which parts of their life narration. Youth and social media scholar danah boyd (2014, p. 56) shows that despite public discourse that pictures teens as radical online oversharers, young people desire and actively pursue privacy in digital spaces. Parents and adults are one group that teens seek to keep their online lives private from, but online bullying continues to limit the ways young people engage with social media (Brown 2016). It is also possible that some users are turned off by the ‘Big Brother’ effect of social media where every move is logged as data and sold to advertisers (Revanche 2017), although as Snapchat grows and changes, they too are using user surveillance technologies like location tracking to collect data to sell to advertisers (Carman 2017). However, young social media users are less likely to respond to corporate or parental surveillance by restricting or reducing their own engagement, but rather by responding to questions like ‘What do we want to show to whom? Who can see us? Who’s looking at us?’ and developing strategies of visibility and audience management (Tufekci 2007, p. 21). These are exactly the kinds of management options that Snapchat provides. In an app that leaves fewer traces, and where users have more control over who views the content they create, there is an escape (or at least the feeling of escape) from the corporate surveillance that permeates other social media platforms such as Facebook, and young people are empowered to manage their audience in a way that gives them privacy from parents and adults. The other factor that plays a part in young people’s enthusiastic uptake of the app is the ability it affords them to communicate and narrate their lives without the burden of the trace or the ‘archive.’ In their study of networked privacy among young people, Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd (2014, p. 1063) note that teenagers express anxieties about social media’s potential to preserve regrettable past (younger) selves. Sites like Facebook (via the Timeline and photo albums) and Instagram (via the profile page that collects and displays a user’s images in a grid) function as archives that store past iterations and images of self-narration that build up over time. Snapchat does not include a publically available storage site like this. Further, particularly in the case of Instagram, there is an impetus built into many social media platforms to present an attractive (or at least aesthetically considered) self-presentation, an impetus that Snapchat evades. Research suggests that Snapchat is a lowstakes form of social media in terms of self-representation, where users feel somewhat freed from the shackles of performance and judgment that act as pressure to the kinds of life narratives they circulate via other, more lasting, social media platforms. 5 In particular, Snapchat appears

166  Kylie Cardell et al. to be a space where users feel free to share trivial content or content that is not highly aestheticized: Because images are temporary, users may feel less accountable to various norms that govern online self-presentation (Bosker 2014; Roesner, Gill & Kohno 2014). Considering these observations, research needs to be done to consider how young people use Snapchat to evade particular groups (like adults and data collectors) and discourses (like the archived self, policing of ‘trivial’ content, and the ‘beautiful’ or ideal life). But there are also pressures associated with ephemeral media like Snapchat. A key difference between Instagram and Snapchat is how the images function. On Instagram, images are posts whereas on Snapchat images are messages. When users post an image on Instagram, it appears in two places: their profile page, which is organized, like a blog in reverse chronological order of posting; and the newsfeeds of their followers, a feed which mimics the Facebook newsfeed by assembling the latest content posted by accounts the user chooses to ‘follow.’ But, on Snapchat, images are messages that are available for, at the longest, twenty-four hours. A recent study on Snapchat use indicates that users perceive the content that they produce on the app as communicative rather than self-representational or as creative photo-sharing (Bayer et al. 2016, p. 967). Like other ‘everyday’ autobiographical forms, such as letters and diaries, users produce communication on Snapchat within a framework where certain social rituals have evolved or are dominant. Snapchat is understood as and largely functions as an aspect of daily life in this context (Bayer et al. 2016, pp. 966–7), and it is a potent site for relational self-storying. In a media landscape where image sharing is both ritualized and ubiquitous, the self-destructing message holds attention in a way that other more lasting media may not; it heightens the role of the recipient, who is under pressure to ‘view it or lose it,’ creating a context of urgency around the interpretation and reception of the image-message (Charteris, ­Gregory & Masters 2016, p. 3). Significantly, Snapchat developers have designed ways to increase the stakes of engagement by imposing rankings on each user’s list of contacts with the result that all relationships on Snapchat are not equal. The app measures user interaction and rewards frequent users with special emojis that symbolize particular kinds of relationships. For example, the Snapchat support page for ‘Friend Emojis’ explains that users are awarded a gold heart to indicate they are ‘best friends’ with another user – Snapchat will deem a user your ‘best friend’ when ‘you send the most Snaps to this Snapchatter, and they send the most Snaps to you too’ (Snapchat support, ‘Friend Emojis’). But there is also a smirking face to indicate when you send the most snaps to a particular person, but they send the most snaps to somebody else. The most compelling and controversial of these is the snapstreak award, symbolized by the flame emoji. A snapstreak is described as

‘Stories’  167 occurring when two users both send a snap to each other within a twenty-­four hour period for three consecutive days. The flame emoji remains next to your snapstreak friend’s name, along with a number corresponding to the number of consecutive days you have sent snaps to each other until one of you breaks the streak by failing to send a snap within twenty-­four hours. Users can have snapstreaks with multiple friends, and they often work hard at maintaining them. One Twitter user reports the lengths her students go to in order to avoid breaking their streaks: ‘Im taking highschoolers to camp this summer. they already have people lined to run their snap chats while we dont have service #snapstreaks’ ­(Twenhafel 2017). Psychologists are now warning parents about the stress that ‘tweens’ may be suffering as a result of trying to maintain too many streaks, while in a recent news media piece on snapstreaks, the BBC cites prominent children’s charity, the NSPCC, which reports receiving helpline calls from young people who are distressed because of terminated snapstreaks, which can cause tension in peer groups (Boleto 2017; Powell-Lunder 2017). In terms of autobiographical media, snapstreaks emerge as a gamification of life narrative technology. Perhaps the snapstreak is an example of a media corporation exploiting young users who are attracted to gamified social media. But it is also an example of how young people are driving developments in technology. The snapstreak reward, after all, elevates the elements of the app that young people found most appealing initially: transience; one-to-one private visual messaging; and impulsive  – or if not entirely impulsive, then at least low-stakes or low-effort – life narration. It will be interesting to see if or how young users hack and adapt elements of snapstreak to evade the regulatory function that it imposes on their use of the app, or whether they ultimately abandon it. As the app develops in response to the desires of its users, new features arise and disappear. One influential addition to Snapchat has been the ‘My Story’ function. Here, Snapchat users have the ability to serialize images or short videos to create a narrative. The function is described on Snapchat’s website: Stories are a fun way to keep up with friends. Each ‘Story’ is a compilation of Snaps that a friend has posted to their Story over the last 24 hours. Each Snap is a part of your Story for 24 hours (unless you delete it, of course!). You can view a Snapchatter’s Story as many times as you’d like before it is no longer available! (Snapchat Support, ‘View Stories’) This added feature moves towards a broadcast model of content exchange when compared to the previous version of the app, which relied chiefly on direct messages. With the addition of ‘Stories,’ there is now something resembling a ‘feed’ on the app. However, it is a list of

168  Kylie Cardell et al. temporarily available messages which functions as inbox rather than newsfeed – the user chooses to ‘open’ the messages they want to view from a list of those available. The key difference here is that a user adds a snap to her or his Story. There is a temptation to view this function as coaxing users away from autobiographical fragments and towards the production of narrative. Sometimes it is used this way. For example, prominent young celebrity and avid Snapchatter Kylie Jenner often creates long Stories that do string together as a narrative. For example, she often snaps herself getting ready for an event and then adds snaps from throughout the event featuring herself and other attendees including friends, her rapper boyfriend, and her famous family, the Kardashians. Even when individual snaps contained within a Story do not center on a single event or narrative thread, they are drawn together by the twenty-­ four-hour window, functioning as a series of glimpses into a Snapchat user’s life that necessarily reflects upon this period but may or may not have a sense of order or coherence within. In a recent BBC guide to Snapchat, Priscilla Ngethe explains, ‘You can share your whole day with the world. That’s the point of Snapchat’ (Cellan-Jones 2017). That social media heavyweights Facebook and Instagram have both added their own versions of Snapchat’s Stories function, which replicate Snapchat’s original premise for Stories (i.e. a series of images that self-delete after twenty-four hours), speaks to the impact of this recent development. In the past, Facebook and Instagram have centered on the model of the archive. The adoption of self-deleting images here points to a destabilization of existing norms of self-narration on social media. Snapchat’s (and now Instagram’s and Facebook’s) twenty-four-hour window encourages frequent engagement from its users – they must check in with the app every day to ensure they do not miss out on content. Impermanence is a currency here. This kind of self-narration might seem as if it offers freedom from surveillance, publicness, and the archival nature of other social media forums. But how free can you feel when you are compelled to log on each day to quell the anxiety of losing your streak or missing out on content with a tight expiration date? There are pressures here, too, that shape the practices of ‘ephemeral’ narrative on image sharing media platforms.

Conclusion: Future Directions Young people are engaging prolifically in forms of digital self-­representation. In doing so, they are communicating with their peers, and they are producing life narrative texts that are personal, relational, public, and private (sometimes blending all of these at once). In this chapter, we wanted to challenge some of the prevalent public discourse on young people’s engagement in social media – which is often perceived as coaxed, homogenous, and

‘Stories’  169 heavily disciplined by the technology. While we aren’t necessarily disputing such claims, we argue that some current practices also reveal how young people may be subverting the affordances of Instagram and Snapchat so that they are also constructing new means for self-representation that, in turn, influence the disciplinary potential of these apps. For example, our research asks that we consider the extent to which contemporary youth memoir practices might be inherently ‘anti’-life narrative (deleting old, embarrassing photographs on Instagram, the twenty-four-hour transience of life narrative ‘story’). What emerges from looking at young people’s use of Snapchat and Instagram is how their desires, adaptations, and patterns of use are key drivers of the development of technologies for self-narration. Much public discourse about young people and social media centers on the perception of young users as possessing a desire for media that allows them to broadcast their lives to as large an audience as possible, and to use this broad audience to grow a self-brand that accumulates likes, followers, subscribers, and – if they are very good at it – profit. In ­contrast, the rise of ephemeral media like Snapchat and its Stories function is driven by young people and their ‘hacking’ of older social networking sites. The result of such hacking is the emergence of sparse or blank public profiles as a kind of reticent self-presentation, with the real action occurring among smaller peer networks in the more private spaces of mobile apps. And what emerges as desirable is the self-­ deleting image that allows for a self in flux, a self that is not responsible to an archive of past selves, and one that evades potential embarrassment for a future self. Contemporary practices of self-representation on social media, particularly by young authors, can appear strikingly unsentimental and even anti-archival. There are fascinating implications here for the future of life narrative, or, for example, for the future methodology of cultural and ­social historians, or for archivists. Evolving practices of self-­representation by young users on social media are sites of active negotiation with culturally formed ideals of legacy and memory. For ­example, in the case studies we have explored in this chapter, the historical status of the photograph as evidence and testament, its documentary power, is subordinate to the social capital of the image as a form of ­currency within social groups and networks. The impulse to record that historians and scholars have long identified with acts of self-­ representation is not absent here, but its significance is reframed. On Snapchat or I­ nstagram, the value of the autobiographical image is lodged in its (however brief) circulation, and the value of trace and preservation that has so long been associated with practices of self-life writing is subordinated. That these practices are being led and shaped by young subjects, who are in dynamic tension with broader forces of commercialization and corporatization in online spaces, is clearly significant.

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Notes 1 Frier, ‘Facebook Messenger’s “Day” Becomes Third Clone of Snapchat Stories.’ 2 Kitzmann has observed that while the landscape and technology of online life writing may appear to have dramatically shifted, the motivation has not. He argues that, ultimately, ‘the status updates, the ‘friending/defriending,’ the sharing of links and stories, the uploading of images and videos, and the basic premise of near-constant connection are arguably continuations and enhancements as opposed to definitive breaks or revolutions. We are not really in new territory here.’ For Kitzmann, life narrative online is intrinsically social and even in disparate technological contexts. 3 Axel Bruns coined the term ‘produsers’ to explain and explore how the boundaries between consumers (or ‘users’) and producers has become blurred within online spaces. Internet users are commonly also content producers. 4 Tellingly, most of the available information about these accounts comes from web safety sites and articles promising to provide parents some insight into the secrets and subterfuge inherent in young people’s social media use, for example, The Guardian reports on ‘Finstagram’ in an article clearly aimed at parents of account holders as does the parenting website Kids Privacy in ‘What parents need to know about Finsta/Spam Accounts.’

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172  Kylie Cardell et al. Patterson, D. 2016. ‘What the finsta?! The darker world of teenagers and Instagram’, The Huffington Post, viewed 28 September, www.huffing tonpost.com/entry/what-the-finsta-the-darker-world-of-teenagers-and_us_ 57eb9e03e4b07f20daa0fefb. Powell-Lunder, J. 2017. ‘Caution: your tween may be stressing over snap streaks’, Psychology Today, viewed 26 March, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/letstalk-tween/201703/caution-your-tween-may-be-stressing-over-snap-streaks. Revanche, J. 2017. ‘I read zines to escape surveillance and clickbait. It’s the new teen rebellion’, The Guardian, viewed 13 January, www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2017/jan/13/i-read-zines-to-escape-surveillance-and-clickbaitits-the-new-teen-rebellion. Roesner, F., Gill, B. T. & Kohno, T. 2014. ‘Sex, lies, or kittens? Investigating the use of Snapchat’s self-destructing messages’, in N. Christin & R. Safavi-Naini, Financial Cryptography and Data Security: 18th international conference, Barbados, pp. 64–76. Safronova, V. 2015. ‘On fake Instagram, a chance to be real’, The New York Times, viewed 18 November, www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/fashion/instagram-finsta gram-fake-account.html?_r=0. Smith, S. & Watson, J. 2010. Reading Autobiography: a guide for interpreting life narrative, The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2010. Snapchat Support. ‘Friend Emojis’ Snapchat. https://support.snapchat.com/ en-US/a/friend-emojis. Snapchat Support. ‘View Stories’ Snapchat. https://support.snapchat.com/ en-US/a/view-stories. Statista, Inc. 2016. ‘Snapchat user demographics: distribution of Snapchat users in the United States as of February 2016, by Age.’ Statista n.d. www.statista. com/statistics/326452/snapchat-age-group-usa/. Suverna, S. 2016. ‘Instagram app update: you can now switch between multiple instagram accounts’, N4BB, viewed 11 February, https://n4bb.com/ instagram-app-update-switch-multiple-instagram-accounts/. Tufekci, Z. 2007. ‘Can you see me now? Audience and disclosure regulation in online social network sites’, Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, vol. 28, no.1, pp. 20–36. Twenhafel, K. [@Katie_Watiee], 2017. ‘Im taking highschoolers to camp this summer. they already have people lined to run their snap chats while we dont have service #snapstreaks’, Twitter, 12 2017, 12:23am. ‘What parents need to know about Finsta/Spam Accounts’, 2016. Kids Privacy, viewed 8 September, https://kidsprivacy.net/2016/09/08/what-parents-needto-know-about-finstaspam-accounts/.

11 Memoir 2.0 The Writing of the Self as Brand Georgiana Toma

‘But they didn’t have to hire me. I hired myself’ —Armstrong H. in Rudulph 2015

Heather Armstrong’s comment encapsulates the paradigm shift of the early 2000s whereby memoir writing in the form of personal blogs1 started to increasingly resemble a brand creation endeavor, with online life writing becoming a significant revenue source for a number of authors. Online memoirs gradually changed their scope from self-­ revelatory, intimate accounts to brand creation exercises. This is perhaps best illustrated in Armstrong’s journey from online author to ‘queen of the mommy bloggers,’ as The New York Times calls her (Belkin 2011). 2 She represents a poignant case study of an online memoirist whose writing undertook a gradual transformation from a practice underpinned by the genuine desire to become part of an online community to a revenue-­ generating instrument whose narrative and aesthetic features are insightfully curated to generate audience engagement and loyalty. The present paper will examine Armstrong’s use of two devices inherent to memoirs: self-disclosure and scriptotherapy, or writing as a therapeutic tool. The blogger skillfully employs these devices to facilitate the writing of the self as brand. Her endeavor is presented in the greater context of mommy blogs as a memoir 2.0 genre, meaning a genre that challenges and broadens the limits of memoir writing through the affordances of the online medium. A comprehensive discussion of mommy blogs and their relation to memoirs falls beyond the scope of the present chapter, primarily because it would entail a much lengthier analysis of a representative sample of mommy bloggers. Therefore, the paper will briefly present the relationship between the two genres with the purpose of setting the context for Armstrong’s case study. Content published on Armstrong’s website dooce.com will be presented through the lens of a text analysis meant to highlight the relationship between scriptotherapy and self-disclosure, and brand creation strategies, with the purpose of illustrating the gradual shift in writing from a healing and self-revelatory endeavor to a brand creation tool.

174  Georgiana Toma The present paper employs the term mommy blog as a type of personal blog whose narrative threads originate in diverse, yet interrelated genres, such as memoir, history, autobiography, testimony, and confession, and whose subject matter revolves around childrearing and everyday aspects of family life (Blood 2000; Friedman 2013, 2009; Herring et al. 2004; Morrison 2010, 2011). Both Friedman and Morrison, the leading scholars on the topic, point to mommy blogs’ non-linearity, fragmentariness, and confessional undertones as elements inherent to gynocentric or female-focused memoirs and discuss their trivialization in mainstream media (Friedman 2009; Morrison 2010, 2011). The historical dismissal of media forms associated with the private sphere or with so-called ‘women’s business’ (Le Masurier & Johinke 2014), is well documented by feminist scholars who point out that discussions of personal thoughts, feelings, or experiences tend to be defined as ‘feminine’ and low status compared to ‘masculine’ high-brow narratives (Douglas & Michaels 2004; Friedman 2011, 2013; Le Masurier and Johinke 2014; Morrison 2010). In this respect, mommy blogs represent a radical act, to use Friedman’s words (2009), an arguably successful attempt to monetize motherhood’s immaterial labor and a subversive alternative to normative discourses on women and mothering. What makes mommy blogs a memoir 2.0 genre is their inherent capability to render events in close temporal proximity to real life chronology. This is further enhanced by the wealth of photographic, audio, and video evidence that supports the text and triggers a referential illusion3 impossible to replicate in any print antecedents. Although there is historical evidence that diaries and autobiographies were circulated among friends and contained photographic testimony (Anderson 2011; Brockmeier & Carbaugh 2001; Rosenwald 1988), the audiences they reached are minimal compared to the large number of readers connected online across sometimes great geographical distances. Another affordance of the medium, which differentiates it from its print counterparts, is the vast and constantly updated narrative and visual record of the author’s everyday life experience, which creates an auspicious environment for brand creation endeavors. I claim that blogger identity is simultaneously the product of authorial control and consumer-driven cultural work, with the blogger having the capability of negotiating her personal brand in relation to life circumstances, audience feedback, commercial pressures, and personal values. I explored how this proposition relates to human brand personality traits and rhetorical use of zany, cute, interesting, and abject aesthetics4 elsewhere (Toma 2016). In this paper, I focus on self-disclosure and scriptotherapy as rhetorical devices that can create the perception of brand authenticity and audience trust in authorial honesty and integrity. I will employ literature from the fields of brand studies and marketing to define authenticity and consumer trust and discuss their importance in relation to writing the

Memoir 2.0  175 self as brand in online co-created forums. I will then move on to analyze Armstrong’s text and her usage of the two devices. Authenticity represents a pivotal characteristic linked to digital followership, especially in an online environment increasingly dominated by a plethora of voices competing for reader attention. Equally, the perception of authenticity represents the holy grail of branding endeavors, with marketing studies devoted to demonstrating its positive correlation to word-of-mouth brand promotion and to consumer loyalty (Beverland, Lindgreen & Vink 2008; Moulard, Garrity & Rice 2015; Napoli et al. 2014; Napoli, Dickinson-Delaporte & Beverland 2016; Spiggle, Nguyen & Caravella 2012). A useful definition of authenticity comes from Napoli et al. whose attempt to measure consumer-perceived authenticity led them to conclude that the latter is not a feature intrinsic to a product, but rather a rationally constructed characteristic supporting an individual’s subjective perception (2014). Research into antecedents of brand authenticity identifies features such as stylistic consistency, softening of commercial motives, and quality commitment as conducive to audience perception of a brand as authentic (Beverland 2014; Beverland, Lindgreen & Vink 2008; Moulard, Garrity & Rice 2015). I extrapolate this to mommy blogs and argue that stylistic consistency is related to audience perception of a unique authorial voice that retains its core features and commitment to high quality, in regular blog content, in sponsored posts, and in any communication on social media or mainstream media outlets. This consistency and commitment to high standards can be employed to demonstrate authorial autonomy and integrity notwithstanding commercial motivations, softening thus negative perceptions of monetary drive. Trust in blogger authenticity and honesty is particularly crucial given that reader perceptions of monetization can be linked to audience defection. The emergent field of magazine studies, particularly the work of Le Masurier and Johinke, offers valuable insight into how readers tend to question authorial integrity when magazines are perceived to be financially reliable on advertising (Johinke 2014; Le Masurier & Johinke 2014). I claim that their assertions apply to mommy blogs as well, given both genres’ focus on the private, the personal, and the everyday. For this reason, successful bloggers, such as Armstrong, deploy sustained and consistent strategies to reinforce their credibility and to cultivate reader loyalty. One of the most successful rhetorical devices to achieve this outcome is self-disclosure, defined as the act of sharing private information with others by conveying feelings, thoughts, or experiences in an intimate setting (Derlega 1993), face-to-face, or online. Literature on self-disclosure posits that the gradual process of discovery of another individual from outer to inner personality layers enhances interpersonal relationships

176  Georgiana Toma (Altman & Taylor 1973; Baack, Fogliasso & Harris 2000; Derlega 1993; Olson 2013). I argue that self-disclosure is employed in online memoirs to create a sense of intimacy through gradual revelations of personal information, which likely contributes to softening commercial motives and to generating consumer trust. I base my claims on Morrison’s assertions that mommy blogs create intimate publics ‘suffused by feeling and affect’ (Morrison 2011, p. 37) and on market-psychology and communication theories on uncertainty reduction5 as a factor contributing to strengthening interpersonal relations (Bradac 2001; Goldberg, Riordan & Schaffer 2010). I contend therefore that mommy bloggers, especially those with large audiences, are adept at gradually releasing personal information simulating real life relational scenarios, whereby gradual self-disclosure leads to uncertainty reduction, and consequently reinforces audience attachment to blogger. Interestingly, successful personal bloggers cater simultaneously both to existing and to new audiences, ensuring that the process of self-disclosure is ongoing and supersedes chronology. Hyperlinks connect current and previously published posts and enable new readers not only to feel part of the in-group who knows the story, but also to partake in authorial revelatory narratives as much as synchronous audiences6 would have done at the time of original publication. Self-disclosure in online blog memoirs caters thus to both synchronous and asynchronous audiences and permeates different channels. Most successful bloggers have a presence across multiple platforms and structure the release of personal information through different mediums, not only through their websites. Armstrong, for example, has Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook profiles, and is very skillful at employing this cross-platform presence to project a unified and cohesive image that upholds her brand core value of ‘raw honesty,’ as The Wall Street Journal puts it (Shellenbarger 2008). Most Web diarists, for example, are too reserved to report, as Ms. Armstrong does, that she’s ‘married to a charming geek,’ had ‘lived life as an unemployed drunk’ for a while, or landed briefly in a mental hospital for postpartum depression. Some mommy-bloggers find her cursing and vulgarity offensive. But it’s that outrageousness, humility and raw honesty that also feed her bond with readers, making her dominant in an emerging Web sector Mr. Blackshaw calls ‘The Power Mom’. (Shellenbarger 2008) Since the early 2000s, Armstrong consistently reiterated the message that honesty represented the core value of her brand. Abject aesthetics and tongue-in-cheek humor permeated uncensored discussions of her digestive tract problems, most notably her constipation, her pregnancy bodily misadventures, or her ‘daydream[ing] about Rob Stewart in

Memoir 2.0  177 inappropriate positions’ (Armstrong 2001). What solidified her perception as honest and uncensored was, nonetheless, the public confession of her lifelong struggle with depression. On 24th October 2002, Armstrong disclosed her mental health affliction, marking a pivotal moment in the blog’s history (Armstrong 2002). That first entry revealed that the blogger was affected by withdrawal symptoms from her depression medication. It was only a year later, however, that the audience found out the details of Armstrong’s medical history in an extensive post entitled Drama. The entry is particularly revealing, not only because it offers an example of a depression narrative which contravened contemporary normative discourses on mental health, but also because it showcases the narrative strategies conducive to Armstrong’s perception as authentic and truthful. About a year ago I wrote a post on this website about what it was like to go off a depression medication. I’d been on a specific medication for over seven years, and it took over three and a half months to go from 100 milligrams/day of the drug to 0 milligrams/per day, a painful, often traumatic trip through nausea, dizziness, numb hands, and temporary blackouts. (…) Chemical depression runs in my family: six of my mother’s eight brothers and sisters have it, my grandmother had it, my brother suffers from it daily. (…) After successfully coming off the drug last year (I knew I had finally made it through the nightmare when I could close my eyes without feeling like the room was going to spin out of Earth’s orbit), Jon and I moved to Utah and lived in my mother’s basement (…). Those five months in suburban Salt Lake City will go down in my personal history as five of the darkest months of my life. It would be hard for anyone to have to live with their parents as an adult, and I was dealing with the loss of identity and freedom and financial stability without the aid of my seven-year SSRI companion. At one point this past February, after contemplating ways in which I could permanently hurt myself, Jon and I decided that I should go back on the medication, if only temporarily. I took the drug for two weeks, to see me over the hump, and then went directly back off because the side-effects came back stronger than ever. (Armstrong 2003a) Armstrong focuses on a biomedical explanation of depression arguably due to the stigma depression carried in both public and private discourse at the time.7 Word choices such as ‘loss’ of ‘identity,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘financial stability’ allude to external factors exacerbating her mental condition. The reference to suicidal thoughts instills a sense of urgency and unease in the self-disclosing first-person account. The text urges an empathetic

178  Georgiana Toma reaction and reads as stream of consciousness, with Armstrong being likely perceived as someone who transgresses the norm and chooses to share a very personal piece of information, making herself thus vulnerable to her online audience. This level of self-disclosure, together with the risk inherent in any contravention of normative discourses, particularly mental health ones, are leveraged as evidence of the Dooce core brand values of honesty and authenticity. Drama is a post about Armstrong returning a previously rescued golden retriever back to an animal shelter because her depression symptoms prevented her from catering to the dog’s needs. It is only in the sixth section of a ten-paragraph post, however, that the audience finds out this piece of information. One might wonder why the blogger chooses to create such an elaborate frame around the main piece of information or why she reveals her depression history in such detail. Armstrong’s narrative choices are not haphazard, and the segment below will explore some concrete rhetorical devices Armstrong employs to manage audience perception of her brand image. Two weeks ago we brought home a new dog, and two weeks ago I stepped into what would be the fastest, most gripping spiral of a depression I’ve felt since I was 16 years old. I was completely unprepared for the types of problems affecting Sadie (…). I read everything I could online (…), and I talked to several golden retriever enthusiasts (…). Everything I read and heard, however, suggested that it would take several months to break her of the anxiety, if it could be broken at all. (…) While I know that the best thing for me, for my baby, and for Sadie is to find her a new home, I can’t help but feel like I’m giving up on this dog. The weight of failure is overwhelming, almost suffocating, and my mood has formed a volatile environment for everyone in my home. (…) I’m struggling to forgive myself, for giving up, for thinking that I was strong enough to try this in the first place, for being emotionally inept to handle what normal people should be emotionally capable of handling. (Armstrong 2003a) Armstrong constructs her image as responsible and competent dog owner by describing in detail the dog’s separation anxiety symptoms, and the steps she undertook to alleviate it. She then shifts narrative focalization on her emotional state, especially her profound regret and sense of failure. Strong emotive lexis such as ‘emotionally inept,’ ‘weight of failure,’ ‘suffocating,’ ‘volatile environment,’ firmly encourage readers to concede that returning Sadie to a shelter is the only reasonable solution.

Memoir 2.0  179 Concessive clauses introduced by ‘while’ are employed to introduce the counter-arguments of an imagined ‘friend,’ which are then disproven, as in this example: ‘While I understand that any attention is better than the no attention she received in the past, I know that I can’t possibly give this dog the life she deserves, and that is devastating to me’ (Armstrong 2003a). Through the act of reading, the audience becomes the receiver of the message, or, in other words, the imagined ‘friend,’ being thus guided to experience empathy. The same grammatical structure is repeated several times in the post, demonstrating that there is a clear authorial intent underpinning the text. This rhetorical technique appears frequently on the blog, specifically in posts where potentially controversial information is revealed, time and again proving successful in securing positive audience reactions. Drama ends with Armstrong declaring scriptotherapy, the deliberate use of writing for psychological relief, and the search for a support group as her motivations for writing. I guess I’m writing this here to help myself heal. I feel better writing about it, despite the risk of having people send me judgmental email telling me what a pathetic and selfish person I am. As needlessly dramatic as it sounds, my husband can only hold my head as I cry for so many hours before I have to get up and force myself to breathe again. I can’t look at the backyard or the place next to the bed where she slept without wanting to crawl into a hole in the ground. Is that dramatic? It probably is, but when you’re depressed, everything is dramatic. Breathing is dramatic. Perhaps I’m writing this to reach out to others who have suffered depression and have overcome it without the aid of medication. How do you get the drama to end? (Armstrong 2003a) Scriptotherapy, or the deliberate use of writing with the purpose of enhancing counseling outcomes, is an established clinical practice (Riordan 1996), given that writing has been demonstrated to offer a way for negative emotions to be expressed rather than internalized (Buck 1984; Pennebaker, Colder & Sharp 1990). Scriptotherapy scholar, Richard Riordan, states that for journaling to be successful as therapy it requires feedback, which promotes self-reflective processes (1996). This is particularly relevant for mommy blogs given that the affordances of the online medium allow for that feedback loop to take place between blogger and readers. Drama ends with Armstrong’s request for advice from the audience, for which she activates the blog’s comment functionality hitherto disabled due to negative commentary, or trolling,8 taking a toll on her already fragile mental state. While an in-depth discussion of trolling falls beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to acknowledge its misogynistic nature, particularly on websites created by women, and the negative impact it is reported to have on both the blogger and the readership community.9

180  Georgiana Toma In this context, Armstrong’s decision to share an intimate account and ask for audience feedback, with its inherent risk of vicious commentary, represents a key authenticating element of her sincerity, and, to some extent, of her bravery, and, perhaps more poignantly, of her desperation. Armstrong’s plea for support from the online community is consistent with the search for an antidote to maternal isolation that underpinned most early mommy blogging endeavors,10 as Friedman notes (2009), and while Armstrong is not the only mommy blogger to discuss depression, she is one of the first ones to do so.11 What makes Armstrong stand out is her narrative prowess and her skill of engendering strong emotional responses in readers through carefully employed rhetorical tropes. The impact of her account was such that even detractors offered her respite from criticism, as Slate magazine notes. There are a few reasons why notoriously cruel Web commenters are retracting their claws when it comes to Armstrong’s recent woes. For one, they admire her honesty when it comes to battling mental illness – over the years she’s been extremely candid about her hospitalization for post-partum depression. Her regular readers are genuinely concerned about her health. (Grose 2012) Drama elicited high audience engagement, with Armstrong reporting having received ‘hundreds of emails of support’ (Armstrong 2003b). ‘I feel warmly welcomed into a large group of people who struggle with this disease and who are trying to make their lives better. Thank you for sharing. Your stories have touched me’ (Armstrong 2003b). Lexis such as ‘comforted,’ ‘encouragement,’ ‘welcomed into a … group,’ ‘support encourages readers to form an emotional bond with the author and to become her recurrent digital followers. Armstrong promises to reply to all the emails received, and this communication loop strengthens the referential illusion of real life personal relationship formation between blogger and readers. Hence, the affordances of the online medium infuse self-disclosing practices typical to memoirs with a 2.0 dimension whereby direct interaction with the audience fosters the development of strong attachment to the author and to her brand. The strongest narrative hook on dooce.com might be, however, Armstrong’s announcement of her hospitalization due to her rapidly deteriorating mental state following the birth of her first daughter. The reason you won’t be hearing anything from me for several days is because this morning Jon is driving me up to the hospital and I’m going to check into the psychiatric ward. I am very scared that if I don’t go ahead and do this that I may experience some sort of nervous breakdown. (Armstrong 2004f)

Memoir 2.0  181 Armstrong reveals that her mental state is rapidly declining in spite of having tried different types of medication. She describes in detail her post-­ partum depression (hereafter PPD) symptoms and reports having sought medical help and receiving a diagnosis she was reluctant to discuss on the blog ‘because it will be such a loaded discussion, and that medication has caused all sorts of problems’ (Armstrong 2004f). The post is written with a sense of urgency, the hitherto confessional call for support and empathy having morphed into an impersonal, unemotional announcement. I have to get all this shit figured out or I really think I’ll hurt myself. I can’t believe that I don’t feel better. I can’t believe that it’s been two months and I DON’T FEEL ANY BETTER. I have to believe that going to the hospital is at least going to let me clear my head, or that it may actually provide an answer. I have to believe in something right now because I don’t feel like I have any hope. This anxiety is so painful, and I don’t see an end to it. (Armstrong 2004f) The stylistically unadorned disclosure of hopelessness and ­suicidal thoughts grant this post a sense of urgency unequalled in the h ­ istory of the blog. She does not call for readers’ understanding or s­ upport in any way, but simply states that she has published the post to inform her loyal followers of the ongoing events, creating thus what would become one of the most engaging narrative hooks on a personal blog: the live documentation of a critical moment in an individual’s ­battle with mental illness. I won’t be checking my email for several days, or the internet [sic] for just as long, and I may die from the withdrawal. I wanted to tell you about this because many of you have been on this journey with me and I feel like you should know what is going on. This is what is going on. I don’t feel better. (Armstrong 2004f) Most readers would have likely felt compelled to return to the blog for updates, and Armstrong, made sure to cater to her audience even from a mental hospital ward. The next post, Unlocked, is published two days later, being prefaced by a note in which the blogger’s husband announces that Armstrong had given him a handwritten account to type. NOTE: Heather asked me to type this in as an entry. She wrote this this morning and handed it to me today when I brought Leta in to have lunch.–Jon (Armstrong 2004g) Unlocked marks a return to Dooce aesthetics entailing irreverent comments and tongue-in-cheek humor as the blogger describes the

182  Georgiana Toma breathtaking views outside of her hospital window and how they might have inspired Brigham Young’s12 decision ‘that “this was the place” to settle the Mormons. By saying that I am in no way implying he was a crazed lunatic. Not at all. Nope’ (Armstrong 2004g). Dooce aesthetics interrupt the flow of the depression narrative, arguably due to the blogger’s awareness that text consumption is driven by a fine balance between pleasure, curiosity, and empathy. Armstrong’s return to her brand core stylistic feature of flippant humor is likely underpinned by her perhaps instinctive understanding that readers’ digital loyalty is stimulated by a pleasurable text consumption and by a consistent encounter with the narrative aesthetics they had come to expect on dooce.com. This stylistic consistency not only ensures cohesion among distinct blog entries spanning over a decade, but also reaffirms the Dooce brand identity and its authenticity. Armstrong was always careful not to allow the depression narrative, even in its most powerful emotive instantiations, to elicit uncomfortable reactions in readers. Equally, she was always mindful not to project an image of victimhood, which is quite a stylistic feat given that the expressed purpose of these posts was to elicit empathy and support from online readers. What contributed to Armstrong’s success was precisely her hitherto established authorial voice and Dooce brand attributes. In Unlocked, for example, the blogger manages to avoid the maudlin or sentimental by interspersing irreverent language and humorous undertones in what most readers would qualify as a moving ‘thank you.’ The first thing I need to say is going to be very sappy and gross and some of you may be in danger of puking afterward, but here goes. For the past three days I have felt your support and good vibes and thoughts, and oh my god, your prayers. Here I am, a scrappy and disgruntled ex-Mormon cusser [sic], thanking you for your prayers. I feel like a crazed kid at a concert who has, in a moment of sheer insanity, jumped off the stage in a grand, sweeping swan dive. And you people caught me. And here I am floating through the crowd on your hands and extended arms. Thank you for catching me, Internet. (Armstrong 2004g) Lexis such as ‘sappy,’ ‘gross,’ ‘puking,’ ‘disgruntled …cusser’ exemplify zany and abject aesthetics, core Dooce brand attributes (Toma 2016), which are employed to leverage the sentimentality inherent to emotional expressions of gratitude. Armstrong is particularly skillful at being consistent in the tone she uses to communicate with readers, ensuring that her brand identity is constantly reaffirmed. Maintaining ongoing communication from a psychiatric ward, that is both stylistically consistent and high quality, bears testament to the importance Armstrong places on audience perception and to her

Memoir 2.0  183 commitment to Dooce as her brand and business. This is not to dispute the honesty of her depression narrative or to claim that monetization rather than scriptotheraphy should be considered her primary writing drive. Armstrong’s growing followership for more than a decade can be seen as testament both to the veracity of her account and to her brand management capabilities. Armstrong’s depression account enlisted a high level of audience engagement, with some media outlets actually attributing the blog’s overall success to it (Belkin 2009). While it is true that this narrative attracted more visitors to her website, it might be an overstatement to attribute Armstrong’s popularity entirely to it, given that dooce.com had already acquired a loyal followership by 2003, according to The New York Times (Belkin 2011, para. 16). It is also important to acknowledge that the depression narrative covers only a small percentage of blog content. In April 2015 for example, dooce.com archives recorded only 83 posts containing the word ‘depression.’ Statistically, this is a very small number considering that Armstrong published an average of 40 posts per month in the period 2003–2015. As Armstrong’s mental condition improved, scriptotherapy became less frequently presented as a writing motivation, being replaced by advocacy or social responsibility. Armstrong became an advocate for depression awareness in many online and mass media forums, joining the Board of Directors of Utah division of NAMI, the North American National Alliance on Mental Illness, in 2012 (Armstrong 2012). Self-­disclosure as rhetorical device is employed, however, throughout the blog’s existence, most notably to secure audience trust in the brand’s core value of honesty. This became increasingly crucial as the blog’s monetization resulted in reader complaints and mistrust in blogger truthfulness. While a comprehensive analysis of Armstrong’s use of self-disclosure to mitigate audience defection due to monetization falls beyond the scope of this chapter due to the wealth of primary material, a short excerpt will be analyzed from the blog’s early stages. Armstrong began the monetization of dooce.com by asking for donations to cover website maintenance fees, becoming thus part of the crowdsourcing avant-garde, since in 2003 raising revenue through online platforms was fairly uncommon.13 In 2004, she upgraded the blog’s revenue-raising model by including banner and text advertising. The decision to monetize her blog is introduced as being motivated by the desire to ‘make a lot of improvements, add more features and make this website an even better waste of your time’ (Armstrong 2004d). Armstrong proposes a list of website improvements, and then, insightfully, she solicits ideas from her readers regarding her website upgrade project. (…) Here’s where I ask for your feedback on the idea of a redesign. I want your input. What would you like to see here?

184  Georgiana Toma (NOTE: NUDE PICTURES OF ME ARE NOT AN OPTION. DON’T EVEN ASK. Nude pictures of Chuck,14 however, coming soon!) Have you got any ideas? (Armstrong 2004d) Armstrong conducts a subtle and effective consumer focus group, whilst ensuring her loyal followers feel they are getting a better product, in whose design they are invited to play an active role. Her desire to offer a better product is leveraged to mitigate potential negative perceptions of commercial motivations. Armstrong manages thus not only to capitalize consumer creativity and immaterial labor, but also, and perhaps more importantly, she secures her readers’ excitement about and investment in the new look and feel of the brand. Armstrong maintains frequent communication with readers regarding the blog’s monetization and upgrade process. Written in Dooce irreverent tones, these updates often employ stylistic elements typical of self-­ disclosing accounts recounted to real life friends in informal settings. Unfortunately I’m not quite sure how to make money doing this. I applied for Google AdSense and they rejected me because of ‘Inappropriate language.’ Yes, that’s right. Google wants nothing to do with me and my motherfucking fucker fucks, my poops and penile diseases,15 my nursing bras and engorged, cabbage-wrapped torpedo boobs.16 (…) Somehow I feel rather proud. I don’t want to be edited or censored, and I would never alter the content of this site to qualify for an advertising program. My stance on this may leave me moneyless, but at least I’ll have my dignity and you’ll have my cabbage boobs. (Armstrong 2004d) This post is a typical example of the communication Armstrong engaged in at the beginning of the blog’s monetization process. Zany and abject aesthetics exemplified in blog tropes such as ‘cabbage boobs’ and ‘penile diseases’ underpin the second-person narration, and the informal tone creates the impression Armstrong is addressing a friend over a cup of coffee. The blogger employed similar posts regularly during the years 2004 and 2005 with the result of successfully managing audience perception of monetization as a transparent and selfless pursuit. Armstrong maintained a consistent approach to her public disclosure of blog revenue, revealing sufficient information to sustain the brand value of honesty and transparency but never being explicit about figures or the alternative monetization channels she gradually introduced on the blog.17 By 2015, almost every post published on dooce.com contained

Memoir 2.0  185 links to external companies or service providers seamlessly woven into the narrative fabric of the blogger’s everyday life. Most of these posts do not fall under the sponsored post category, given that they do not feature the mandatory disclosure of financial compensation for product endorsement. While it is unclear whether Armstrong receives any compensation for them or not, what remains undisputable is the blogger’s growing digital audience for more than a decade, which speaks to her ability of convincingly telling everyday life stories to a loyal followership that relishes Dooce brand aesthetics and believes its sincerity. Armstrong’s personal brand image was carefully curated to soften any mistrust potentially generated by the introduction of a financial element to a relationship founded on self-disclosure and mutual trust. Her brand image of uncensored author and the zany-abject product attributes permeate the text consistently and deliver a clear message to the audience: Monetization will never impact the integrity of the Dooce brand or her authenticity. It is audience trust in her authenticity and sincerity, as well as their fascination with Armstrong as an exciting, sophisticated, rugged, and nonconformist human brand (Toma 2016), that secured the blog’s steady digital followership for over a decade. Armstrong’s storytelling prowess and her innate brand management instinct represent her main points of differentiation from other veteran mommy bloggers. Equally important was her commitment to producing new and engaging content regularly, irrespective of her life circumstances, a commitment few bloggers were willing or capable to sustain (Lawrence 2009).

Notes 1 I employ the term personal blog to mean a webpage containing its author’s personal opinions, musings, autobiographical accounts, links to other websites, photographic, and/or video material (Chen 2013; Herring & Paolillo 2006). 2 Armstrong’s blog, dooce.com, is one of the first personal blogs to feature commercial advertisements (hereafter ads) (Rettberg 2008) and one of the few mommy blogs that are still regularly updated and read sixteen years after their inception. Armstrong launched dooce.com on 27th February 2001 (Armstrong 2015a). On 23rd April 2015, Armstrong announced that she would be reducing the number of posts on the blog as she was launching a new company called HBA Media, Inc., dedicated exclusively to providing consultancy services on Internet marketing and social media brand presence (Armstrong 2015b). 3 I employ Roland Barthes’ term ‘referential illusion’ to mean the illusion of the unmediated representation of reality, or the reality effect, which is the result of a ‘direct collusion of a referent and a signifier; [with] the signifier [being] expelled from the sign, and with it, … the possibility of developing a form of the signified’ (Barthes 1989, pp. 147–8). 4 I employ the terms zany, cute, and interesting as they were introduced by Sianne Ngai in Our Aesthetic Categories (2012). The zany character

186  Georgiana Toma embodies intense affective and physical labor deployed in the sphere of reproductive or immaterial work, comprising ‘stay-at-home’ mothers, artists, or information workers (Ngai 2012, pp. 189, 205–206). The cute is an aesthetic concerned with a range of affective responses towards unthreatening or subordinate anthromorphized ‘commodities,’ ranging from infantilization to sadism (Ngai 2012, pp. 70–88). The interesting as aesthetic category is connected to a feeling of mild surprise at comparing existing information to new stimuli and discovering a new perspective or a deviation from an existing norm or assumption (Ngai 2012, pp. 112–15). I employ the term abject aesthetics to refer to Armstrong’s use of abject tropes such as constipation or flatulence to solidify her perception as uncensored author (Toma 2016). 5 I employ the theory of ‘uncertainty reduction’ as it was originally developed by Berger and Calabrese to refer to the initial stages of interaction between people (1975). They claim that the process of finding out increasingly more information about the other person reduces an individual’s uncertainty as they become better equipped to predict the other person’s behavior and actions, resulting thus in the development of trust which is conducive to positive relationship building (Berger & Calabrese 1975; Goldberg, Riordan & Schaffer 2010). 6 Synchronous audience refers to readers who read a blog post in close temporal proximity to its publication. Asynchronous audience refers to readers who engage with the text after a significant amount of time had passed since its original publication. 7 I employ the term ‘stigma’ as it is used in medical literature on depression to refer to the negative characteristics the public attributes to depressed individuals, with the purpose of discrediting their social identity and positioning them as different from ‘normal’ people (Goffman 1968; Silton et al. 2011). In 2006, the North American organization, National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), reported that an overwhelming percentage of the United States population held misconstrued beliefs about depression, ‘popular misconceptions that trivialize depression as “just the blues” or dismiss it entirely as an “imaginary disease” (…) as a “myth” and deny that medical or other treatments are necessary for recovery’ (NAMI 2006). 8 Trolling refers to negative behavior on comment threads, including, but not restricted to, insults, abusive language or disrespectful comments, with trolls being defined as users who purport to be sincerely invested in the community, but who in reality aim to cause disruption for their own personal amusement (Hardaker 2010). 9 This statement is underpinned by the awareness that it is not only male or male-identifying trolls who participate in disciplinary rhetoric (Bartlett et al. 2014) and that gender is difficult to ascertain beyond doubt in online forums. The statement builds on feminist scholar research which categorizes chauvinist online commentary as an act of silencing women through intimidation or harassment (Herring et al. 2002; Herring, Johnson & DiBenedetto 1995; Jane 2014a,b). 10 Medical, sociological and women’s study scholarship agrees that social support, involving relationships in which individuals feel valued, loved, and connected to a larger social network, is key for women, especially when they develop their mother identities (Oakley 1992; Westall & Liamputtong 2011). Lack of social support has been linked to depression, especially in Western societies where women are often isolated from relatives or other mothers (Putnam 2001; Westall & Liamputtong 2011; WHO 2000). 11 Alice Bradley, for example, who is a veteran mommy blogger alongside Armstrong, has also discussed her mental health struggle, but at a later date (Friedman 2013, p. 96).

Memoir 2.0  187 12 Brigham Young was the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormonism, and the founder of Salt Lake City (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 2004). 13 At the time, the only existing crowdsourcing platform was ArtistShare, a website enabling fans to financially support their favorite artists’ creative projects (Chinen 2013; Freedman & Nutting 2015; Newman 2015). 14 Chuck is the blogger’s dog. 15 ‘penile disease’ refers to Armstrong’s mishearing ‘peanut disease’ in a conversation with a small child when she spent a semester abroad in college (Armstrong 2004c). 16 ‘cabbage-wrapped torpedo boobs’ refers to the blogger’s natural remedy for alleviating post-lactation chest pain, and it represents a theme frequently mentioned on the blog (Armstrong 2004a,b,d,e, 2005, 2006). 17 In a 2011 interview, for example, she declared ‘We’re a privately held company and don’t reveal our financials.’ The author of the article estimated, however, that dooce.com income was, at that time, $30,000–$50,000 per month, ‘and that’s not even counting the revenue from her two books, healthy speaking fees, and the contracts she signed to promote Verizon and appear on HGTV’ (Belkin 2011).

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Memoir 2.0  191 Shellenbarger, S. 2008, ‘The blogger mom. In your face’, The Wall Stret Journal, April 10, viewed 2 September 2016, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/ SB120778656388403417. Silton, N. R., Flannelly, K. J., Milstein, G. & Vaaler, M. L. 2011, ‘Stigma in America: has anything changed? Impact of perceptions of mental illness and dangerousness on the desire for social distance: 1996 and 2006’, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. 199, no. 6, pp. 361–66. Spiggle, S., Nguyen, H. T. & Caravella, M. 2012, ‘More than fit: brand extension authenticity’, Journal of Marketing Research, vol. 49, no. 6, pp. 967–83. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 2004, Brigham young, 2nd president of the church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, viewed 3 November 2016, www.lds.org/churchhistory/presidents/controllers/ potcController.jsp?leader=2&topic=facts. Toma, G. F. 2016, ‘‘I Exploit My Children for Millions and Millions of Dollars on My Mommyblog’ How Heather B. Armstrong’s Personal Blog Became a Successful Business’, PhD Thesis, viewed 10 April 2017, https://ses.library. usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/15779. Westall, C. & Liamputtong, P. 2011, Motherhood and Postnatal Depression: narratives of women and their partners / Carolyn Westall, Pranee Liamputtong, Springer Verlag, New York. WHO 2000, Women’s Mental Health. An evidenced based review, World Health Organisation, viewed 8 September 2016, http://apps.who.int/iris/ bitstream/10665/66539/1/WHO_MSD_MDP_00.1.pdf.

12 Travel Memoir and Australia From Twain to Tracks and the Present Day Ben Stubbs Introduction Couser writes in Memoir: An Introduction that ‘travel writing is, at bottom, single-experience life writing; as such, it verges on memoir and can be extended into it’ (2011, p. 129). In Australia, this ‘single-­experience life writing’ has progressed from a self-centered and inward looking form in its earliest manifestations, to something which has both popular and critical appeal as an example of trans-genre writing. This chapter will look at the evolution of the travel memoir in Australia from three distinct perspectives. Firstly, it will observe the writing of Mark Twain during his visit to Australia in 1895 in one of his last forays into the field. Twain’s writing shows the perspective of a travel memoirist, self-named ‘the most famous man in the United States’ (2006, p. vii) at the time. Secondly, I will look at Robyn Davidson’s Tracks (1980), which established the popularity of Australian travel memoir during the same era that Paul Theroux and Bruce Chatwin were popularizing the genre internationally after a dormant period post-World War Two. Thirdly, Don Watson’s ode to a life in and around the outback in The Bush (2014) is explored for its trans-genre approach encompassing memoir, travel, poetic observation, and history. Couser writes that memoir is the ‘literary face of a very common and fundamental human activity: the narration of our lives in our own terms. It is rooted in deep human needs, desires, and habitual practices’ (2011, p. 9). On the surface, travel writing and memoir might seem distinct, though just as there are many commonalities between memoir and the techniques of fiction writing (Couser 2011), so too are there similarities between memoir and the writing of travel. Travel writing is a form of creative nonfiction that involves the foregrounding of the narrator (Blanton 1997), and the combining of facts with ‘vividly rendered descriptive details and anecdotes, characters and dialogue. Such stories transport the reader and convey a rich sense of the author’s experience of the place’ (George 2005, p. 65). Baine Campbell notes that travel writing has a ‘plurality’ that allows it to have relevance to readers across disciplines (2002). And as Sims writes, travel writing ‘invites narrative, everyday interactions, and the voice of a guide’ (1995, p. 14) similar to memoir.

Travel Memoir and Australia  193 Fussell writes in Abroad that, ‘Travel books are a sub-species of memoir in which the autobiographical narrative arises from the speaker’s encounter with distant or unfamiliar data’ (1980, p. 203). Through encounters with new customs, cultures, and landscapes, narrators undergo an inner change while travelling and writing (Sims & Kramer 1995; Youngs 2013). Another important element that is key to the understanding and advancement of travel memoir is the use of immersion. In this context it refers to the amount of time and the depth with which the writer engages with the people and the places they are writing about. While there are different types of immersion, such as the quest, the experiment, reenactment, and the infiltration (Hemley 2012), there is a common thread to the value gained from in-depth experience. Award-winning immersion journalist and writer Ted Conover writes that a truer sense of story is discovered from deeper immersion, since ‘you get more than just information. You gain shared experience. And often you get powerful true stories’ (2017, Chapter 1, Section 2, para. 12). From an historical sense, the first notable overlap with travel writing and memoir is the work of Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) about the author’s journey and experiences as a merchant seaman travelling to California. Dana Jr. offers the reader ‘a first-hand account of life on the remote and little known West Coast and an inside narrative of the life of a common seaman’ (2011, p. 125). As Couser notes, Dana Jr. presents one of the first examples of published ‘single-experience life writing’ which also gives us an appreciation of place and the narrator’s position within this (2011). By focusing on Australia and exploring the works of Twain, Davidson, and Watson, who each bring a different perspective to writing about the continent, this chapter demonstrates how the form has evolved from a self-­ centered and imperialistic form to a subgenre that bolsters the popularity and credibility of memoir more broadly because of its trans-genre appeal.

Travel and the Self in Australia Australia is a place where travel stories have been an enduring part of its literary identity, from the Dreamtime, songlines, and creation myths of the Indigenous people, to the journals of early explorers and the more modern adaptation and commodification of the travel writing form (Morrison 2017). As historian Richard White writes, ‘Perhaps Australia has always been a land more travelled than settled’ (2007, p. 1), and this transient, nomadic sensibility is reflected by those who decide to travel and write about it to reflect on their journey and themselves within the vastness of the country. White writes in the Studies in Travel Writing journal that, ‘equally important in the development of a sense of Australia’s place in the world has been the long tradition of commentary by visitors to Australia’ (2007, p. 4). White writes of this outward

194  Ben Stubbs facing ideal that stems from ‘an economy so bound to the outside world, for capital, for labor, for markets, so dependent on and sensitive to the good opinion of others, it seriously mattered what the rest of the world thought’ (2007, p. 5), and this position is reflected in the transitions within Australian travel memoir. In their study of the history of travel writing in Australia for Thompson’s Routledge Companion to Travel Writing (2015), White and Greenwood note that while the first travel book set in Australia can be traced back to Joseph Hall in 1605, in the early days of colonial life travel writing reflected the perspective of explorers searching for usable land and encountering the exotic, including accounts from Sturt, Giles, Eyre, and Leichardt (Flannery 1998). This expanded to more conventional perspectives of the tourist landscape in the 19th century, with works by Ellen Clacy (1853) and William Howitt (1855) prefacing the particularly influential work from Anthony Trollope in Australia and New Zealand (1873), as his view of the Australian landscape was much repeated (White & Greenwood 2015). Later examples of Australian travel writing encompassed everything from C.E.W. Bean’s On The Wool Track (1910), to one of the first expressions of true independence and adventure from a female perspective with Ernestine Hill’s The Great Australian Loneliness (1956), which acts as a precursor to Robyn Davidson as both writers encapsulate the vast, unfamiliar landscapes of the outback. Travel writing in Australia during this era covered everything from early nature writing and the examination of a newly conservative nation right through to the commodification of tourism and travel writing from a local point of view (White & Greenwood, 2015, p. 463). White and Greenwood observe the transition in Australian travel writing – moving from a colonialist form of expression about a self-­ conscious nation, to an inclusive genre where the importance of the inner narrative and an open perspective became clearer. White and Greenwood note that irrespective of the era there is often uneasiness encountered by travel writers writing about Australia. Many find ‘neither the familiarity of the “old world” nor a sense of plunging into a wholly unknown other’ (2015, p. 457) as they negotiate the familiarity of the cities against the unforgiving nature of the outback. This uneasiness suggests that there has necessarily been a progression of the travel memoir in Australia for writers to engage meaningfully in place in this post-imperialist landscape. The immersed writer is prompted to look inwards and include more analysis of themselves and their own biases and preconceptions as they attempt to interpret their journey through both the familiar and alien aspects of travel in Australia. The Wayward Tourist While Mark Twain was more often identified as a novelist and fiction writer, his travel writing was some of the most popular in the 19th

Travel Memoir and Australia  195 century (Melton 2002), and his Australian travel memoir was one of the first examples of the genre in Australia to reach an international readership. Yagoda writes in Memoir: A History that Twain was a writer ‘who achieved fame through memoir’ (2009, p. 126) with his earlier work in The Innocents Abroad. It was part travelogue, though the autobiographical lens was always apparent with the ‘near nuclear power of a self-deprecating narrator’ (2009, p. 128) that became the nonfiction style he was later expected for in Australia. Along with Twain’s position as America’s great commentator came immense wealth. His eccentricities led him to invest in things that sparked his imagination, including a typesetting machine that was supposed to change the printing business. The invention failed and Twain’s fortune dwindled. ‘I’ve got to mount the platform again or starve’ (2006, p. xxv) he writes of his decision to travel to Australia in 1895 on a speaking tour to pay off his debts despite the fact that he was, ‘ageing, tired and in pain’ (2006, p. xxix). He would endeavor to perform at 150 events on his yearlong world tour – devoting approximately six weeks to the entire Australian continent (2006). Watson notes in his introduction that during this trip Twain ‘glided around the colonies like a man on roller skates,’ (2006, p. xxvi) such was the nature of his immersion, confirming the colonial opinion that the ‘metropolitan outsider’s word carried more weight than a local’s opinion,’ (White & Greenwood 2015, p. 460) and that he could get away with such a brief approach because of his status. Despite Twain’s literary pedigree his motivation for traveling to Australia reinforces the shallowness of his travel memoir. Where Twain could have engaged with diverse groups of people, he generalizes, and when he could reflect more meaningfully on the changes travel has had on him as a writer and a traveler in between his memoirs, he does not engage. For example, Twain spends much of his Australian experience questioning the treatment of the Indigenous people, though despite this apparent concern, Twain never endeavors to meet or talk to an Indigenous person: ‘He saw no Aborigines, but he wrote more about them than everything else put together. By contemporary standards his tone was grossly patronizing and as often as not he had the facts wrong,’ (2006, p. xxxi) Watson writes. The Wayward Tourist follows Twain’s itinerary as he travels around the country on his speaking tour, from Sydney down to Melbourne, across the gold fields to South Australia and over the water to Tasmania. His history of Australia begins with Captain Cook and convict life, and it focuses on the cities and the settlers who have become successful despite the isolation. The outback is most often used as a transition between his set scenes in the book. Many of his comparisons of the people, religion, and government are also categorized by how similar they are (or not) to the Americans and English (2006, p. 25), and deviations from this are points of humor rather than opportunities for real engagement. In each

196  Ben Stubbs of the twenty chapters, the text rarely ventures further than the illumination of a single anecdote to represent the place – whether it be the shark fishermen of Sydney or the Melbourne Cup in Victoria. Twain’s thinly spread perspective also suggests that focus within travel memoir more broadly is an important consideration. Twain attempts to encapsulate an entire country during a rushed journey, and the result is unsatisfying despite his obvious literary ability. The successful use of focus in this context will be discussed later with the two more contemporary examples from Davidson and Watson. As he travels through the country from one engagement to the next, he flirts with the idea of the outback and the unknown parameters of the desert, a place he calls a ‘stupendous blank,’ (2006, p. 9) though as with many aspects of Australia, he spreads his narrative too thinly across its surface for this statement to have real value. Twain travels mostly by train between cities – allowing him to indulge in his thoughts on the Indigenous population from the enclosure of his carriage. He watches out the window for the hostile Indigenous people in the scrub on his way to Adelaide. As his journey continues he discusses the ingenuity of the boomerang with a fellow passenger, remarking about these people he never meets, that, ‘along with their unpleasant qualities they had some exceedingly good ones’ (2006, p. 89). When he is outside the comfort and safety of the towns and cities again travelling through rural Victoria, he observes the scorched landscape and fantasizes about the life of the Indigenous people from a distance. He imagines it to be one of laziness and houselessness, and he concludes that they are ‘just plain savages, for all their smartness’ (2006, p. 102). These sorts of comments, made from the position of a self-centered and preoccupied narrator, confirm that Twain’s final travel work is his most ‘ethically conflicted travel book’ (Melton 2002, p. 139) because, despite his realization that a tourist, such as himself, is not a harmless, if indulgent visitor, he does not salvage the experience for the better, ‘he can no longer ignore his inevitable connection to the misdeeds of an aggressively imperialistic culture and his complicity as its most pernicious representative,’ and ultimately he has become a ‘writer on empty,’ (2002, p. 140) offering neither valuable personal insight nor real immersion in place for the reader. This travel memoir did put Australia on the map, though it wasn’t until much later that we witnessed true immersion and engagement with the country. Tracks The position of the travel memoir as a popular and critically engaging form in Australia rose to international prominence when Robyn Davidson set out across the desert of central Australia with four camels and a dog for company in the late 1970s. It was during this era that Paul

Travel Memoir and Australia  197 Theroux and Bruce Chatwin popularized travel writing; Tracks (1980) reinforced adventure and personal reflection as central to the narrative. Testament to its longevity and success, Tracks is still in print and was adapted into a major feature film in 2013. For Wasserman and Almeida, travel writing such as Davidson’s, ‘records conquest and the imposition of the cultural self on a cultural other, but it also records exploration and the opening of the self’ (2009, p. 9) – with exploration of the self a hallmark of modern travel writing, as noted by Youngs (2013, p. 102). Despite the fact that up until the late 20th century, ‘women travelling in Australia remained an anomaly,’ (White 2007, p. 11) Davidson set out to cross the Australian desert alone to understand the landscape and herself in the process. Similar to the raw style of Twain’s first travel memoir The Innocents Abroad, where he was bold and less concerned by the outside world, Davidson’s narrative is loosely structured. In an interview for Studies in Travel Writing, she says, ‘Tracks was so unguarded, a completely honest book, an innocent book really’ (Youngs 2005, p. 23). Many travel memoirs begin with the author’s motivation (why they’re walking across a desert, over a mountain, or moving to a villa in Tuscany for example), though Davidson is never quite sure. It takes her nearly two years to even begin her journey, as she endures trials and false starts in her life in Alice Springs. A considerable part of the book is spent learning the craft of cameleering, and within the narrative she often wonders whether the trip might happen at all. She doesn’t set out until chapter six, more than a third of the way into the book. Despite the slow start, Davidson’s narrative is engaging because of its lack of pretention and its honesty. Davidson writes that she never intended for this journey to be the subject of a book, at least initially. She only secured funding from National Geographic magazine with the help of photographer Rick Smolan shortly before departure to allow her to fund the trip in exchange for a magazine article. Even then, her commitment to the article seems fleeting, and this allows her to experience the place with less narrative concern and more authenticity than an experienced journalist or writer might. Despite the delays, she is confident of her decisions. ‘There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns – small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you know you’re on the right track’ (1980, p. 19). She is also aware that this is an internal journey as much as it is a trek from the desert to the sea. As Beck notes, ‘It is constructed both as an individual search for her “self” in the world as well as a narrative that goes beyond personal frontiers’ (2016, p. 94). In his writing on immersion, Robin Hemley supports the search for self as a binding goal in many memoirs. He calls the process, ‘kind of an archaeological dig, an excavation of the layers of self’ (2012, p. 59).

198  Ben Stubbs While Tracks might lack initial structure, it still moves the reader through Davidson’s inner change; she begins as someone who is hesitant and doesn’t know how to do many of the things required for the journey within the first five chapters, from how to manage a camel or plan an expedition, to accepting help when it is needed and to let go of control when appropriate. ‘I had never held a hammer, had never changed a light-bulb, sewn a dress, mended a sock, changed a tyre, or used a screw driver’ (1980, p. 93). As the kilometers strip her of these worries in the second part of the book, she thrives in the outback environment and her concern for appearances melts away. This shedding also allows her to achieve a more meaningful understanding of herself and the country she is travelling through. This is demonstrated by the period she spends walking and listening with Mr Eddie from the Pitjantjara tribe. He is an elder who helps her cross a sacred stretch of land she would have had to otherwise avoid. As they walk she learns of his ‘strength, warmth, self-possession, wit, and a kind of rootedness’ (1980, p. 165). As her examination of self grows, Davidson also needs to complete the journey for herself, rather than for the magazine contract, or the pressure from outsiders. As the journey nears its completion Davidson notes: I was rediscovering and getting to know people who were long since dead and forgotten. I had dredged up things that I had no idea existed. People, faces, names, places, feelings, bits of knowledge, all waiting for inspection. It was a giant cleansing of all the garbage and muck that had accumulated in my brain, a gentle catharsis. (1980, p. 192) Davidson enters central Australia at an important time in Australian history, when there was a more visible effort to recognize Indigenous rights, and she lives, walks, and talks among Indigenous people all along her trip as a way of also understanding the fractured past of Australia for herself. Beck writes that one of Davidson’s preoccupations in the book is: To re-access Aboriginal history and its legacies, and she does that not only by resisting imperial white Australian racist views of Aborigines, but also by recovering Aboriginal knowledge and their ties to the Australian land. (2016, p. 94) This sentiment is confirmed by Davidson towards the end of her sixmonth walking trip, when she writes, ‘as I walked through that country, I was becoming involved with it in a most intense and yet not fully conscious way’ (1980, p. 195). This was never her stated intention,

Travel Memoir and Australia  199 though the amount of time spent on the ground gives the memoir a deep appreciation of the place. Whereas Twain’s rushed journey only gives glimpses of the surface of the country, Davidson’s immersion allows her to bear witness to the reality of the outback during an important era of recognition and understanding. Participation is her way of finding the narrative – a technique also supported by Sims and Kramer (1995). White writes that from the 1980s onwards there was a distinct trend in the merging of memoir and travel writing in Australian writing (2015, p. 466). Yagoda writes that the popularity of memoir increased by 400 percent between 2004 and 2008 (2009, p. 7). Others echoed the adventure of Davidson’s journey: Heidi Douglas’s Catch up with the Sun (2012), where she travelled on horseback across the desert; and Gregory Bryan’s To Hell or High Water (2012), which retraced the experiences of Henry Lawson. Meaningful engagement with Indigenous Australia was also seen more often in travel literature after Davidson’s work, with examples such as Kim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke, and Paddy Roe’s Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (1984) and Kim Mahood’s Craft for a Dry Lake (2000). The popularity of travel memoir also saw accounts from Rothwell (2003) and Tim Flannery in Country (2004), which presented a combination of scientific analysis, travel, and ‘a far more nuanced search for the “real” Australia’ (2015, p. 466). These recent titles show the juxtaposition of an inner and outer journey, the combination of personal narrative, history, and discovery of place as first demonstrated for a popular audience by Davidson. These distinctions and the ability to include meaningful digressions within the travel memoir leads to the final text, Don Watson’s The Bush. The Bush Political speechwriter, nonfiction author, biographer, and commentator Don Watson published The Bush in 2014, a travel memoir that explores the significance of the Australian bush. Frank Bongiorno argues that the book’s power comes from the way the author positions himself as ‘both an insider and outsider to the Australian bush,’ and that it is presented as a ‘meditation on Australia itself through reflection’ (2014). The Bush focuses on one theme within Australia (the bush) to give the progression purpose and coherence – a technique absent from the broad-stroke writing of Twain. Watson conducts thorough research into the significance of the bush from scientific, cultural and political perspectives, personal recollections (drawn from a lifetime of experiences in the bush) and anecdotes of his own experiences and family life, and a history of the colonial use of the bush as a juxtaposition to the Indigenous understanding of the same space. He also utilizes travel writing and extended thematic digressions to extend the reach of the book – a technique that is crucial to good memoir and immersion writing according to both Kramer

200  Ben Stubbs (1995, p. 32) and Conover (2017). The Bush expands on the early personality Twain presents and builds on the immersion and discovery of self in Davidson’s Tracks by including more robust research and linked digressions that tie into the broader theme of the memoir. Watson begins by recounting a story of the bush, his story. He shifts focus, from near to far as his memoir unfolds, from the gum leaves on his grandmother’s veranda, which caused her to sweep with a superstitious fury; the vicious nature of the bush, which almost claimed Polish adventurer Paul Strzelecki’s life in 1840 as he scrapped through the gullies of the South Gippsland Ranges; and the early settlers who learned to clear, burn, and scorch the bush in order to establish farming. ‘The bush could gulp you, or your children, much as the dread interior swallowed explorers and drovers and prospectors. A few kilometers from my place a monument has been erected to some children who got lost in the bush and died’ (2014, p. 18), Watson writes as a warning of the power of the bush. Watson also uses this theme to subtly comment on politics and the change in the general opinion of the bush in Australia; it has become everything that isn’t in the center of a city, and because of this, ‘in the modern sense the bush means everything and therefore almost nothing. It is nine-tenths nonsense’ (2014, p. 69). Watson is critical of the myth of ‘the bush’ at the same time as he writes about its romantic influence on his own life. ‘The bush was the nursery of local legend,’ (2014, p. 92) he notes. Watson cites how once upon a time coming from the land, as his grandparents did, gave people resilience and tenacity that he doesn’t see anymore. The bush was once a thing that was shaped and made people hard and proud, where communities with schools, hospitals, roads, and churches were created. As a modern counter to this, Watson uses the town of Nimbin, ‘an icon of alternative living,’ (2014, p. 186) on the mid north coast of New South Wales as an example of the changing impression of the bush many Australians have. It was formerly just a town with a war memorial and a mechanic’s hall, which only came into existence because of the once abundant cedar that was felled there. It is now, in Watson’s words, ‘a marijuana-pickled, bad taste rural slum,’ (2014, p. 186) where the past is laid to waste and the new age vision of what it is to be in nature is supplanted for the visitor. Watson also demonstrates importance of engagement with place and culture within his memoir, eschewing the ‘skating’ of Twain for something more closely resembling the immersion of Davidson. Where Watson’s memoir differs though is through the depth of research. Within the index there are two pages just on the references to the Indigenous relationship with the bush – from eel traps and Murray River clans to resistance battles and winter wurlies. Every chapter resonates through the experience of the Indigenous people to ensure that the reader

Travel Memoir and Australia  201 understands the evolution and story of the bush beyond Watson’s particular lens. He writes extensively of the Indigenous connection with the bush in the chapter ‘A Collision of Cultures’ as he drives through the Mallee region of Victoria during a mouse plague, ‘wheelbarrows full of them’ (2014, p. 151) marauding through the wheat fields introduced by the settlers. This gives Watson the chance to explore the settler’s romantic ideal within wheat country while also examining the nature of Indigenous name places in the region, and the fact that the true meaning of ‘Mallee’ itself has been lost in translation between the Wergaia language, the Jardwadjali name, and the hasty interpretation by settlers of a word possibly misheard. Because of this anecdote Watson then prompts the reader to pause and consider the more systematic indifference white settlers have shown to Indigenous culture beyond renaming – that the disregard in renaming sacred Dreaming places shows the sort of reckless indifference that has become an accomplice to broader Indigenous decline in Australia beyond the bush; ‘Where Europeans saw Sirius, the Aboriginals saw the wedge-tailed eagle. When Europeans took possession of the earth they also colonized the heavens. What had been a possum in a tree became the Southern Cross,’ he writes (2014, p. 163). It is the overall ambition of the narrative that is unique in Watson’s memoir. The itinerary is broad, and the travel is thematic, though the broader significance of the bush – to the original Indigenous people, the early settlers, his grandparents, and now to himself, sheltered on the slopes of Mount Macedon 60-kilometers from Melbourne, is what endures here. While Watson examines, and is not immune to the legend of the bush created by characters as removed as Henry Lawson to John Howard, he still understands that it is a narrative and a theme integral to the experience of being in Australia. Hirst writes in his review for The Monthly, ‘From this retreat Watson has contemplated what humans have made of this land and opened his mind to us on that grand subject’ (2014). Watson returns to the bush himself in the final chapter after a life lived in the city, a coming home to reignite the memories spawned in the introduction on the veranda and among the trees, animals, and giant ferns of his grandparents’ shack. He does so to bind the memoir together, that of the evolution of the bush in the Australian public, literary, and political consciousness, and the quieter more reflective motivation for himself and ‘the silence, the view into something else, and the birds’ (2014, p. 306) to quiet the metronome of city life he picked up from 40 years away from the bush.

Conclusion As Couser writes ‘travel writing is, at bottom, single-experience life writing’ (2011 p. 129). The three authors analyzed here demonstrate that when looking at travel memoir in Australia there is a spectrum

202  Ben Stubbs within this ‘single-experience life writing’ which has grown from the fleeting and self-centered writing of Twain, through to the immersed inner journey of Davidson, through to the research and trans-genre approach with Watson. Twain’s view of Australia captures the point of view of an outsider all too aware of his own influence at the end of his career, and the experience of skating across the surface of Australia prevents his journey from engaging as much as it could. Contrary to this, as a writer at the beginning of things, Davidson lays the groundwork for what is possible with travel memoir in Australia nearly 100 years after Twain. Her immersion, honesty, and engagement with place have influenced many travel memoirists in Australia since – most recently with Douglas (2012) and Bryan (2012), who engage with the desert in a similar way. Don Watson’s ode to the scrub in The Bush demonstrates the progression of travel memoir in Australia from self-centered, fleeting narrative, to one that embraces immersion, self-reflection, and the benefits of trans-genre perspective. The Bush contains a plethora of influences – memoir, travel, journal, history, poetry, and political and personal reflection demonstrating that travel memoir in Australia can encapsulate place and personal growth while also advancing the reach of the subgenre as an important contribution to the field and representation of the people and the country. In the wake of Davidson’s travel memoir, it led to the opening up of the genre – to Indigenous perspectives, the advancement of popular travel writing in Australia, and of the importance of both adventure and the female point of view uncovering the multitude of Australian stories. As Watson’s The Bush (2014) becomes part of the canon – as a work which acknowledges the past and advances the possibilities for travel memoir in Australia – it will be important to observe how the genre can continue the task of ‘making the familiar strange and the unfamiliar manageable’ (2015, p. 467) into the future as White and Greenwood hope for in their analysis of Australian travel writing. Just as memoir more generally has become a culturally important and popular form (Yagoda 2009), so too has the subgenre of travel memoir. It has expanded its popularity and critical esteem, and this is demonstrated by the evolution of the form in Australia. Initially it was a narrow manifestation of ‘single-experience life writing,’ as seen with Twain’s selfish and surface oriented ‘skating’ across the continent. This expanded as Robyn Davidson wrote Tracks to show its potential as a creative, selfaware form with a less imperialist relationship to landscape. The same critical esteem and cultural currency (Couser 2011, p. 3) which now sees memoir rival fiction for popularity has been realized in the latest example of travel memoir in Australia with Don Watson’s The Bush, which shows that travel memoir can now involve creativity, self-awareness, and a genre hybridity with history, poetry, literature, and journalism combining to demonstrate the depth now possible within travel memoir in Australia.

Travel Memoir and Australia  203

References Baine Campbell, M. 2002, ‘Travel and its theory’, in P. Hulme & T. Youngs (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 261–78. Bean, C. 1910, On The Wool Track. Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Beck, M. S. 2016, ‘Traveling, writing and engagement in Robyn Davidson’s tracks’, Ilha do Desterro, vol. 69, no. 2, pp. 93–106. Florianopolis: Editora DAUFSC. Benterrak, K., Muecke, S. & Roe, P. 1984, Reading the Country: introduction to nomadology, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, WA. Blanton, C. 1997, Travel Writing: the self and the world, Routledge, New York. Bongiorno, F. 2014, ‘Travels in the Heart of Australia’, Australian Book Review, October 2014, Viewed 31 January 2017, www.australianbookreview.com. au/abr-online/current-issue/123-october-2014-no-365/2170-travels-in-theheart-of-australia. Bridgman, R. 1987, Traveling in Mark Twain, University of California Press, Berkeley. Bryan, G. 2012. To Hell or High Water: walking in the footsteps of Henry Lawson, Big Sky Publishing, Newport. Clacy, E. 2007, A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852–53 [1853], Echo Library, Fairford. Conover, T. 2017, Immersion: a writers guide to going deep, University of Chicago Press (Kindle Edition), Chicago. Couser, G. 2011, Memoir: an introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Dana, R. 2009 [1840], Two Years Before the Mast, Signet Classics, New York. Davidson, R. 1980, Tracks, Jonathan Cape, London. Douglas, H. 2012. Catch Up with the Sun, Finch Publishing, Sydney. Flannery, T. 1998, The Explorers: stories of discovery and adventure from the Australian frontier, Grove Press, New York. Flannery, T. 2004, Country, Text Publishing, Melbourne. Fussell, P. 1980, Abroad: British literary traveling between the wars, Oxford University Press, Oxford. George, D. 2005, Travel Writing Then and Now, LP Publications, Melbourne. Hemley, R. 2012, A Field Guide for Immersion Writing: memoir, journalism, and travel, University of Georgia Press, Athens. Hill, E. 1956, The Great Australian Loneliness, Robertson & Mullens Limited, Melbourne. Hirst, J. 2014, ‘Shaped for Good Purpose’, The Monthly, October 2014, Viewed 6 October 2016, www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/october/1412085600/ john-hirst/shaped-good-purpose. Howitt, W. 1855, A Boy’s Adventures in the Wilds of Australia, Ticknor and Fields, Boston. Mahood, M. 2000, Craft for a Dry Lake, Anchor Books, Melbourne. Melton, J. 2002, Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: the tide of a great popular movement, University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa. Morrison, G. 2017, Writing Home: writing, literature and belonging in Australia’s red centre, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Rothwell, N. 2003, Wings of the Kite-hawk: a journey into the heart of Australia, Picador, Sydney.

204  Ben Stubbs Sims, N. & Kramer, M. (eds.) 1995, Literary journalism, Ballantine Books, New York. Trollope, A. 1873, Australia and New Zealand, G. Robertson, Melbourne. Twain, M. 2006 [1897], The Wayward Tourist, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Twain, M. 2010 [1869], The Innocents Abroad, Wordsworth Editions, Ware. Wasserman, R. & Almeida, S. 2009, ‘Introduction’, Ilha do Desterro, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 9–18. Florianopolis: Editora DAUFSC. Watson, D. 2006 [1897], ‘Introduction’, in M. Twain, The Wayward Tourist, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Watson, D. 2014, The Bush, Penguin, Melbourne. White, R. 2007, ‘Travel, writing and Australia’, Studies in Travel Writing, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 1–14. Routledge. White, R. & Greenwood, J. 2015, ‘Australia’. In C. Thompson (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing. Taylor & Francis, London, pp. 457–67. Yagoda, B. 2009, Memoir: a history, Riverhead Books, New York. Youngs, T. 2005, ‘Interview with Robyn Davidson’, Studies in Travel Writing, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 20–36. Routledge. Youngs, T. 2013, The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Section IV

Bloodlines

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13 Holding the Memories Death, Success, and the Ethics of Memoir Bunty Avieson

Introduction Timothy Conigrave’s internationally acclaimed memoir Holding the Man tells of a 15-year love affair that started as flirtatious notes between two Catholic schoolboys and ended with their deaths in the 1990s from AIDS. The book, which won the 1995 Human Rights Award for Non-Fiction, has been reimagined over the intervening decades as a series of play adaptations, a docudrama, and in 2015 a film starring Anthony La Paglia, Geoffrey Rush, and Guy Pearce. Shortly after the film opened in Sydney, I remember listening to friends discuss its merits. I hadn’t yet seen it but have been close to the author’s sister for many years, growing up around the corner from the Conigrave family and living through the events depicted in the film. This was of little interest to my film-going friends because, they explained, the sister was only a minor character. Of more interest was which of the two men gave the other AIDS. They asked if I knew. I struggled to respond and one friend helpfully explained that it was a ‘big deal in the Tim and John story.’ I remember the six years Tim and his partner, John Caleo, battled the slow, cruel disease. Which of them had brought it home hadn’t been a ‘big deal’ for them or the Conigrave family. Tim himself writes that he told John ‘It’s not important’ (1995, p. 170). But for my friends, this appeared to be the central intrigue of the story. Through the discussion that followed different versions of the two men emerged and it became apparent that we were drawing from conflicting narratives – mine came from a mélange of memory fragments, some three decades old, mixed in with events as seen through the eyes of my friend Anna and her family, while theirs had been formed by a two-hour film adaptation of a 286-page book, made by a highly skilled, award-winning director. The storylines and events were the same and yet oddly different in crucial ways. Like the famous Indian parable about the blind men describing the elephant, each of us had brought our own limited focus to Conigrave’s life story, as well as our personal biases and those of the various intermediaries we had encountered. This, of course, could be seen as just an

208  Bunty Avieson example of multiple subjectivities – my own, the filmmaker’s, and that of my cinema-going friends. But Conigrave’s memoir is worth investigating beyond what it offers as a poststructuralist view of the subjectivities of the reader/audience. As a case study, it highlights one of the core ethical challenges of memoir – namely a conflict between the obligation to be truthful and the obligation to be sensitive to others. In writing his story Conigrave reveals intimate details of two Catholic families confronted with their sons’ sexuality and subsequent deaths from AIDS, a disease treated by society at that time with ignorance, shame, and marginalization. The portrayals are uncompromising and often unflattering. In Holding the Man the tension between these obligations is further complicated by two factors – Conigrave’s death and the book’s enormous success, which has created posthumous celebrities of ‘Tim and John.’ Conigrave’s literary skill, along with the timing and forbidden nature of their schoolboy affair – a ‘Romeo and Juliet for the AIDS era’ (Robey 2016) – has propelled it onward, inspiring others to adapt and reinterpret the men’s story for film, stage, and docudrama, turning it into a ‘living memoir.’ But in the absence of the author, it is left to the two families to carry its legacy. Difficult as that is, Conigrave’s memoir supports the case that the memoirist’s responsibilities to others are limited, and it is the integrity of their own story that should be privileged.

The Story and the Players In the broadest terms, Holding the Man is a coming of age/coming out story, tracing the author’s early years at a private boys’ school in Melbourne, through his sexual awakening, experimentation, and fumbling affair with John Caleo, the captain of the under-16s football team. This love story is at the heart of the narrative as Conigrave pays tribute to the 15-year relationship which flourished despite resistance from their middle-class conservative Catholic families, various infidelities and relationship struggles, and ultimately their battle with AIDS. Our lives are by nature inter-contextual, and like all autobiographies Holding the Man comprises multiple biographies of communities and individuals. Conigrave was a graduate of Australia’s preeminent acting school, NIDA (1984), and chronicles his early years as an actor and playwright, as well as that intense period in the ’80s and early ’90s when the HIV virus suddenly exploded onto the world stage, creating panic and heightening homophobia. Conigrave’s memoir provides an historic ethnographic account of the terror experienced within Sydney’s gay community as it came to terms with this new plague that was decimating its population. It has been described as a ‘seminal account of the AIDS pandemic’ (Bird & Sharpe 2016) and is part of an international canon

Holding the Memories  209 of literature, dubbed ‘AIDS memoir’ by Jason Tougaw, which he defines as ‘the autobiographical act of bearing witness to a collective trauma’ (1998, p. 167).1 Most movingly Holding the Man is also a double-edged grief memoir. Conigrave details the slow decline of his lover, which is all the more poignant because he knows he faces the same future, and will have to endure it without his life partner. Conigrave is by Caleo’s bedside for his final breath, and afterwards washes his emaciated corpse. He writes of ‘caressing his body with sponges,’ ever aware of the disapproving presence of Caleo’s father, Bob. ‘I think it was a huge privilege. Not many people get to be there when their lover dies’ (Conigrave 1995, p. 276). While his own health is deteriorating, he spends his remaining time ‘urgently writing their shared story’ (Trevor 2016). His brother Nicholas says: ‘It meant a horrible death and actually that’s one of the things that’s always struck me is how Tim can watch John die and then spend two years writing this book’ (Conigrave 2015). Ten days after Conigrave delivered the manuscript to Penguin, he too died from AIDS-related illness, leaving the aftershocks of his personal revelations to reverberate in his absence.

The Shadow of Death The title Conigrave chose, Holding the Man, has multiple meanings. It is a football term for a player transgression, as well as a description of male lovers. It could equally be understood as what Conigrave hoped to achieve by writing the book – a way of holding his lover, creating a space to keep him alive. The grief memoir can be a way of writing the dead into immortality as well as providing the author with a method of dealing with the loss. Sigmund Freud proposed that the task of mourning is the ‘long-drawnout and gradual’ withdrawal of the ego’s libidinal attachment to the lost object (1917, p. 256). Only after the mourner recognizes and accepts the loss can the reconstitution of the shattered ego begin (pp. 244–5). The detachment is accomplished through hypercathexis, a process facilitated by remembering the lost object: ‘Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected’ (p. 245). Roland Barthes wrote after the death of his 84-year-old mother that his life’s purpose henceforth would be to write a tribute to her. He started compiling Mourning Diary a month after she died in 1977 and continued till his own death in 1980, but it took his literary executors 30 years to publish it, partly because it was so unlike his other works (Berman 2012, p. 265): ‘What I wanted…was “to write a little compilation about her, just for myself” (perhaps I shall write it one day, so that, printed, her memory will last at least the time of my own notoriety)’ (Barthes 1981, p. 63).

210  Bunty Avieson Jeffrey Berman traces the grief memoir as a genre back to C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, written in 1961. He says that writing about the experience of losing a loved one provides ‘the writing cure,’ a textual equivalent to the ‘talking cure’ used in psychotherapy (2010, p. 18). Kathleen Fowler says grief memoirs perform a multitude of functions, describing them as ‘fusion of art and heart, of writing and reflection, of literary consciousness and personal and social analysis, of the story of the deceased and the story of the griever’ (2007, p. 525). Under Fowler’s definition, what distinguishes the grief memoir from other literary treatments of grief is that the death of an intimate other and the grief of the author are the defining reality, right at the heart of the text. The author tries to convey the essence and the particularity of the person who has died and what Isabelle Allende terms their ‘journey of the soul’ (quoted in Fowler 2007, p. 527). ‘Grief,’ Fowler observes, ‘can become almost unlivable and the memoir becomes a means to try to contain it, to comprehend it, to make it bearable’ (2007, p. 547). Writing his memoir undeniably performs all of these functions of grief and mourning for Conigrave, writing Caleo into immortality while processing his own emotional pain, but it goes further into an examination of death. He chronicles the processes of dying, both as observer and through his lived experience, sharing with brutal honesty all the intimacies and indignities of AIDS, which Eric Michaels describes as ‘a disease of a thousand death rehearsals’ (1997, p. 94). Conigrave does not explore the challenges of negotiating an altered future without his partner, like the grief memoirs of Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) or Joyce Carol Oates in A Widow’s Story (2011). Instead he writes from that liminal space of grieving for his life partner while facing his own imminent death. His memoir charts his own course of dying and the existentialist quest of pondering his own physical disintegration. In an ontological contortion of memory and imagination, after Caleo has died and been buried, Conigrave takes himself back to a dark night of the soul where he remembers wrestling with their inevitable deaths. In bed I was awake for many hours, thinking. ‘I wonder what the moment of death will be like? Will I be so bombed on morphine I won’t even notice? Or will my soul crack me open making its escape? And when John dies, what will it be like, life without him? I want it all to go away. Leave me alone.’ (Conigrave 1995, p. 203) Cancer survivor Arthur Frank reflected on the narrative of illness as a way of emotionally processing the assault on one’s physicality and sense of personhood, describing himself as the ‘wounded storyteller.’ He argues that constructing stories about oneself provides a way to repair

Holding the Memories  211 the damage that illness has done to the person’s sense of where they are in life and where they may be going (1995, p. 53). But just as the grief memoir negotiates a new future, so does the author constructing an illness narrative. The emotional and ontological perspective is that they expect to recover, and they are processing their changed sense of self. In contrast, the dying author approaches their memoir with acute recognition of their own imminent annihilation. Life doesn’t come with a narrative, so we can only impose one in retrospect. Writing becomes a method of working through feelings of grief at their own loss of self, while making sense of their life and assembling it into some sort of cohesive narrative – memoir as a reconstructive project. They write as a counter to the capricious nature of fate and circumstance, which becomes most evident in circumstances such as that which faced Conigrave, who was not writing from the vantage point of old age, looking back over a long and satisfying life. His was cut short too soon, an unlucky death. In his situation writing was an act of agency and defiance, even as his physical abilities declined. Tougaw says that AIDS memoirists suffer from the tension between the need to write and the trauma of doing so. ‘The simultaneous narrative drive toward staying alive and coming to terms with imminent death give way in the end to resignation, and very often to an abandonment of writing’ (1998, p. 175). It is as Paul de Man declares – that death, in autobiography, is primarily a ‘linguistic predicament’ (1998, p. 930). How does a dying person write their ending? Conigrave solves this literary dilemma with an apostrophic address to his absent lover. He writes in the final chapter: Dear John, I am sitting in the garden at the back of my hotel, surrounded by orange trees and bougainvilleas… I guess the hardest thing is having so much love for you and it somehow not being returned. I develop crushes all the time, but that is just misdirected need for you. You are a hole in my life, a black hole. Anything I place there cannot be returned. I miss you terribly. Ci vedremo lassu, angelo (translation: See you soon, angel). (1995, pp. 285–6) Clinical Psychologist Simon Kennedy is in a unique position to consider the influence of death on Conigrave’s writing. In his professional life Kennedy is well versed in the practices of life writing as a palliative practice. Further, he knew both Conigrave and Caleo at school and was close to them in their final year. Kennedy read Holding the Man through these two lenses – as a clinician and friend – and concludes that Conigrave was often harsh about his own shortcomings, while reimagining Caleo through a misted lens. He surmises that the process of the illness had led to some depersonalization of John, as well as coloring their relationship

212  Bunty Avieson with suffering. ‘It is likely that grief would not have allowed him to think negatively about John (Caleo) or their relationship for any extended period’ (Kennedy 1999). It is not that anything was factually wrong, rather that death flavored Conigrave’s approach. Even where it is not foregrounded, as in the first half of the book dealing with his childhood and the early, mostly happy years of his life with Caleo, that thanatological viewpoint informs his authorial perspective.

The Spotlight of Success The book’s publication in 1995, two years after Caleo’s death and three months after Conigrave’s, would perhaps have remained as a small, contained moment of unwelcome attention for the two families, who could then have returned to privately grieve, except for its enduring success. The two families had responded differently to their sons’ deaths, just as they had to their sons’ relationship. The Conigrave family had for many years by then openly embraced John Caleo as their son’s life partner. The Caleo family, however, had continued to deny their son’s homosexuality, his relationship with Tim, and that he died of AIDS-related illness. Conigrave writes bitterly of being expunged from his lover’s life in the Caleo family death notices and at the funeral service (pp. 274, 278) and of his shock when the mother, Lois Caleo, told him John would be buried beside her and her husband, with no room for him (p. 268). The Conigrave family attended John’s funeral, but the Caleos stayed away from Tim’s. Holding the Man was published into these existing tensions and differences. Most AIDS memoirs were of their time and as attitudes have changed, so has their visibility, but in recognition of its enduring popularity Holding the Man has never been out of print and was reissued as an orange and white Popular Penguin in 2009. 2 UK newspaper The Telegraph calls it ‘soul-shaking’ and a ‘trailblazing book in gay Australian literature’ (Robey 2016); social commentator Benjamin Law describes it as a ‘monumentally loved book’ (n.d.); and The Guardian writes that it is ‘one of Australia’s most beloved non-fiction books’ (Buckmaster 2016). But the book was just the beginning. Holding the Man moved beyond the page and onto the stage, being turned into plays with various casts in Sydney (2006–2008, 2013), London’s West End (2010), and Los Angeles (2014), as well as the film, intended for an international audience, in 2015. The 2016 docudrama, called Remembering the Man, is a peculiar hybrid of styles combining Conigrave’s voice, recorded as an oral project by the National Library of Australia in 1993, with footage from old Caleo family videos, alongside new interviews with friends, commenting on events that occurred two to three decades earlier, from the foreign country of middle age and a new millennium.

Holding the Memories  213 While each iteration, from play to film to docudrama, draws from the original memoir, each production brings different perspectives, privileging different scenes and adding nuance, while also making their own, independent truth claims. This is not to say they are factually wrong, rather that the dramatic requirements of each form differs and each version has reoriented Conigrave’s original narrative to accommodate technical and creative needs. While it can be argued a book by a single author is a solo work; stage, film, and documentary are collaborative efforts, bringing the skills and subjectivities of a multitude of contributors to the final result, including actors, directors, script writers, and film editors. This ongoing interpretation, editing, and adaptation of Conigrave’s narrative means that even after his death, his story has become a ‘living’ memoir, ever-changing as it mutates within new forms. The creators of these new iterations face different ethical considerations to the memoirist. While they share the same obligation to the truth as Conigrave, for them that means being faithful to his original text, with all its inherent subjectivities, while negotiating the technical and creative requirements of their media form. To a great extent the audience can judge for themselves the integrity of each new iteration as Conigrave’s memoir is readily accessible. Further, each production makes clear they are multi-authored. While only Conigrave’s name appears on the cover of his book, the posters for the plays give Conigrave second billing to the playwright: ‘Holding The Man, by Tommy Murphy, from the book by Timothy Conigrave.’ The film poster also gives him second billing, crediting the film ‘from acclaimed director Neil Armfield, based on Timothy Conigrave’s classic memoir.’ For the families, these ongoing reimaginings of Conigrave’s memoir have a variety of consequences. On one hand, each new form serves to honor their sons/siblings, keeping them ‘alive’; but equally, with each new iteration comes a distancing, as there is no new truth to be revealed by the two men themselves, and each new version produces a further subjective interpretation of the young men and their story, often by people who didn’t know them.3 Conigrave wrote his story through the prism of death and dying, and these new interpretations force the families to keep revisiting that dark period, creating Groundhog Day for their grief. In her only interview John’s mother Lois Caleo reveals she hasn’t read the book, seen any of the plays, or the film. Speaking in 2015 to radio presenter Libbi Gorr, an old friend of her son from university, Lois says: ‘I know a lot of people might find that strange, but I couldn’t. I really could not go through the grief and the sorrow of it all again, it is just like it happened yesterday. The tragedy was the thing that nearly killed me, the sorrow of it, it was dreadful’ (2015). But not reading the book, seeing the plays, or watching the film hasn’t allowed her to avoid them entirely. Conigrave’s memoir turned her son into an international gay icon. When she visits his grave,

214  Bunty Avieson there are flowers laid by strangers, and she continues to receive letters and cards. This brings her both pleasure and suffering. It’s still in your heart and soul but then the film comes up and I get all the phone calls and letters. It brings it all back…I would say I had a hundred letters and cards from people all over the world about how some of them were in that situation themselves. The letters were beautiful and so understanding, and saying how much it helped them cope with their situation. (Caleo 2015) Conigrave’s mother Mary Gert feels the same deep well of grief but has responded differently. Like Lois Caleo the dominant emotion is aching sadness for her lost son, which has never abated. But she has attended first nights all over Australia, visited the set of the film, appeared as a background extra in the wedding scene, and travelled to London for its West End opening. She is gracious and proud when people come up to shake her hand, excited to meet ‘Tim’s mum’ and thanks them when they tell her how much the book changed their lives, making them feel better about being gay in a heterosexual world. But such fortitude carries an emotional cost for the 80-something widow. ‘Mum has seen the movie about four times. It rattles her, all the time, but she braves up,’ says Anna (pers. comments 2015).

Truth and Other People Most often when ethics of memoir are considered it is in terms of truth and representation. Lejeune identifies the ‘autobiographical pact’ – the tacit understanding between reader and writer that a memoir will represent the author’s world more or less directly (Couser 2012, p. 80). Couser explains memoir as owing a responsibility first to the historical record, then to the people the memoirists represent (2012, p. 79). What responsibilities does the memoirist have when these are in conflict? Do the sensitivities of the subject trump the author’s contract with the reader? In constructing their own life story, how much should an author consider the sensitivities of people further removed from themselves and their subjects, such as their families and the families of others? The Conigrave and Caleo families also have been appropriated and reimagined as part of the ‘Tim and John story,’ and with each new art form this process continues. During the years that Conigrave depicts in his memoir, his parents and siblings exist in worlds beyond his, but he writes them into being only in relation to his central narrative. This is sometimes a harsh view, not factually inaccurate, but by necessity, a limited view. Conigrave portrays the Caleo family as rigidly Catholic and harshly disapproving of his relationship with their son. He describes

Holding the Memories  215 how Lois told John that if he insisted on embarrassing the family by telling people he had AIDS, she didn’t know if she could be his mother (p. 241). More than two decades after his death, Lois Caleo says her views have changed. How other people judge me didn’t worry me in any way and it still doesn’t worry me. Nobody’s perfect, it was hard to come to grips with then, but I do understand now. It was all so foreign to me, not ever having gone through any of this before – gay people and HIV – it was really hard to comprehend, but all I was caring about was my son… I think a lot more people do now accept the situation and you are what you are when you’re born. And like it or not you must understand it and appreciate it. (Caleo 2015) In writing the memoir, Conigrave has set in aspic the attitudes and personalities of both families as they were at that time and in those circumstances. This gives them an existence in two dimensions simultaneously; while holding fixed roles in the Tim and John story, they are being changed by the telling and retelling of that story, as well as by the passing of time itself. For Conigrave’s younger brother Nicholas, the evolution of the memoir into film has been profoundly beneficial. On the film set, Anna recalls Nicholas telling the actor Craig Stott, who played Caleo, that he felt ashamed of his behavior in the 1980s. Stott responded that he was being too tough on himself, saying: ‘You were only 14, mate.’ Anna says it was as if a burden lifted from Nicholas, now 53 (pers. comments 2015). He gained a new perspective and was finally able to forgive his own confusion and youthful prejudice about his brother’s homosexuality. He is now able to see his role in his brother’s life differently. While the memoir fixes the attitudes and behaviors of family members in ways that are no longer accurate, it is clear that its success and evolution into new forms has provided them with opportunities for reflection and growth.

Responsibilities of the Author That there is no singular ‘truth’ is a poststructuralist truism. Writers create narrative selectively and through the prism of their own subjectivity, which in Conigrave’s memoir includes the shadow of illness, grief, and death. Conigrave and Caleo, like all people, were multi-­faceted individuals, complex and capable of the full panoply of emotions and opinions, often contradictory and sometimes contrary. They exhibited different sides of themselves to their families, each other and the world at large, changing according to mood and circumstance. In short, they lived lives beyond what could be fitted into a 286-page book. This is equally true of the friends, family, and acquaintances that

216  Bunty Avieson make appearances in the narrative. But the authorial pact of memoirists with their readers is to tell ‘their’ truth. That is not the whole truth, a contested notion in itself, rather it is well understood that authors are selective. Conigrave wrote in first person, and the reader is clear that he is simultaneously author, narrator, and protagonist. It is his point of view being presented. Even so, his authorial power is absolute, which leads him into the precarious ethical terrain of making a subjective, but definitive, representation of others, creating the initial text, from which all the other works have followed. Conigrave writes Caleo into existence, representing him in a mimetic sense (explaining who he was), a political sense (presenting his views), and in the biographical sense (an account of who he was). Lois Caleo said in her 2015 radio interview that while it was Conigrave’s ‘right’ to write the book, she found even the idea of it ‘confronting,’ which is also evidenced by her avoidance of reading the book, or seeing the plays and film. And yet… in a seemingly contradictory decision, after 20 years of avoidance, she chose to help the producers of the 2016 docudrama Remembering The Man, providing them with family film footage and photos. According to producer Nickolas Bird, Lois called him during filming to offer encouragement. ‘She said to me, “Oh, I just felt like calling you. Touching base to see how the film is going. Telling you what a good thing I think it’s going to be and how important I think it’s going to be for John’s story”’ (Buckmaster 2016). After decades of avoiding the book, plays, and film, this new version would appear to offer Lois something else, a chance to have her son reimagined, beyond Conigrave’s version of him. This might reposition him in the center of the story, which for his mother is undoubtedly his rightful place. To read someone else’s representation of your son, that presents him outside your understanding of him, must indeed be difficult. Just as sexuality is a core part of our being, it is not all of our being, and certainly not the primary lens through which a mother would view her son. Reading Conigrave’s memoir, which covers in some detail their sexual relationship, would not help to bring back John, her son, as she knew him. Rather it presented a version of him she hadn’t wanted to know. The fact that two decades later she chose to contribute to the docudrama suggests that over time she has come to an acceptance of her son’s public profile as a gay man and one half of the Tim and John story, even if she still finds the book unappealing. In the AIDS memoir Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz writes that it was common among families of AIDS victims in those early years, to try to erase their sons’ sexuality after death. Partly this was to do with the shame and stigma surrounding the disease. Wojnarowicz confronted a legal and ethical dilemma when he wanted to include in his memoir letters that he had received from a lover. To avoid legal action by the parents, Wojnarowicz created the pseuodynm ‘Dakota,’ to conceal his

Holding the Memories  217 lover’s identity. But writing the man’s identity out of the account came at a moral cost. Wojnarowicz writes: They were letters pertaining to his sexuality in early morning dreams, his desires for a structure of his own choosing,… I chose these letters because they were the only surviving pieces of evidence that allowed Dakota to speak on his own behalf about his humanity, his animal grace, his own spirituality… [In trying to get permission to print the letters], I spoke to his brother, who told me that Dakota’s life work … [was] destroyed by the parents… his entire identity had been murdered by his folks… it is very emotional for me to have to participate in the process of denying him a voice by editing from this manuscript his personal words to me. (1991, pp. 163–4) Like Dakota’s parents, the Caleo family had also denied their son’s sexuality in life and in death, telling extended family that he had died from cancer. Voice requires a material form to be embodied, and Conigrave served as Caleo’s voice, his advocate, facilitating his truth from beyond death, presenting Caleo’s sexuality and relationships as central to his life. It is inevitable that in the process of writing Caleo, Conigrave also ‘overwrites’ him, both giving him a voice while at the same time, speaking for and over him. It is Conigrave’s Caleo that is presented to the world. The selection of anecdotes, the framing of stories, even the vernacular, reflects the author’s sensibilities and worldview. But imperfect as that may be, still it emerges from a desire to tell John’s truth and counter the Caleo family’s misrepresentation of John’s sexuality and his life. The Caleos were never going to be happy with Conigrave’s representation of their son, but what moral obligations did he hold to them? What ethical responsibilities does any memoirist carry? In biography, one cannot libel a dead person, and the legal right to privacy terminates at death (Couser 2004, p. 6); however, this is a low bar that doesn’t address other forms of harm. In Conigrave’s case what harms were perpetuated on the family of his dead lover? Lois made clear in her radio interview that matters such as sexuality and family infamy paled to insignificance against the enormous tragedy of her son’s death. Grief, particularly for a parent losing a child, is an all-encompassing state, causing a visceral pain that goes far beyond embarrassment or shame. The fact that Conigrave’s memoir presented a side of John that the Caleo family had chosen not to recognize doesn’t increase or diminish their heartbreak at losing their son and brother, and publication of the memoir shouldn’t be conflated with the undeniable tragedy of Caleo’s death. At worst it reminds them of that sad time. But as Lois demonstrated, they were able to limit their exposure by not reading the book or seeing the various productions. What has seeped through that wall of denial are cards and letters and flowers

218  Bunty Avieson at his graveside, an outpouring of affection that demonstrate a different attitude to his homosexuality and tragic death, which ultimately has provided some solace.

Conclusion Two decades after Conigrave’s death the film adaptation of his memoir was nominated for six awards at the 2015 Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards. At the pre-show cocktail party I stood with Mary Gert Conigrave as she sipped champagne and graciously accepted praise from high-profile actors and directors who sought her out. A woman of dry wit, she looked around the room, raised her glass in a toast and said with a twinkle in her eye: ‘As I told Timothy, no-one is interested in your sex life.’ Her grief at losing her son hasn’t dimmed, but she wears the legacy of his memoir lightly and with pride. It would appear the Caleo family’s attitudes also have changed. Lois has travelled a long way from the pages of Conigrave’s book, where she threatens to disown her son if he makes public his AIDS status (p. 241). She provided family videos for use in the docudrama and also demonstrated acceptance in her 2015 radio interview, recognizing the benefit of the book and film to other gay men and their families. To help people understand the world and that we’re all not the same, we’re all born different and that’s God’s way – I think that’s wonderful. If it does that, that is terrific. (Caleo 2015) Couser poses the question that if writing about your own life inevitably means violating the privacy of others and possibly harming them, what values might offset the ethical liabilities (2004, p. xi)? This is where Conigrave’s memoir offers some useful insights. While it is not possible to know the effects on all of the Caleo family, particularly John’s father Bob, it would seem that at least for the Conigrave family and Lois, the memoir has prompted acceptance, reflection and personal growth. It is also clear that Holding the Man benefits the wider community. In 2015 UK pop singer Sam Smith posted on his Instagram account: ‘The most powerful thing for me was how this book captured what it’s like to grow up gay and all those confusing scary and amazing moments I had coming out and realising who I was…this book and film pretty much changed my life’ (Zuel 2015). Smith’s post received more than 131,800 ‘likes.’ One of the strengths of memoir is that it situates the reader inside the author’s interior world. Holding the Man has demonstrated both enduring appeal in its literary form as well as the ability to inspire other storytellers to re-present it in a myriad of ways. Conigrave could not have known how far his words would reverberate or for how long and

Holding the Memories  219 in what new forms. Asking a writer to anticipate what might happen to their text is to place an impossible and unrealistic burden. His death and the story’s success have contributed to the complicated emotions felt throughout the past two decades for both families, including grief, shame, pride, and acceptance, while also contributing to a broader conversation and providing a rich ethnographic account of a specific time and place – taking us inside the experiences of AIDS stigma, homophobia, love, dying, and death. For all these reasons, and with the benefit of hindsight, Conigrave’s prime responsibility as creator of the original work was to the integrity of his story, and he was justified in privileging it over his responsibilities to others, which includes his representation of his lover, the sensibilities of his lover’s family, and the emotional legacy his own family continues to carry.

Notes 1 Other popular AIDS memoirs by international authors include: Monette 1992 & 1988, Wojnarowicz 1991, Arenas 1993, Callen 1990 & Preston 1995. Also American-born anthropologist Eric Michaels, who spent five years with Indigenous Australian communities in Central Australia, wrote Unbecoming in 1997. Thomas G Couser devotes a large section to AIDS writing in his 1997 book Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. 2 This honor was also afforded another Australian AIDS memoir, April Fool’s Day, written in 1993 by popular author Bryce Courtenay about his son Damon, a hemophiliac who contracted AIDS through an infected blood transfusion. Damon had wanted to write the memoir himself but was unable to finish it, and on his deathbed asked his famous father to ‘take up the baton and to fill the book with love; love, he felt, was the key to increased tolerance, greater acceptance and improved treatment in every sense of the word’ (Harris 2012). 3 In a nod to Lyotard’s conception of metanarrative, it must be acknowledged that this paper is yet another iteration, appropriating the stories of people involved in the book, and beyond, according to the inevitable subjectivity of this author.

References Arenas, R. 1993, Before Night Falls: a memoir, Viking, New York. Barthes, R. 1981, Camera Lucida: reflections on photography, translated by Richard Howard, Hill & Wang, New York. Berman, J. 2010, Companionship in Grief: love and loss in the memoirs of C. S. Lewis, John Bayley, Donald Hall, Joan Didion, and Calvin Trillin, University of Massachusetts Press, viewed 12 May 2017, www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctt5vk1xn.11. Berman, J. 2012, Dying in Character: memoirs on the end of life, University of Massachusetts Press, Massachusetts, USA Bird, N. & Sharpe, E. 2016, Remembering the Man, docudrama, Waterbyrd Filmz, Melbourne, Australia.

220  Bunty Avieson Buckmaster, L. 2016, ‘“I just sat there and cried”: the making of Remembering the Man’, guardian.com, April 12. Caleo, L. 2015, Interview by Libbi Gorr, radio, 774 Melbourne, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 30 September. Callen, M. 1990, Surviving AIDS, Vintage, New York. Conigrave, N. 2015, Interview by Monique Shafter, television, 7.30 Report, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 7 August. Conigrave, T. 1995, Holding the Man, Penguin Books Australia, Victoria, Australia. Couser, T. 1997, Recovering Bodies: illness, disability, and life writing, University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin. Couser, T. 2004, Vulnerable Subjects: ethics and life writing, Cornell University Press, New York. Couser, T. 2012, ‘Memoir’s ethics’, Memoir: an introduction, Oxford University Press, New York. Fowler, K. 2007, ‘“So new, so new”: art and heart in women’s grief memoirs’, Women’s Studies, vol. 36, no. 7, pp. 525–49. Frank, A. 1995, The Wounded Storyteller, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Freud, S. 1917, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by James Strachey & Anna Freud, Hogarth Press, London, vol. 14, pp. 243–58. Harris, E. 2012, ‘Bryce Courtenay: a brief encounter’, ABC Northern Tasmania, viewed 12 May 2017, www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2012/12/18/3656647.htm. Kennedy, S. 1999, ‘Life review and heroic narrative: embracing pathology and attention to context’, Australia and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 1–10. Law, B. n.d., ‘Holding the Man and AIDS in Australia’, The Wheeler Centre: Books Writing Ideas, viewed 12 May 2017, www.wheelercentre.com/projects/ the-long-view/holding-the-man-and-aids-in-australia. Michaels, E. 1997, Unbecoming, Duke University, North Carolina, US. Monette, P. 1992, Becoming a Man: half a life story, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York. Monette, P. 1988, Borrowed Time: an AIDS memoir, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich San Diego. Preston, J. 1995, Winter’s Light: reflections of a yankee queer, University Press of New England, Hanover, New Hampshire. Robey, T. 2016, ‘A Romeo and Juliet for the AIDS era’, The Telegraph, 11 March. Tougaw, J. 1998, ‘Testimony and the subjects of AIDS memoirs’, a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 235–256. Trevor, P. 2016, Interview, in N Bird & E Sharpe’s docudrama, Remembering The Man, Waterbyrd Filmz, Melbourne, Australia. Wojnarowicz, D. 1991, Close to the Knives: a memoir of disintegration, Vintage, New York. Zuel, B. 2015, ‘Sam Smith tells his fans the Australian film Holding the Man ‘changed my life’’, Sydney Morning Herald, July 30, viewed 12 May 2017, www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/sam-smith-tells-his-fans-theaustralian-film-holding-the-man-changed-my-life-20150729-ginep1.html.

14 First-person Narratives and Feminism Tracing the Maternal DNA Kath Kenny

Introduction Towards the end of 2014 the Good Weekend – the weekend magazine of Australian broadsheet newspapers the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald – ran a short column, ‘Pill-pop culture’ (Pryor 2014). By regular columnist Lisa Pryor, a mother and full-time medical student, it contained a very personal confession: Pryor told her readers that when people asked her ‘How do you do it all?’ she had taken to responding to her interlocutors with ‘the truth’ – ‘caffeine and antidepressants.’ Pryor said her revelation led to all kinds of ‘juicy’ conversations: ‘custody battles, affairs, career doubts, parental ambivalence.’ But her even more public confession to Good Weekend readers – that ‘a little bit of neurochemical assistance helps me actually enjoy the glorious disaster of raising two small children while studying medicine full time’ – also led to a national conversation about Pryor’s mothering. Some commentators condemned Pryor’s parenting1; others, notably female journalists and mental health professionals, applauded Pryor’s frank disclosure. Four months later Mia Freedman, 2 the founder of the Mamamia Women’s Network, published a 4,800-word personal essay (Freedman 2015) detailing her nervous breakdown, a collapse brought on by the anxiety she felt while juggling three young children and a growing online startup. Freedman concluded her essay – published the day she launched a new website for older women, Debrief Daily – with the confession that she found a solution in a good psychiatrist and a prescription of the antidepressant Lexapro. Freedman’s essay also prompted a public debate. Some commenters took her to task for recklessly recommending a prescription drug to her fans; dozens of readers, meanwhile, praised Freedman’s candor. In comments that took the total words on the page to 17,000, readers thanked Freedman for sharing her story, many writing that she had described their own experiences exactly. As lightning rods for heated discussions about what a good mother looks like, Pryor’s and Freedman’s stories, and the responses to them, are instructive in showing just how stubbornly resistant are normative ideas about women and mothers. For Australian audiences watching these

222  Kath Kenny events unfold, one of their most salient features was the abuse directed at Pryor and Freedman by a former leader of the Australian Labor Party, Mark Latham, then a columnist with the Australian Financial Review.3 But there was another, overlooked aspect to this story which fascinated me: more than 50 years after the feminist journalist Betty Friedan (1963/2013)4 documented unhappy housewives consuming prescription drugs because they apparently had too little to do, and 40 years after another feminist journalist, Anne Summers (1975, p. 103), wrote in Australia about ‘vast numbers of women…imbibing massive doses of what they see as soothing panaceas: sedatives and tranquillizers,’ here were two first person stories by feminist journalists5 who confessed to taking prescription drugs for their mental health because they had too much to do. Fertile ground, it seemed, for the observant feminist scholar.6

Feminism, Storytelling, and Consciousness Raising Feminists have long used a form of memoir – the personal testimony – to highlight the contradictions between normative expectations and representations of women and actual women’s lives. A century ago the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst wrote a vivid first person account of being force-fed in prison to highlight the suffering some women were prepared to endure in the campaign for suffrage.7 More recently, feminist writing is increasingly memoir-based (a point I will return to). Memoir and feminist life writing share common features: their focus on key events or turning points in a life, the attempt to locate patterns and themes in a life story, and the search for lessons that can be gleaned from a life. While telling personal stories has long been a feature of feminist literature, it was Second Wave feminism, emerging from the American New Left, that gave the practice a formal name – consciousness-raising – and explicitly linked personal storytelling to political action. Recently several scholars (Friedman 2013; Lopez 2009; Sowards & Renegar 2004) have argued that contemporary women and mothers writing about their lives in print and online are the inheritors of Second Wave feminism’s consciousness-raising tradition. In this chapter I want to take up this argument and ask whether the two contemporary first-person stories I opened this chapter with represent a continuity with, or a break from, Second Wave feminism’s consciousness raising. At first glance Pryor’s and Freedman’s texts, in offering readers opportunities to experience identification, revelation, and consolation, appear unmistakably to be an offspring of Second Wave feminism’s consciousness raising. But while Second Wave feminists used personal stories to interrogate problems in women’s lives and then to develop political movements for social change,8 Pryor’s and Freedman’s stories emphasize personal transformation, including a medical transformation of the self.

First-person Narratives and Feminism  223 I consider these contemporary stories in terms of a celebrity feminism that now operates in the mediasphere: as Taylor notes, ‘media culture is now the primary site for the construction and circulation of various forms of feminism’ (2014, p. 770). And I suggest that personal stories, once recruited by feminists to build movements, are now harnessed by star feminists to build brands. Before coming to these points, I first want to briefly turn to the United States in 1957 and to a young mother and freelance journalist: the woman who helped set the scene that would soon be occupied by consciousness raising groups around the world. Betty Friedan, a psychology graduate and mother of three, was bored writing about breastfeeding for magazines such as Ladies Home Journal (2013, p. 512). She became obsessed, instead, with the idea of surveying 200 of her Smith College classmates about their lives. Friedan gathered stories of women who felt unfulfilled, empty, and desperate (2013, pp. 7–8). She met women ‘in colonial houses in a small Massachusetts town; on patios in Memphis; in suburban and city apartments; in living rooms in the Midwest,’ famously recording ‘the problem that has no name’ (2013, p. 7). The feminine mystique, as Friedan calls it, is the idealized image of romance, marriage, and a house full of children. And it bore only a tangential relationship to the lives of the middle-class women she interviewed. Rereading The Feminine Mystique (TFM) today, it’s striking to notice how few details Friedan gives away of her own life story. Friedan alludes to her life: As she tells other women’s stories, her professional frustrations, her own experiences of the mind-numbing boredom of constant childcare, and her irritation that women are expected to devote their hard-won education and energy to local community projects, infuse the text. ‘The book came from somewhere deep within me,’ Friedan wrote in the TFM’s tenth anniversary introduction: …all my experience came together in it: my mother’s discontent, my own training in Gestalt and Freudian psychology, the fellowship I felt guilty about giving up, the stint as a reporter which taught me how to follow clues to the hidden underside of reality, my exodus to the suburbs and all the hours with other mothers shopping at supermarkets, taking the children swimming, coffee klatches. (2013, pp. 514–15) Friedan, however, was less interested in the specific biographical details of any one woman’s life than in finding the common denominators of all women’s lives: the boredom and desperation that could lead ‘happy suburban wives [to] go berserk one night, and run shrieking through the street without any clothes on as one doctor told Friedan (2013, pp. 278–9). Friedan wanted to write the autobiography of a whole class of women. ‘I saw myself on every page,’ writes the Second Wave US feminist

224  Kath Kenny Susan Brownmiller in her memoir (1999, p. 3). While acknowledging the limitations of Friedan’s work, particularly its focus on ‘middle-class suburban housewives who downed too many pills’ (a criticism others have shared), Brownmiller credits Friedan for inspiring a mass form of consciousness raising: ‘A revolution was brewing, but it took a visionary to notice’ (1999, p. 3). Brownmiller’s memoir goes on to describe a 1967 meeting of the nascent women’s liberation movement in a New York apartment, four years after Friedan’s book was published, where she says the term ‘consciousness raising’ was first coined (1999, p. 21). The assembled women were mostly veterans of the Left, influenced by the Marxist notion of ‘false consciousness.’ Activist Anne Forer spoke up, asking: ‘Would everybody please give me an example from their own life on how they experienced oppression as a woman? I need to hear it to raise my own consciousness.’ Forer said her words particularly resonated with Kathie Amatniek (later Kathie Sarachild): ‘From then on [Sarachild] sort of made it an institution and called it consciousness raising’ (Forer, quoted in Brownmiller 1999, p. 21). In 1970 Sarachild published a manifesto, ‘A Program for Feminist Consciousness Raising,’ that linked telling personal stories and political action: ‘Our feelings will lead us to our theory, our theory to our action, our feelings about that action to a new theory and then to a new action’ (1970, p. 78). She recommends beginning with ‘bitch sessions’ (sharing stories), moving on to find the ‘common root’ of women’s feelings and experiences, discussing ‘methods of struggle,’ and, finally, suggestions for collective ‘actions.’ By 1972 the practice had spread to cities across and beyond America (Brownmiller 1999; Curthoys 1994). Although feminist thinking of this period was not untouched by psychoanalytic theories,9 more recently poststructuralist, postcolonial, and queer theories have critiqued the notion of a simple false consciousness opposed to a unified and ‘correct’ consciousness, providing us with more complex understandings of divided and unstable subjects. Nevertheless, personal narratives hold an enduring appeal: first-person stories are among the most-read stories on feminist websites, in a trend Slate’s Laura Bennett (2015) evocatively calls ‘the first-person industrial complex.’10 Stories that communicate what it feels like to be in the world offer readers moments of identification, a respite from feeling alone, and they can help readers find words for experiences they previously had no language for.

Feminist Consciousness Raising Online In recent years, scholars have argued that consciousness raising has been given a new life by women writing personal stories online (Friedman 2013; Lopez 2009). May Friedman likens mommy blogs to ‘consciousness-raising groups of the past’ (2013, p. 11), contending that by allowing women to write about the contradictions, confusions, and

First-person Narratives and Feminism  225 chaos of motherhood, mommy bloggers represent a new kind of feminist activist. Friedman further argues that mommy blogs, by allowing for constantly shifting conversational spaces between authors and other voices, accommodate and produce hybrid, cyborg, and queer11 maternal identities (2013, pp. 22–7). She confesses that mommy blogs ameliorated the crisis she experienced when she became a mother, providing ‘intimacy and dialogue’: ‘I leapt hungrily from blog to blog…thrilled to confirm that I was not the only new mother feeling as I did’ (2013, pp. 3–4). Lori Lopez likewise contends mommy blogs are potentially political spaces transforming women’s ‘personal narratives of struggle and challenge into interactive conversations with other mothers,’ adding that showing ‘the ugly side of motherhood has the potential to be liberating and beneficial for all women’ (2009, p. 744). Lisa Pryor’s and Mia Freedman’s confessional columns share many of the features of the mommy blog Lopez and Friedman discuss. Mia Freedman’s background is as a professional journalist (she famously edited Australia’s Cosmopolitan in her twenties), but during a hiatus between jobs she started a personal blog, Mamamia. By March it was clocking 40 million monthly page impressions (Hooper 2014), and by June 2015 the Mamamia Women’s Network was a multimillion-­dollar business employing 100 full-time staff (Cadzow 2015). Mamamia’s articles share many of the features of the amateur mommy blog: highly opinionated and often very personal tales about pregnancy, parenting, relationships, friendships, and divorce. As Jane Cadzow (2015) writes in a Good Weekend profile, Freedman specializes in confessional journalism: ‘she has told the world about everything from her miscarriage and her fear of flying to her inability to put anything in an oven without burning it.’ That the publication of Mia Freedman’s ‘I’m finally ready to talk about my anxiety’ column coincided with the launch of her Debrief Daily site for older women indicates just how intertwined Freedman’s personal story and her identity as a writer and publisher have become. Friedman argues the power of blogs is in the way they have replaced notions of objectivity with an ‘insistence on authorial stance’ (2013, p. 30). Mia Freedman’s anxiety story is, likewise, relayed in the author’s highly personal authorial style. Freedman uses the pronoun ‘I’ 204 times, and her account of a twelve-day long panic attack is replete with personal anecdotes and reflections: a detailed description of a health retreat visit; verbatim accounts of therapist sessions; and a fraught family holiday to Byron Bay where she maintains a cheerful face despite believing she is dying from ovarian cancer. She concludes by outlining her recovery thanks to a kindly GP and a therapist who prescribed Lexapro. Interspersed throughout the tale are amateur photos of Freedman on the beach with friends, in the water atop a surfboard, and posing by a buggy at the health retreat. The text is a beguiling and occasionally jarring mix of light hearted – ‘I started loving the shit out of this clean

226  Kath Kenny living Zen business’ – and brutally frank: ‘Every day, hundreds of times, I imagined saying goodbye to my family. I imagined my funeral in vivid detail. I imagined my kids growing up without me.’

The Personal is Powerful Pryor’s Good Weekend column, too, is comparable to the mommy blogs Friedman describes: detailed, confessional reports from the frontlines of motherhood, told intimately and informally. Pryor writes about the ‘glorious disaster’ of combining childrearing and full-time study, confesses to disliking conversations about ‘the stale terrain of weather and property prices,’ jokes about those who seek peace in ‘meditation’ and ‘kale smoothies,’ and concludes with a wry observation – ‘if I ever win a medal in the Working Parent Olympics I may be stripped of it due to doping’ (2014). Lopez argues that such a whisper-in-the-ear, informal style creates ‘a tremendous closeness and loyalty’ to authors: Readers feel ‘they are reading the words of a close friend instead of [a] stranger’ (2009, p. 734). Pryor’s and Freedman’s columns share many characteristics Lopez argues are key to successful mommy bloggers: the language is ‘extremely informal and usually narrative,’ and ‘the most popular writers employ a great deal of humor and levity to entertain their audience’ (2009, p. 734). The responses to both Freedman’s and Pryor’s stories bore out Friedman’s argument that readers hunger for the ‘intimacy’ of personal stories of motherhood (2013, pp. 4–5). As Pryor writes: ‘It is about the power of showing vulnerability, diagnosable or simply human, and how it makes others feel safe to do the same’ (2014). Pryor is referring to outpourings of empathy and disclosure in her real-life conversations, but her column also resulted in a spate of sympathetic online responses. Fairfax columnist Annabel Crabb defended Pryor’s column by echoing Friedman’s claim for the soothing, calming role of blogs. Crabb outlines three key types of opinion columns, before categorizing Pryor’s column as a ‘disclosure column,’ a genre she is keen to defend: The writer gives away something precious about him or herself – something that is difficult or private…The reader (if it’s done well) finds comfort or identification or company in the fact that someone else has – oh, I don’t know – had cancer, cheated on their spouse, lost a child. (2014b) As Crabb argues (and as would Friedman and Lopez) Pryor’s revelation offered readers consolation: Any reader with depression, or who had at any point felt pushed to the edge of reason by the modern scourge of busyness, might have felt stirred by her candour, and relieved not to be alone. (Ibid.)

First-person Narratives and Feminism  227 Mia Freedman herself defended Pryor’s column: ‘We need more women like Lisa Pryor in the fight to normalize and accept depression and anxiety and other mental illnesses as part of life’ (Freedman 2014). Other columnists and health professionals defended Pryor, arguing that talking candidly about mental health issues could end stigma (Borenstein 2014; Christensen and Joseph 2014; Dent 2014; Maley 2014). Freedman’s own anxiety column (2015), four months later, attracted 98 comments; 61 readers said Freedman’s story mirrored their own experiences: Readers used phrases such as ‘you told my story exactly,’ ‘I felt I could have written this,’ ‘you have just written my life story,’ and ‘it could have come straight out of my own head.’ Many confessed to their own anxieties and depression while managing family and other responsibilities. Forty-five thanked Freedman for ‘sharing’ her story, with ten noting her confession helped them feel less ‘alone.’ Six said they would ask family and friends to read Freedman’s story. Only five comments were negative, raising concerns about Freedman ‘promoting’ a prescription drug.12 The responses to both Pryor’s and Freedman’s columns demonstrate how confessional stories can allow readers to take comfort. And according to bell hooks, this style of writing can be an essential part of feminist activism. As she developed as a writer, hooks says, ‘I had to give people something that allowed them to identify with what I was saying, and not just offer some abstract idea that might not have any relevance to their lives’: At times I share things that I don’t want to share. But if you really see yourself as a worker for freedom, then the challenge is also on you to sacrifice whatever notions of privacy that many of us would want to hold onto, especially if we are clinging to bourgeois models of self and identity. (hooks quoted in Ma 2015)

Constructing Identity from the Chaos of Motherhood By telling stories of unhappy housewives Betty Friedan aimed to address the radical loss of identity women can experience when they become housewives and mothers: the very condition of being a housewife can create a sense of emptiness, non-existence, nothingness, in women. There are aspects of the housewife role that make it almost impossible for a woman of adult intelligence to retain a sense of human identity, the firm core of self or ‘I’ without which a human being, man or woman, is not truly alive. (2013, p. 366)

228  Kath Kenny Summers described the ‘enveloping double bind when [women] devote their entire lives to their families: their selves are constructed on this premise, yet their selves are threatened when they do it’ (1975, p. 101). While Second Wave feminism was successful in giving women access to the public sphere, questions of identity – particularly questions of a torn identity – remain. In her memoir A Life’s Work, English-­Canadian writer Rachel Cusk writes powerfully of the fragmented maternal subject: ‘To be a mother I must leave the telephone unanswered, work undone, arrangements unmet. To be myself I must let the baby cry, must forestall her hunger or leave her for evenings out, must forget her in order to think about other things. To succeed at being one means to fail at being the other’ (2008, p. 63). Like the bloggers Friedman and Lopez refer to, Cusk writes of the self-annihilation and ambivalence women can experience when ‘performing’ motherhood: ‘Looking after children…is isolating, frequently boring, relentlessly demanding and exhausting. It erodes your self-esteem and your membership of the adult world’ (2008, pp. 13–14).13 Cusk says she wrote her book for the ‘man or woman who recognises in the experience of parenthood the experience of the primary disjunction – with all its wealth, comedy and love – between the self and others.’ For these readers, she says, the book functions ‘as an echo, a consolation, a mirror’ (2008, p. 3). Ruth Quiney (2007) argues the rise of motherhood memoirs by writers such as Cusk and Naomi Wolf, author of Misconceptions (2001), is an attempt by contemporary female authors to reckon with the trauma and dislocation of motherhood. Motherhood, Quiney writes, can produce upheaval for middle-class women reared with ‘expectations of high personal productivity’ as workers and autonomous actors (2007, pp. 30–1). When she becomes a mother a woman’s ‘productivity is projected away from her: transferred, deferred to the child, the future citizen who must, according to every popular maternal advice regime, come first’ (Quiney 2007, p. 30). Maternal memoirs, Quiney argues, can be read as an attempt to create female subjectivities in a world where the female body bears not just ‘the weight of historical oppressions’ but also of contemporary economic uncertainties: Motherhood memoirs grapple with ‘the overwhelming sense of loss of self in the transition to motherhood, and of grief for the apparently fully individuated, “normal” body that preceded maternity’ (2007, p. 36). As Sowards and Renegar (2004, pp. 541–2) observe, compared to Second Wave feminism’s consciousness raising, consciousness raising now ‘is now much more likely to be a public experience’: personal stories are now everywhere – in books, anthologies, magazines (and now, I would, add online). Such stories still provide a ‘cathartic mechanism’ for writers, they suggest (2004, p. 542). And by resisting Second Wave feminism’s ‘structured time’ for consciousness raising, readers are not limited by time or location: Whether women’s stories are ‘read’

First-person Narratives and Feminism  229 in popular culture, in graduate school, or in books and anthologies, women can now engage with each other’s stories where and whenever they please (2004, p. 547). But if helping other women feel less alone in their struggles appears to make these two contemporary columns a more public and flexible child of Second Wave feminism’s consciousness raising, I now want to consider how the maternal DNA has evolved.

The Changing Nature of Personal Stories: Is the Personal Still Political? I’ve noted that sharing stories and expressing feelings was simply the start of the Second Wave feminist’s consciousness-raising project. The point was to use women’s stories to understand how the world worked, and then to take political action to change the world. Women’s widespread use of antidepressant and anti-anxiety drugs led Second Wave feminists such as Friedan and Summers to ask what was wrong with women’s social and political worlds. Friedan pointed to the mystique of happy mothers and homemakers – an ideology supported by advertising, women’s magazines, schools, and the then-dominant versions of Freudian and other psychoanalytical theories. Summers likewise identified as harmful the ideology that women should devote their lives to their families, warning that when women’s anger at their lot is turned inwards it can turn into ‘depression – rather than outwards against the cause of their “self” dislocation. The quiet and passive endurance of anguish is typically female behaviour’ (1975, p. 101). In contrast, while both Pryor and Freedman briefly allude to social circumstances which might have contributed to their problems (Pryor refers to the ‘glorious disaster’ of study and childcare, and Freedman mentions her accumulated sleep debt resulting from ‘15 years of parenthood, a toddler and a business’) neither author suggests the solution to their problems lies in social or political change. Instead, their texts foreground notions of individual empowerment, choice, and personal transformation. To be clear, I don’t intend my analysis in the following pages to be read as a comment on the moral significance or the efficacy of either woman’s medical situations or treatments. What I’m interested in is how Pryor’s and Freedman’s stories operate as texts; what kinds of narratives their texts present and how their texts construct particular kinds of selves. In Freedman’s narrative, she recounts in detail visits to a health farm, a therapist, a GP, various specialists, and, ultimately, a psychiatrist. Concluding on an upbeat note, she describes how, along with a prescription of Lexapro, she now successfully manages her anxiety. I need lots of sleep and I need to exercise every day. I need to keep my mind busy and active and I don’t drink coffee or take drugs. And

230  Kath Kenny I try to limit my exposure to stories about cancer or mothers being suddenly taken from their children. I also have regular health tests; mammograms and ultrasounds… it’s expensive but I don’t apologise for it. If that’s what it takes to help alleviate my anxiety, it’s worth it. Freedman overcomes anxiety through a personal transformation achieved with self-surveillance and self-managing. Here, Freedman appears to exemplify what Rosalind Gill describes as the kind of self increasingly constructed under neoliberalism – ‘individuals as entrepreneurial actors who are rational, calculating and self-regulating’ (2007, p. 163). Natalie Fixmer and Julia Wood (2005) argue that much of Third Wave feminism is characterized by an ‘embodied’ politics of personal transformation and change. Although Fixmer and Wood are careful of making hard and fast distinctions between the various feminist waves (Germaine Greer tasting menstrual blood can sound very Third Wave, for example), they nevertheless identify a contemporary feminism characterized by highly ‘personal’ politics, often based on bodily action exercising and resisting power in everyday life (2005, p. 249). For Fixmer and Wood, a Third Wave feminist ‘is not just someone who envisions a different world but someone who creates a life that will change it’ (2005, p. 243). For Angela McRobbie (2004, p. 261), the downside of this process, one she sees as having close parallels with neoliberalism’s ideologies of individualism, is that individuals are called upon not just to create themselves, but to endlessly self-fashion and improve themselves through making the right choices. As McRobbie points outs, this process calls on women, in particular, to constantly monitor and construct their selves. She writes: ‘Self-help guides, personal advisors, life coaches and gurus, and all sorts of self-improvement TV programmes provide the cultural means by which individualisation operates as a social process’ (2004, pp. 260–1). In her text, Freedman appears to not only enact the monitoring and life planning McRobbie refers to, but by her story’s conclusion she has positioned herself as a personal advisor and life coach to her readers: ‘If you think you have a problem with anxiety you probably do. Reach out. Get Help. It’s the strongest bravest thing you can do.’ Although a much shorter narrative, Pryor also narrates a self taking personal responsibility for managing a mental health problem. ‘I’m not depressed, I am anti-depressed’, she writes, adding, ‘It’s not about endorsing medication, even though it has worked so well for me.’ Choice is central to both narratives. Visiting a health retreat, a place where choices are radically removed, is a turning point in Freedman’s story: Someone is always there to tell you where to go next and what to do. You make no choices about food and you barely even have to decide what to wear… A health retreat is the opposite of real life in every possible way.

First-person Narratives and Feminism  231 It’s this loss of choice that leads to disaster: ‘anxiety…parachuted in to fill the space created when I dismantled the very scaffolding around which my life was built.’ Quitting her busy life, Freedman writes, ‘was the most reckless and foolish thing I could have done and if you’re anything like me, I caution strongly against it.’

‘We have to Fix This Now’ ‘Notions of choice, of “being oneself” and “pleasing oneself” are central to the postfeminist sensibility’ Gill argues (2007, p. 153). And this emphasis on choice and personal transformation, Gill writes, has moved into ‘entirely new spheres of life and intimate conduct’ (2007, p. 155). Now women must not only transform their bodies, they must efficiently and continuously remodel their interior lives. Pryor declares ‘I’m antidepressed’, Freedman emphasizes the need for a fast solution to her problems: I could not afford to live like this, waiting for the next attack. So my therapist referred me to another counsellor… In the one session I had with him, he said that he recommends just being still and curling up until it passes, even if that takes several months. When I recounted his advice to my own therapist, she was dismissive. ‘For heaven’s sake, you have a family and a business. You can’t sit in the foetal position for three months! No. We have to fix this now’. I was relieved to hear this because I didn’t think I could spare three months or even three days to curl up and be still. Compare Freedman’s description of her encounter with therapists to Betty Friedan, writing in TFM: For the social worker, the psychologist and the numerous ‘family’ counselors, analytically oriented therapy for private patients on personal problems of sex, personality, and interpersonal relations was safer and more lucrative than probing too deeply for the common causes of man’s suffering. If you no longer wanted to think about the whole of mankind, at least you could ‘help’ individuals without getting into trouble. (2013, p. 218) Here it’s possible to see a shift in feminist focus, from one where the social world is the primary thing which requires change, to one where the primary locus of change is the individual. This shift, I argue, needs to be understood in terms of McRobbie’s observation that ‘Feminism is

232  Kath Kenny now a heavily named and signatured activity, where in the past “collective” sufficed’ (2013, p. 133). For McRobbie, this tendency is exemplified by Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘feminist’ blockbuster Lean In (2013), a text replete with ‘uplifting anecdotes, helpful tips, homilies, sentimental eulogies,’ which adopts a ‘positive, cheerful’ tone encouraging readers to adopt entrepreneurial and individualistic solutions to their lives (McRobbie 2013, p. 133). Where once authors of popular feminist texts would become celebrities after their books were published (for example, women such as Friedan and Germaine Greer (1970)), now the trajectory is often reversed. Popular feminist texts are now often penned by women who are celebrities first – see Sandberg’s Lean In, or recent memoirs from film and television stars, such as the writer/actor/producer Lena Dunham (2014).14 In these more recent texts15 the author’s life story takes on a new importance; the author’s personal success increasingly stands in as an alibi and proof of her feminist credentials. Fight Like a Girl, the best-selling 2016 book by Australian journalist Clementine Ford, for example, is heavily based on Ford’s personal experience and anecdotal in style (Ford 2016a). This shift to the personal, a trend Margaret Henderson (2008, p. 165) has called the ‘autobiographical turn’ in American feminist writing from the mid-1990s on, is not merely a generational difference. In her study of memoirs by Betty Friedan (Life So Far, 2000) and Robin Morgan (Saturday’s Child, 2001) Henderson finds the authors have repudiated Second Wave feminism’s emphasis on the collective story that women such as Brownmiller could project their individual lives onto. Instead these Second Wave authors have reversed their earlier moves and conflated their individual life stories with feminist history, emphasizing their decisive role in creating and shaping that history (Henderson 2008, pp. 168–9).

Conclusion Freedman, as both a feminist journalist and publisher as well as an iconoclastic public figure, appears to me to occupy a transitional or hybrid position between the older and newer traditions of feminist life writing. As someone who regularly speaks publicly about feminist issues, from domestic violence to nude selfies, she recalls the tradition of feminist journalists most evident in the Second Wave and the early 1990s, but Freedman is also a feminist ‘celebrity’ who frequently highlights her personal story in her articles and public appearances.16 In a Guardian profile, Chloe Hooper (2014) describes Freedman as ‘the go-to girl on feminist issues,’ and her Mamamia network as being at ‘epicentre of the mainstream Australian women’s movement.’ In publishing her anxiety story the day she launched her Debrief Daily site, Freedman demonstrates how star feminists have now explicitly recruited the personal story as a marketing device. Freedman’s feminism, it

First-person Narratives and Feminism  233 appears, invites you to consume her story, her brand and, finally, a drug she recommends literally consuming: Anxiety is ‘a problem that can be fixed’ she writes, outlining her medication regime: ‘I take Lexapro every day and it has changed my life.’ In providing authors and readers with the opportunity to share experiences and receive consolation, Pryor’s and Freedman’s personal stories are clearly an offspring of Second Wave feminism’s consciousness-raising tradition. But it’s also possible to see a new emphasis on personal responsibility and transformation and a new and explicit suturing of the personal story to a marketing strategy: As Angela McRobbie writes, ‘to be effective’ as a feminist now ‘requires going public, being highly visible and this in turn requires modes of self-branding and self-promotion’ (2013, p. 133). My conclusions are of course limited by this study’s small nature: I have only had space for close readings of Pryor’s and Freedman’s texts here. I will however briefly note two more examples of personal stories, both published by Daily Life in the months after Pryor’s and Freedman’s stories appeared, that broadly fit the genre I have described here: a story about how taking antidepressants can be empowering (Nguyen 2016) and Clementine Ford’s guide to managing your anxiety (Ford 2016b). This is not to say Freedman, Pryor, and other contemporary feminist writers always eschew political analysis and theoretical approaches to feminism. Nor is it to suggest that in a feminist utopia mental illness would magically disappear. But it is to suggest a critical feminist response to mental illness might still ask what in an individual’s social world could be contributing to her situation. There is contemporary feminist writing that remains interested in the social and political factors that shape individuals. Annabel Crabb, author of the recent, though very Second Wave-like17 book The Wife Drought (2014a), wrote one of the most coherent (and readable) responses to Mark Latham’s attack on Lisa Pryor, calling on men to tell their own transformative househusband stories – for the ‘new stay-at-home-man’ to come out of the closet. But I am suggesting that individualist and first-person narratives are increasingly the predominant mode of address in popular feminist discourse. And while this speaking mode is clearly often an offspring of Second Wave feminism’s consciousness-raising tradition, it’s a child that at times looks like something completely new.

Notes 1 Notably, in an Australian Financial Review column, former MP and media commentator Mark Latham (2014) described Pryor as representative of ‘inner city,’ ‘left feminists’: women who ‘don’t like children and don’t want to be with them’ and who suffer from a ‘psychoneurotic disorder.’ 2 In this chapter I refer to three authors whose surnames are similar in spelling: Mia Freedman, author of the primary source article ‘I’m finally ready to talk

234  Kath Kenny about my anxiety’ Debrief Daily (2015, 23 March); May Friedman, author of Mommyblogs and the Changing Face of Motherhood (2013); and Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique. 3 In another AFR column Mark Latham (2015b) described Freedman’s public confession as indulging in the ‘online equivalent of group therapy,’ and in a Twitter account later linked to him, he wrote that Freedman has ‘a nanny, cleaner plus “Sleep Whisperer” while lecturing suburban mums. Shameless’ (Latham 2015a). 4 All references to The Feminine Mystique, first published in 1963, are from the 2013 anniversary edition published by W. W. Norton and Company. 5 Pryor did not explicitly call herself a feminist, but she did not eschew Latham’s feminist categorization. And she was supported by outspoken feminist and fellow Daily Life columnist Jenna Price, among others, who petitioned the AFR to remove Latham’s column (Robin 2015). 6 This chapter draws heavily on research I conducted for a masters of research thesis (Kenny 2016). 7 Manchester Guardian, 26 March 1913. 8 Nancy Fraser pinpoints the beginnings of the consciousness raising tradition within Second Wave feminism, describing it as a practice of ‘horizontal counter-ethos of sisterly connection,’ writing that the aim of consciousness raising was: ‘overcoming women’s subordination [through the] radical transformation of the deep structures of social totality’ (2009, pp. 104–5). 9 Betty Friedan, who trained with Erik Erikson (Friedan 2013, p. 78) writes that The Feminine Mystique was centrally influenced by her ‘training in Gestalt and Freudian psychology’ (2013, p. 514). 10 See an honors thesis by Kate Wilcox (2013) which finds the most-read stories on Fairfax’s Daily Life feature the first-person voice. 11 By ‘queer’ Friedman (2013, pp. 25–6), following David Halperin, refers to non-normative resistance to subject formations more generally, rather than to just sexuality-specific subjectivity. 1 2 Comments, published directly below Freedman’s article, were downloaded on 2 February 2016. 13 While encouraging other parents to find solace in her words, Cusk warns against reading the book as an instruction manual, suggesting the ‘ambivalence which characteristics the early stages of parenthood seemed to me to be kith and kin of the writer’s fundamental ambivalence towards life’ (2008, p. 4). 14 Anthea Taylor (2014, p. 763) argues it’s important to make a distinction between political figures who become ‘celebritised’ (such as Germaine Greer) and celebrities who become ‘politicised.’ 15 See Rowlands and Henderson’s (1996) seminal work on the feminist ‘blockbuster’ concept. 16 I’m not suggesting celebrity feminism is a new invention: Lilburn, Magarey, and Sheridan (2000) build on and complicate Rowlands and Henderson’s blockbuster concept (1996), arguing Germaine Greer and The Female Eunuch, were the prototypical blockbuster author and feminist text in Australia: During Greer’s 1972 Australian publicity tour, Greer the author was foregrounded as often as her text, but Lilburn et al. argue Greer’s celebrity ‘performance’ ‘legitimated a feminist politics in the public arena’ (2000, p. 343). 17 While Crabb briefly refers to her own personal story throughout this book, her personal anecdotes function as background to statistics, analysis, interviews with other women, and a program for change (such as men doing more housework).

First-person Narratives and Feminism  235

References Bennett, L. 2015, ‘The first-person industrial complex’, Slate, 14 September. Borenstein, R. 2014, ‘Latham’s claims dangerously irresponsible’ (letter), Australian Financial Review, 25 November. Brownmiller, S. 1999, In our time: memoir of a revolution, The Dial Press, New York, NY. Cadzow, J. 2015, ‘There’s something about Mia Freedman’, Good Weekend, 27 June. Christensen, H. & Joseph, P. 2014, ‘Busting the stigma of depression lies in education’, Australian Financial Review, 3 December. Crabb, A. 2014a, The Wife Drought: why women need wives and men need lives, Ebury Press, North Sydney. Crabb, A. 2014b, ‘Annabel Crabb: Mark Latham’s criticism of Lisa Pryor a positive point in disguise’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 November. Curthoys, A. 1994, ‘Australian feminism since 1970’, in N. Grieve & A. Burns (eds.), Australian Women: contemporary feminist thought, Oxford University Press, Australia. Cusk, R. 2008, A Life’s Work: on becoming a mother, Faber and Faber, London. Dent, G. 2014, ‘Mark Latham needs to take mental illness seriously’, Australian Financial Review, 21 November. Dunham, L. 2014, Not That Kind of Girl, Random House, New York, NY. Fixmer, N. & Wood, J. 2005, ‘The personal is still political: embodied politics in third-wave feminism’, Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 235–7. Ford, C. 2016a, Fight Like a Girl, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, Sydney. Ford, C. 2016b, ‘Clementine Ford: how I quell the panic when anxiety threatens to take over’, Daily Life, 20 May. Fraser, N. 2009, ‘Feminism, capitalism and the cunning of history’, New Left Review, vol. 56, pp. 97–117. Freedman, M. 2014, ‘Today, I stand with every woman who is honest about motherhood or mental illness’, 21 November. Retrieved from www.mamamia. com.au/mark-latham-column/. Freedman, M. 2015, ‘I’m finally ready to talk about my anxiety’, Debrief Daily, 23 March. Retrieved from www.debriefdaily.com/. Friedan, B. 1963/2013, The Feminine Mystique, with an introduction by Gail Collins and afterword by Anna Quindlen, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY. Friedman, M. 2013, Mommyblogs and the Changing Face of Motherhood, University of Toronto Press Toronto, Buffalo, London. Gill, R. 2007, ‘Postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 147–66. Greer, G. 1970, The Female Eunuch, Granada, Sydney. Henderson, M. 2008, ‘The feminine mystique of individualism is powerful: two American feminist memoirs in postfeminist times’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 165–84. Hooper, C. 2014, ‘Being Mia Freedman’, The Guardian, 27 May. Kenny, K. 2016, ‘First person narratives and third-wave feminism: raising consciousness or the mother of a guilt trip?’, Masters of Research Thesis, Macquarie University, Sydney.

236  Kath Kenny Latham, M. 2014, ‘Why left feminists don’t like kids’, Australian Financial Review, 20 November. Latham, M. 2015a, RealMarkLatham, Mia Freedman no different to @ annabelcrabb: she has nanny, cleaner plus ‘Sleep Whisperer’ while lecturing suburban mums. Shameless, 24 January 2015, Tweet, viewed 9 November 2015, https://twitter.com/RealMarkLatham/status/558835703388200960. Latham, M. 2015b, ‘Mark Latham argues we are putting women in danger’, Australian Financial Review, 27 June. Lilburn, S., Magarey S., & Sheridan S. 2000, ‘Celebrity feminism as synthesis: Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch and the Australian print media’, Continuum, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 335–48. Lopez, L. K. 2009, ‘The radical act of ‘mommy blogging’: redefining motherhood through the blogosphere’, New Media & Society, vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 729–47. Ma, J. 2015, ‘25 famous women on writing their own stories’, New York Magazine, 23 September, viewed 30 September 2015, http://nymag.com/ thecut/2015/09/25-famous-women-on-writing-their-own-stories.html?mid= emailshare_thecut#. Maley, J. 2014, ‘What drug is Mark Latham on?’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 November. McRobbie, A. 2004, ‘Post-feminism and popular culture’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 255–64. McRobbie, A. 2013, ‘Feminism, the family and the new ‘mediated’ maternalism’, New Formations, vol. 80/81, pp. 119–37. Nguyen, G. 2016, ‘Why returning to anti-depressants was an empowering choice’, Daily Life, 27 March. Pryor, L. 2014, ‘Pill-pop culture’, Good Weekend Magazine, 14 November. Retrieved from www.smh.com.au/. Quiney, R. 2007, ‘Confessions of the new capitalist mother: Twenty-first-­ century writing on motherhood as trauma’, Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 19–40. Robin, M. 2015, ‘A hollow victory? Lack of contrition grates with Latham’s critics’, Crikey, 18 August. Rowlands, S. & Henderson, M. 1996, ‘Damned bores and slick sisters: the selling of blockbuster feminism in Australia’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 11, no. 23, pp. 9–16. Sandberg, S. 2013, Lean In: women, work and the will to lead, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY. Sarachild, K. 1970, ‘A program for feminist “consciousness raising”’, in Notes from the Second Year: women’s liberation: major writings of the radical feminists, Radical Feminism, New York. Sowards, S. & Renegar, V. 2004, ‘The rhetorical functions of consciousness-­raising in third wave feminism’, Communication Studies, vol. 55, no. 4, pp. 535–52. Summers, A. 1975, Damned Whores and God’s Police, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria. Taylor, A. 2014, ‘Germaine Greer’s adaptable celebrity: feminism, unruliness, and humour on the British small screen’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 759–74. Wilcox, K. 2013, ‘Daily Life: pink ghetto or feminist triumph’, Honours thesis, Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney. Wolf, N. 1991, The Beauty Myth, William Morrow and Company, New York.

15 To Begin to Know Resolving Ethical Tensions in David Leser’s Patriographical Work Sue Joseph and Carolyn Rickett Introduction: Vampires and Thieves Our lives are relational. This proximity to the other means, as Eakin argues, ‘our privacies are largely shared, making it hard to demarcate the boundary between where one life leaves off and another begins’ (Eakin 2004, p. 8). How to treat and respond to this perceived indivisibility, as we well know, often vexes those who write memoir, particularly stories relating to parents. Most notably, in the Australian context, there is Richard Freadman’s excellent framing of the issues constellating around whether he should (or could) write about his deceased father (Freadman 2004). And of course, Nancy K. Miller’s work charting the dilemmas and responsibilities associated with potential acts of ‘betrayal,’ writing about parents continues to be both instrumental and informative (Miller 2000, 2004). Resolving the binary oppositions of loyalty/betrayal and privacy/shared ownership frequently problematizes the practice of those writers producing patriographical/matriographical texts. In an article for The Guardian Charlotte Higgins identifies one of the chief criticisms when drawing on the lives of others to author stories, arguing that writers can reduce their subjects, narration often serving as an act of diminishment rather than expansion. Then comes this pejorative charge: ‘Memoirists are vampires and thieves, you might say: vampires and thieves with shards of ice in their hearts’ (Higgins 2010). Central to this judgment is the notion that writers not only prey on their subjects – and echoing Malcolm’s (1995) burglary metaphor – they also heartlessly steal part of what is essential to the core of another person as part of their intrinsic creative process. While Higgins’ ‘thieving’ imagery is a heightened claim, nonetheless it graphically highlights the charge writers often seek to ameliorate when moving familial work from the private to the public sphere. In Freadman’s reckoning when publishing a book about his father, part of this ethical resolution lies with the establishment of ‘trust parameters’ (Freadman 2004, p. 133). Freadman clearly identifies one of the chief concerns curtailing early attempts to write an account of his father’s life: ‘… writing the book would hurt, and I shied away from that’ (2004, p. 121).

238  Sue Joseph and Carolyn Rickett The initial shying away from textually representing a father is not unique to Richard Freadman. Similarly, in his own work Australian author and journalist David Leser experienced both the desire to tell and an initial inability to publically disclose his father’s life story. While Freadman finally produces a book about his deceased father, Leser has to work through the inherent tensions of writing about someone who is still alive. Although each of these separate familial scenarios produce particular challenges around making private knowledge public, Freadman is ultimately able to resolve his hesitancy: This book about my father and myself is in part a narrative of exploration, an attempt to give the fullest – and the most morally consequential – answer to the question who am I? My father would certainly have understood and endorsed such a search. (Freadman 2004, pp. 143–4) Likewise, Leser’s ongoing questions about selfhood finally propel the completion of his book. As Miller argues ‘… memoirs are documents about building an identity – how we come to be who we are as individuals – and a crucial piece of that development takes place in the family’ (Miller 2000, p. xi). This is difficult territory for, as Mansfield writes, the writer-son is required to travel in two different directions simultaneously when attempting to write about his father: At one end of the first spectrum stands the towering presence of the father, the ‘fully realised’ biographical subject of the text through whom the autobiographical self of the son is formed. The identity of the author is created out of his depiction of the father, even when it is drawn against or in opposition to the father. In such cases, the father is the enduring presence of the narrative and a reader may favour him over the son, regardless of the author’s intentions. At the other end of that spectrum one encounters the dominant presence of the author-son, the more realised subject of the narrative through whom the author attempts to construct an image of the father. In many cases, even when the portrait is a sympathetic one, the device of foregrounding the autobiographical self seems to be adopted reluctantly, as perhaps the only way to give birth or shape to the reticent figure of the father. (Mansfield 2013, p. 8) What is most interesting are the questions and concerns that affected Leser’s decision making and writing processes during the construction of his memoir, and we offer this paper as an exploration and exemplar of the practice of a contemporary author who seeks to both protect and reveal the lived experience with a parent.

To Begin to Know  239

David Leser: A Professional Context David Leser is an award-winning journalist, one of Australia’s most prolific profile and feature writers. He has worked as a Middle East and Washington DC correspondent, and as feature writer for the Murdoch, Packer and Fairfax organizations. He has written six books, and is editor of a seventh,1 as well as his work for the Daily Telegraph, The Australian, Australian Women’s Weekly, HQ magazine, The Bulletin, The Sydney Morning Herald and Good Weekend, Asia-Pacific writer for Italian and German Vanity Fair, and the Daily Beast website in America. He is also executive producer of the award-winning documentary on the life and musical career of Paul Kelly. But importantly, David Leser is the son of the late Bernard Leser, 2 the founder of Australian Vogue, 3 the former managing director of British Condé Nast, and former president of Condé Nast International. David Leser’s professional writing career spans decades so he is familiar with the forms and audiences shaping and driving the publication industry. He has a keen understanding of Ben Yagoda’s observation that: ‘Memoir has become the central form of the culture, not only the way stories are told but the way arguments are put forth, products and properties marketed, ideas floated, acts justified, reputations constructed or salvaged’ (Yagoda 2009, p. 7). Given the prevalence and current appetite for memoir, it is unsurprising that David Leser ultimately writes one. However, what is interesting about Leser’s engagement with this form is his self-reflexivity astutely summed up in Diane Dempsey’s book review entitled ‘David Leser finds himself in his father’: [David Leser] is fascinating on journalism. He cultivated profile writing that is illuminating, but can often be excruciating for the subject. But Leser is alive to the contradictions and anomalies inherent in the biographer’s art. Acknowledging the skill of documentary maker Errol Morris, he says the best way to find the truth about your subject is not to shame them but to humanise them. (Dempsey 2014) The reviewer cogently articulates Leser’s overriding impulse to narrate truthfully without shaming; that is, to humanize and truthfully represent to the best of his ability, in an attempt to preclude accusations of theft. As Mansfield writes: How does one decide what an ethical representation of the father is? What are some of the ethical complexities that must be negotiated when representing the reticent-laconic father in auto/biography? How does the desire to judge or not to judge the father, to condemn or to celebrate, complicate the act of representation? If the father is

240  Sue Joseph and Carolyn Rickett deceased … how do notions of regret or debt affect the task at hand? How does the father’s death impact upon a reader’s judgement of whether an author’s representation is ethical? (Mansfield 2013, pp. 10–11) In reality, Leser’s father was still very much alive, if nearing the end of his life. Leser was in a race to finish his text while his father was still alive, not just so his father could read and give him his blessing, but so they could dialogue about it. He succeeded in this venture, publishing several months only before his father passed away.

Desert Places David Leser entitles the preface to his text To Begin to Know: Walking in the Shadows of My Father ‘The Desert Places,’ appropriating from the poet Robert Frost4 as he ruminates on his own inner turmoil and fear: ‘…I have it in me so much nearer home; To scare myself with my own desert places’ (Frost 1936). It is an apt selection, as Leser explains the thesis behind his text in three stages: his father writing it; Leser writing his father’s story; and finally, writing his own story, with the story of his father told within. All the while shaping the process is Couser’s notion that ‘Memoirs are, undeniably, artful’ (Couser 2012, p. 168), which is to acknowledge ‘… memoirs are just “texts”. They’re never the whole truth, never truth-ful. They’re errant, fallible, fictive human constructions…’ (Couser 2012, p. 168). David Leser has his own framing of what memoir is, and what function it can perform: … the role of memoir is to … serve as a way of remembering, serve as a way of setting down a record. Not exact, because it’s memoir, but a record of an experience or a moment or an episode in one’s life. It’s to give voice to a kind of – to the enormity of the human experience, in all its guises. Whether it’s the Irish memoir that looks at the poverty and the oppression of the Irish at the hands of the English, or whether it’s the Jewish memoir which is to record the Holocaust; celebrity memoir, to survey the arc of a kind of glitzy career. It’s a record of people’s experiences … I think the unconscious thing from the writer is to give shape and meaning to their experiences. (Author interview 2016) Building on the motivation for writing a memoir, he writes in the opening pages of his text: ‘I began this book out of love and disappointment for my father’ (Leser 2014, p. ix). His disappointment was watching his

To Begin to Know  241 father as he grew older, and he could ‘see his purpose faltering’ (p. x). And he tells Richard Fidler in an interview on ABC radio, …I thought that once he’d stepped down from the position of president of Condé Nast based in New York his purpose faltered and the view didn’t look as good or as clear as it had from the mountain top, and I felt him sliding a little bit into melancholy if not depression, and I thought as the act of writing often helps you become clearer about things. When you have to write things down as opposed to just say them it sharpens your thinking….and it brings clarity and perspective to your life, and I thought that that would be a wonderful exercise for him. To just sit with himself and the arc of an extraordinary life well lived. (Conversations 2014) But his father did not want to write his story. Leser believes he did not want to do it himself: ‘…because he’s not a writer, and because he is that social animal and to write, you really have to spend inordinate hours on your own’ (Conversations 2014). So Leser offered to write it for him, telling Fidler he thinks his father was at first ‘very chuffed’ that he had offered to write it. Then: ‘I think he was proud. I mean it was obviously an act of great fealty. A son saying I’ll write about your life’ (ibid). But that strategy did not work either. The prospect of writing bringing many of the issues that Eakin describes: ‘Moral issues… The moral consequences of the act of writing itself. What is right and fair for me to write about someone else?…’ (Eakin 1999, p. 160). As Leser explains: …it proved impossible. I mean I started it and then I thought, well how does a son do this? How does a journalist write about his father when as a journalist you’re always wedded to the truth whatever the truth might be?…Was I going to go off, wade off, go off into the distance and actually ask all the people that populated his life about him? Tell me about my dad, and what were they going to say and what was their motivation going to be for telling what they told me? Knowing they’re talking to his son, and so there were all sorts of problems with that, and then what about the things that I was critical of and how did I write about that. How did I put down on the page the fault lines that run through any father son or mother daughter relationship? (Conversations 2014) What Leser articulates here are the very real writerly pressures and consequences Ellis and Bochner describe which can result from autobiographical narration: ‘…honest autoethnographic exploration generates

242  Sue Joseph and Carolyn Rickett a lot of fears and doubts – and emotional pain’ (Ellis & Bochner 2000, p. 738). They further describe the loss of control that can attend the process of generating texts for public consumption: ‘Just when you can’t stand the pain anymore, well that’s when the real work has only begun. Then there’s the vulnerability of revealing yourself, not being able to take back what you have written or having any control over how readers interpret it’ (Ellis & Bochner 2000, p. 738). And in relation to the production of autoethnographic work (life writing) Freeman makes this observation: ‘The temptation to imbue events with our own ethical perspective can be overpowering’ (Freeman 2015, p. 6). From Leser’s ethical perspective, it was important for him to consider the vulnerability and pain that might also result for his subject (his father), and it is important to cite his deliberation here at length: When I started writing the book, I realized maybe three or four chapters in that I actually didn’t want to write a biography. I didn’t want to spend all this time observing my father’s life. That’s one thing, because as I say in the memoir, as a child you spend forever trying to look up to or live down your parents’ expectations in life, and so I actually was sort of standing alone in the clearing. I realized that the act of putting myself back in the thrall of my father’s life was a kind of retrograde step for me. Because the second point is that I didn’t feel I could write about him without writing about myself. I mean, that’s axiomatic, really, because if you’re writing nonfiction, just like quantum physics shows us that the person who’s doing the experiment actually influences the outcome to the experiment, there’s no such thing as objectivity. Equally, a nonfiction writer observing events is filtering it through his or her own personal experience. It filters the things that they’ve seen or haven’t seen, people they’ve spoken to or haven’t spoken to, so it’s a subjective enterprise. So I decided that I would conflate the two and I would try and write something that was both biography and memoir… the hardest person to write about is the person most close to you. Did not take a while for my ethical lights to be switched on with this project because how on Earth was I going to write without fear or favor about my own father? Impossible. Unless you don’t care…a lot of children are scathing about their parents, but I had no wish to be like that because I had a very – with all its complexities – a very beautiful relationship, so why would I cause him injury? (Author interview 2016) Relating to his own practice, it is clear that Leser closely identifies with Couser’s ethical concerns when writing about another person, particularly a vulnerable one: ‘Deliberation on the ethics of life writing entails weighing competing values: the desire to tell one’s story and the need to

To Begin to Know  243 protect others, the obligation to tell truth and the obligations of trust’ (Couser 2004, p. 198). And, the day after his interview with Richard Fidler where he airs such considerations, Leser tells Michael Cathcart on ABC Books and Arts: The book is called To begin to know for various reasons. The act of writing is the act of thinking better and understanding better. I think it’s easy to say things. It’s easy to verbalize things, but when you actually have to commit them to the page it sharpens your thinking. It gives you some kind of clarity and some space, and I think I began to realize that in my early years as a feature writer and profile writer, first of all there was a desire to prove myself as not just the son of Bernie Leser but as a writer in my own right, but also I was a child of the ‘60, ‘70s’ generation. Gough Whitlam was one of my heroes and I was appalled by the war in Vietnam and I wore my hair long and I was part of that sort of hippy generation and that was the antithesis of Vogue, and so I think every healthy child has a healthy dose of rebellion in him or her and that was mine. I rebelled against the value system of Vogue. Vogue was all about etiquette and style and good manners. (ABC Books and Arts 2014) Cathcart then poses this complexity: One of the motives you questioned … or one of the skills you questioned is this way in which a successful journalist is able to win the trust and confidence of someone and then goes away and writes an article which also dumps on that person. To which Leser replies: Yes, that’s the Janet Malcolm Journalist and the Murderer5 idea. That you know every journalist in a way is a trickster. Is a confidence man or woman preying on the vanity or the self-delusion or the gullibility of their subject, and they’re like burglars. They rifle through the drawers and they see what’s in there and then they steal away in the night and then they air it for everybody to see. There is a part of that in the implicit contract. You want the story. You want the pearls and those nuggets of truth that go to the person’s psyche. You want all those things that speak to the human condition and that’s both the dark and the light. So to get that it’s not dissembling. It’s part psychoanalyst. You know, you’re playing therapist and you’re appealing to the vanity. I mean why would someone agree to be profiled? I’ve always asked myself that… subjects, I think, they fall for this sense of I’ll trade you pound for pound, flesh for flesh. You tell me about your life, I’ll tell you about my life too. Well it’s a totally unequal thing. I mean, they’re

244  Sue Joseph and Carolyn Rickett talking to two or three million people. You’re just talking to them. So I think that people who agree to being profiled have a healthy ego or they have something to say. They have a message and that’s a good reason to agree to a profile because there’s a larger story about what you want to convey, and I think they’re the best profiles. Is that you use the person or you employ the subject as a device for exploring larger themes around the human condition. (ABC Books and Arts 2014) While Leser is acutely aware of a potential powerful differential between writers and their subjects, he places ethical considerations at the center of his practice. The application of Freadman’s statement/question ‘Writers have a right to write. But how far into the privacy of others does that right extend?’ (Freadman 2004, p. 123) is answered by Leser: …it would be true to say that amongst the most frightening words in the English language, for any family member, are ‘I’m thinking of writing a memoir’. Because no one signs up to that. You don’t give birth to that, you don’t marry that, you don’t – that’s just something that doesn’t enter your head; that years and years of parenting are suddenly going to change into some kind of narrative for public consumption. So it’s a crippling thing. If you care about ethics, which I do, and I suppose if I was to track my journalism from pretty early on, I would say there’s always been a kind of moral component to my stories. I’m looking for the moral moment, the tone, you know, who acts well, who doesn’t act well, the human paradox, how do we make a good life, what’s worth doing; all those kinds of Socratic questions. I’m also informed by Buddhism in my latter years, which is do no harm. So if you love someone – and even if you don’t, you still have a duty of care – but if you love someone, you have a huge duty of care not to hurt them as best as possible, and that is in absolute tension. That stands in absolute tension to the prerogatives of the writer; to write as you see fit, to call it as you see it. There is that inner moral compass and that’s what guided me – there was no way in the world this book was ever going to be published without my parents, my brother and sister, and my former wife, having sign-offs. Not having sign-off; reading it and feeding back their comments. (Author interview 2016) Importantly though, Leser qualifies the difference between a sign-off and feedback, observing: Feedback. I never promised to change anything, but I did promise to take very, very seriously any concerns they had. For example, my father asked me a number of times – he kept coming back to this point

To Begin to Know  245 in my memoir of me writing about him being sick in the morning. ‘What happens in a man’s bathroom should stay in a man’s bathroom,’ he said… (Author interview 2016) Leser remembers as a small boy, hearing the sounds of his father vomiting each morning into the toilet bowl. It was the stress of his job and deep anxiety his high profile role produced. Leser recounts this episode in his memoir, and it is the only private revelation Bernard Leser asks him to remove. Leser says he listened to his father but felt strongly this particular component of the book was integral. It is an example of the relational complexity of story-telling where this particular component is integral to Leser’s story, but not in his father’s view. And this is the textual moment where arguably the story becomes largely Leser’s, and not his father’s. Providing an insight into the proximity and demarcation of shared ownership of past events, and what influences his choice of material as a writer, Leser describes a conversation with his father: I would argue with him that this was one of the most crucial hinge points in the book. But when he put on his armor and he would zip up his Armani suit and he’d step out into the world, that’s what he presented to the world. But as this little boy, I could hear something else. I could see something else, and that for me was I think when I first unconsciously, as I write, began to equate success with stress. You couldn’t have one without the other. He rang me a couple of times, and each time I would say, ‘Dad, please, don’t make me take this out … This is my story and you’ve got to understand this is a little boy’s moment. This is a little boy reacting to his father not being well, or thinking his father’s not well, and actually, Dad, it’s the only point in this book where you’re vulnerable. I’m vulnerable all through this book and you’re invulnerable for all this book except here. It actually makes the reader like you more. It makes the reader identify with you more. So I want to appeal to the publisher in you. ‘You’ve always championed free speech. You’ve always wanted to see journalists call it like they see it. This is how I see it. Can you live with it?’ ‘Okay.’ That’s what he said. ‘Okay.’ …then I think he said: ‘Look, I’m not happy about it but it’s yours – it’s your book. It’s your story.’ (Author interview 2016) When confronting the politics of ownership and perspective associated with this notion of your story and the right of the writer to tell it, Leser

246  Sue Joseph and Carolyn Rickett also confronts the critical question of whether his memoir is ultimately authorized or unauthorized theft? He proffers: Look, there’s no doubt… it would be disingenuous to say – for any memoir writer – to say that there’s complete endorsement for everything you write. By its nature, writing is theft. Paul Kelly is a songwriter. He begs and borrows and steals from other songwriters for his lyrics. He makes no bones about that. He conceals the theft in – as a kind of – as a fictional story, but embedded in that are tricks and moments and lines and melodies that belong to some of his heroes. So theft is always taking place. Are we authorized to steal? There’s some kind of licence as an artist – as a writer, I think, but I wouldn’t want to give it complete carte blanche. I think I went through all the necessary ethical steps to ensure that people didn’t get hurt, and therefore I was authorized as much as one could be, and therefore this book has that stamped authority on it as a result. Look, the fear was that probably of all the people that were most at risk in this book – well, my father, obviously, and also my former wife, the mother of my children. So it was less important to me to be right in my recollections of everything than to have her say okay, so most of those nine pages of notes I agree with. I think I had a fairly strong, independent voice as a writer up to that point [of writing the memoir], but that’s just – there’s much more – it’s much more my own voice now because it was the first time I have ever written so personally. So all the experience that I had writing about others and writing it from others’ spirited positions and my own individual slant on the world, writing something like this is actually – it’s a kind of stepping out. (Author interview 2016) Reflecting on the therapeutic nature of writing memoir, Leser decides in the end that the reading of books/the act of reading books can be just as therapeutic. He argues: Memoir definitely has a therapeutic role. Both can have – it can have for the writer and the reader. I mean look at whether revenge is therapy; betrayal is therapy. There are many memoir writers who have waded into print as a way of getting back at someone. Whether that’s therapy for them, who could say? There are many memoir writers who betrayed confidences and have engaged in theft, authorized theft because maybe memoir writing is all slightly theft of some sort. But I think at its best, isn’t reading – aren’t books therapy anyway? I mean, isn’t the act of reading an act of therapy for the reader? It’s a

To Begin to Know  247 consolation. It’s a source of solace. It’s nourishment. It enlarges your horizons, takes you into a private universe. That’s for the reader. For the writer, I think there’s something about putting things down and trying to make sense of your own life … It gives a shape and a form to what can otherwise be just random and myriad experiences. (Author interview 2016)

Conclusion There are few moments where a memoirist can escape the interconnectivity between their own story and the story of another – the assertion of their own voice while simultaneously considering the possible violation of someone else’s privacy. And of course, an ethical memoirist gives due consideration to harm minimization. Novelist Charlotte Wood describes both fiction and nonfiction when she writes: We writers are the only people who may be able to pinpoint the exact delineations between life and fiction in our work, and to describe the transformative processes involved, yet we rarely discuss the ethics of this in public. Perhaps this is because we all know that, no matter how much we deny it, or try to minimise the damage we cause, theft from the lives of others (and the potential to cause pain as a result) is … a deeply uncomfortable, complex moral problem that has always been with us, and will never disappear. (Wood 2009, pp. 82–3) Wood’s idea of ‘theft from the lives of others’ may have an even more restrictive moral claim on writers such as David Leser, as Couser explains: ‘Memoirists … have much less freedom in the creation of their characters than novelists. More to the point they have a responsibility toward their characters that is more than aesthetic’ (Couser 2012, p. 171). While Leser wrestles with the aesthetics and conventions of narrative practice, his duty of care to his father is never far from his consciousness when publishing the finished manuscript. To Begin to Know: Walking in the Shadows of My Father was launched in 2014 at the Icebergs in Sydney. The late Bernard Leser attended, as did all of Leser’s family and many of his friends. In testifying to both a writerly and fatherly endorsement of the memoir – and the comfortable convergence of lineage and legacy – David Leser concludes: The book launch was basically his last public appearance. His last public outing, if you like. He spoke and he was very proud, and – I can only give you the flavor of it [what his father said at the launch], which was one of great pride and then he – and I think that he was always looking – he sung me into life, in a way. He sung my praises

248  Sue Joseph and Carolyn Rickett and he passed me the mantle, and I don’t see a lot of men doing that to their sons. So this book, the fact that he could read it before he died, was a great gift. A blessing, actually, because I would’ve always wondered. I wanted it to be published before he went, because I didn’t want to live with the wondering of how he might’ve reacted. It sits very comfortably. I think it’s a good book. I think it’s as good a piece of writing as I could do at the time, and very, very difficult ethical issues that were hovering from the get-go. But yes, when I look through that book, I’m proud of it. (Author interview 2016) David Leser attempted to write his father’s biography and failed, specifically because of the familial ethical tensions which arose. As Mansfield writes: … author-sons will continue to create monuments and tributes to, mount searches and performances for, elucidate defences and denouncements of, and seek dialogue and resolution with their patrimonial inheritances through the act of writing autobiographically. (Mansfield 2013, p. 199) Leser knew his father’s story was an important one to tell because of Bernard Leser’s renowned public profile. He discovered the only way to write this narrative was by enmeshing it with his own story – bridging the tacit gap between father and son, and producing a hybrid generational text, nuanced by differing perspectives. He masterfully navigates proprietorial entitlement – more simply, whose story is it? – forensically negotiating the spaces and intersections between himself and his father, and other family members, in To Begin to Know. His struggle to write authentically – focusing on raw honesty, yet concurrently constrained by an overarching harm-minimization ethos, privileging familial allegiances – uplifts this text as an exemplar in its field.

Note on Methodology Ethical approval for this research was granted by the University of Technology Sydney’s Human Research Ethics Committee.6 We interviewed Dr. David Leser via Skype, as a semi-structured narrative discussion. There were 11 main questions ranging from his views on what memoir is and what it performs within a literary culture, to the ethics of writing about other people, particularly his father Bernie Leser, and other members of his family. The interview was recorded, including Dr. Leser giving his informed consent and conducted in accordance with the Australian Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance Code of

To Begin to Know  249 Ethics.7 We then melded his responses with other interviews he has taken part in as well as paratextual materials, for example, reviews about his memoir.

Acknowledgement Our thanks to Dr. David Leser for his time in taking part in this research and offering insights to a broader academic community. By way of transparency, we wish to note that Dr. Leser completed a DCA candidature at The University of Technology Sydney in 2016, and Dr. Sue Joseph was his supervisor. He wrote, completed, and published his memoir To Begin to Know: Walking in the Shadows of My Father as the creative component of his DCA.

Notes 1 To Begin to Know: walking in the shadows of my father (2014 Allen & Unwin); A View from the Lake (2014 Random House); Dames & Divas (2006 Media 21 Publishing); Somebody Save Me (2002 Allen & Unwin); The Whites of Their Eyes (1999 Allen & Unwin); Bronwyn Bishop (1994 Text Publishing); and editor of Paul Kelly: the Essays (2013 Shark Island). 2 Bernard Leser, 1925–2015. 3 First published in 1959. 4 1874–1963; Desert places in a further range (Holt, 1936; Cape, 1937); the 1937 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry. 5 Published by Alfred A. Knopf/Random House, 1990. 6 UTS HREC: ETH16-0428. 7 see www.meaa.org/meaa-media/code-of-ethics/.

References ABC Books and Arts program 2014, Radio program, ABC Radio National 576AM, 9 July. Conversations 2014, Radio program, ABC Radio 702AM, Sydney, 8 July. Couser, G. T. 2004, Vulnerable Subjects: ethics and life writing, Cornell University, New York. Couser, G. T. 2012, Memoir: an introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Dempsey, D. 2014, ‘David Leser finds himself in his father’, 13 September, viewed 7 July 2016, www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/book-reviewdavid-leser-finds-himself-in-his-father-20140908-10d3ly.html. Eakin, P. J. 1999, How Our Lives Becomes Stories, Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Eakin, P. J. 2004, The Ethics of Life Writing, Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Ellis, C. & Bochner, A. P. 2000, ‘Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: researcher as subject’, in N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (eds.), The Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed., Sage, Newbury Park, California, pp. 733–68. Freadman, R. 2004, ‘Decent and indecent: writing my father’s life’, in P. J. Eakin (ed.), The Ethics of Life Writing, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, pp. 121–46.

250  Sue Joseph and Carolyn Rickett Freeman, J. 2015, Remaking Memory: autoethnography, memoir and the ethics of self, Libri Publishing, United Kingdom. Higgins, C. 2010, ‘Candia McWilliam, AS Byatt and the ethics of the memoir’, The Guardian, 24 August, viewed 1 July 2016 www.theguardian.com/culture/ charlottehigginsblog/2010/aug/24/candia-mcwilliam-hilary-mantel. Leser, D. 2014, To Begin to Know: walking in the shadows of my father, Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Malcolm, J. 1990, The Journalist and the Murderer, Alfred A. Knopf/Random House, New York. Malcolm, J. 1995, The Silent Woman, Vintage, London. Mansfield, S. 2013, Australian Patriography: how sons write fathers in contemporary life writing, Anthem Press, London. Miller, N. 2000, Bequest and Betrayal: memoirs of a parent’s death, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Miller, N. 2004, ‘The ethics of betrayal: diary of a memoirist’, in P. J. Eakin (ed.), The Ethics of Life Writing, Cornell University Press, New York, pp. 147–60. Wood, C. 2009, ‘Forgive me, forgive me: the ethics of using other people’s lives in fiction’, Meanjin, vol. 68, no. 4, pp. 66–83. Yagoda, B. 2009, Memoir: a history, Penguin Publishing, New York.

Interview David Leser interview May 6, 2016, Sydney (Skype).

16 The Epistolary Thread as Collaborative Writing in Grief Memoir Freya Latona

Introduction The act of writing memoir is a complex endeavor for many reasons, not least because of the ethical stumbling blocks the author may encounter at various stages of their writing journey. Memoir that relays the author’s grief experience is certainly no exception; to write about grief involves revealing intimate details about the life and death of a loved one. This paper seeks to illuminate some of these ethical problems in writing relational memoir, looking specifically at memoirs about motherloss, and reflecting on the composition of my own memoir about my mother’s death. Drawing upon the research of life-writing academic Thomas Couser and others, I explore the use of epistolary writing in memoir, addressing the perhaps unanswerable question, ‘How do we obtain permission to write about the other when they are dead?’ Some memoirs draw on intertextual epistolary additions to their narratives to give the other a voice, by incorporating their letters, emails, and other forms of text. In this way, the epistolary thread can be seen as a methodology to write collaboratively in relational memoir. This paper examines if this sense of epistolary co-authoring adds a therapeutic dimension to the composition of grief memoir. Thomas Couser, in Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing, asks simple yet ethically fraught questions of his readers: Where does the right to express and represent oneself begin to infringe on another’s right to privacy? How shall the desires of the self be weighed against the demands of the other, concern for aesthetics with concerns for ethics?…When consent cannot be obtained, what constraints, if any, should apply to intimate life writing?… If life writing necessarily involves violating the privacy of others and possibly harming them, what values might offset such ethical liabilities? (Couser 2004, pp. 10–11) These are the same questions I ask in this exposition about motherloss memoir. By focusing on the epistolary thread in memoir, and specifically

252  Freya Latona the notion of writing a collaborative filial memoir – co-authoring, if you like, with the deceased – I intend to contribute to the continued academic interest in the ethical standards of life writing.

Relationality in Memoir According to Paul John Eakin, all autobiography (memoir falls under this umbrella term), is relational (1999, p. 43). Eakin acknowledges that no life story can be written without recognizing the relational nature of identity and story formation: ‘[there exists]…ethical problems generated by the tension between self and other in relational lives, where narrative lines and life-lines are inextricably intertwined’ (1999, p. 61). Couser notes that this relationality evident in all memoir pushes the genre into the realms of biography: Sometimes it [memoir] is used to refer to any account of the author’s life, as if it is synonymous and interchangeable with autobiography… But autobiography and memoir can also be used to refer to subtly different kinds of self-life writing. In that case, memoir becomes in effect a subgenre of autobiography, a particular way of writing one’s life. And that’s not all. Memoir can also be used to refer to a narrative that is primarily about someone other than the author; used in this way, the term refers to a subgenre of biography… (Couser 2012a, pp. 17–18) Eakin and Couser’s sentiments are echoed by others in the field, including Nancy K Miller, who asks, ‘[c]an my story – or yours – ever be more than that: a dialogue enacted with other selves?’ (2000, p. x). Academic Rosamund Dalziell warns us of the inherent authority given to the memoirist despite this relationality: ‘As autobiographers cannot write about the self without representing others also, they may assume a power over others that cannot always be countered’ (2005, p. 193). This concept of relationality is no more evident than when examining matriographical memoir (memoirs about mothers by their children, a term coined by Couser, see Couser 2012b, p. 260). The text type is deeply and advertently relational. Matriographical memoir, by its very name, gestures to its relationality. Couser notes: ‘[t]he closer the relationship between writer and subject, and the greater the vulnerability or dependency of the subject, the higher the ethical stakes, and the more urgent the need for ethical scrutiny’ (2004, p. xii).

Writing the Dead: The Ethical Quandary When the relational subject of a memoir is dead, this can complicate rather than simplify the memoirist’s dilemma. Despite this, it is common

The Epistolary Thread as Collaborative Writing  253 for writers to say, ‘I cannot write this until they’re dead’ in regards to representing loved ones in their life writing. Comedian and writer Judith Lucy tells her readers, ‘…let’s face it, I could really rip in because they were dead’ in her memoir about her parents and upbringing, Drink, Smoke, Pass Out (2012, p. 154). Obviously, the notion is that the person is no longer able to bear any negative effects of public exposure. Conversely, this paper explores the issue under a different assumption, that memoirs representing the deceased still face a serious ethical dilemma. Perhaps this is just the case with certain grief matriography/ patriography – a child may be inherently protective of a deceased parent’s legacy and feelings toward public representation of it. So, how do we depict mothers/fathers/other relational subjects who have died in a way that consoles and/or satisfies both the memoirist and respects the wishes (known or unknown) of the figure represented? Reflecting on his own ethical dilemma while composing a piece of relational life writing, Richard Freadman writes: There is, I believe, no single or general answer to that question… I could give a fairly considered account of how I felt and of how I saw my rights in this situation. But what of my father? He had been dead eight years. How was I to assess his rights, the feelings he might have had, the attitude he might have taken to my project? (Freadman 2004, p. 123) This brings me face to face with the issue that perplexes me: what is it about death – the absence of the person – that allows a writer to feel they can reveal more about them than if they were alive? Apart from the obvious reason – they are presumably unaffected personally by any new information revealed about them. But in a sense, the person is affected, despite their absence. People leave a legacy after their physical disappearance. Their stories are left behind. Some may argue these stories have more meaning because of death. We are aware in this case, that there are no more stories to be made, and no new endings to these stories to develop. The weight of these stories rests in their representative significance – they define the person in the eyes of those who are still living.

Are the Dead ‘Vulnerable Subjects’? Couser’s book Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing is an apt title for the issue that faces relational life writers. Is there any more ‘vulnerable subject’ than a deceased parent? A deceased mother? A person that most of us know intimately and in every grizzly domestic detail. A person who we have observed, for better or worse, from our infancy. It is relevant here to touch on David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death, which, while not strictly an epistolary memoir, draws heavily

254  Freya Latona on his mother, Susan Sontag’s, diaries, often quoting her verbatim. His choice to do this may seem unsurprising given Sontag’s long career as a much loved writer. However, Rieff publicly criticized Sontag’s partner, photographer Annie Leibowitz, for exhibiting ‘…carnival images of celebrity death…’ (Rieff 2008, p. 150) when she displayed images taken of Sontag in several states of illness, and some after death, in a book collection titled A Photographer’s Life 1990–2005, and in its related touring exhibition. Here we see an interesting case. Rieff is assuming that publication of the words of the deceased a) is less an invasion of privacy than showing images of them; and b) that he has more right to expose elements of his mother’s story, as her son, than Leibowitz, her partner. Both Rieff’s memoir, with its inclusion of her journal entries, and Leibowitz’s images, expose Sontag, in her most vulnerable moments, to the public. Both texts are composed by loved ones of Sontag, acting as witnesses to her ordeal. Rieff does this in greater length and detail than Leibowitz, creating a book length exposé on her attitudes to cancer and mortality. However, he views imagery as being on the wrong side of the ethical spectrum. In any case, the dead Susan Sontag, having been represented textually by her loved ones, is arguably a candidate for Couser’s ‘vulnerable subject’ status. It is arguable that Rieff’s outlining of details of his mother’s intimate ordeal in memoir form is somehow less ethically fraught than Leibowitz’s images. This argument contains many snippets of justifications: He is a son, writing from his own perspective. Indeed his own mourning and confusion takes center stage in his memoir. A reader of this text ventures into the dark with its writer and subject. They cannot simply walk past the image in a gallery quickly, unthinkingly. This comparably lengthy exposé gives the subject the weight it requires for empathetic consideration. A series of photographs, displayed to thousands, does not contextualize Sontag’s illness and death like Rieff’s analysis of his own sense of confusion as a son sworn to assist his mother’s attitude that her survival was possible and probable. Indeed, his matriography is specific in its approach – it describes Sontag’s response to her illness, her treatment, and eventually her decline. Yet it is this recount that allows the reader to properly interpret her death from her son’s perspective; the background, the detail, further bolstered by Sontag’s epistolary-like passages. Comparatively, Leibowitz’s images are scattered in their display. They are contextualized only through their presence as photographs taken by Leibowitz between the years 1990 and 2005. Arguably, they are superficially displayed in an exhibition which also features portraits of various film stars posing for the camera. Here a lack of contextualization may imply a lack of ethical consideration for the deceased. As well, we can consider Sontag’s own career. She was a writer. This was her medium of expression and method of analyzing complex issues. It is fitting

The Epistolary Thread as Collaborative Writing  255 that her son explores his own predicament by sharing hers through her much adored profession. The reader can at least believe that Sontag approved of personal storytelling and the exploration of the grey areas of life through the medium, given her own output of such texts. While debate surrounding the ethics of Leibowitz’s publication of images of Sontag in decline and death, and Rieff’s exposure of her in his memoir is still ongoing, one fact is certain: Sontag, the dead, is a figure unprotected from textual mis/representation. Couser’s Vulnerable Subjects lists groups that he views as falling under the definition of a subject ‘at risk’ of unpermitted exposure in life writing. He focuses on those with physical and or mental impairment; age (being young or old); and those belonging to a social and/or cultural minority, mostly because these groups have difficulty giving informed permission for their story to be written by another (2004, p. xii). However, Couser does not focus on the dead, a group who, arguably, are the most vulnerable of all subjects, if our definition of a vulnerable subject is those who cannot give informed permission for their representation. Strangely, the deceased are either the most or least vulnerable group, depending on the ethical framework implemented by the life writer when considering their own choices to write and publish relational material. The dead cannot give permission for writing to take place about them, unless an agreement is discussed prior to their death. In any case, writing about the dead has incredible power to redefine a person’s legacy in the eyes and minds of those who outlive them. The writer’s power over their deceased subject is not to be underestimated. For this reason, I am hyper aware of the importance of protecting my mother’s life story and reputation. I can see how easily it can be altered to suit the narratives of surviving others, how it hangs on by a thread, at the mercy of the ethical decisions of those who knew her and seek to retell bits and pieces of her life. Is there a middle ground between the protection of the dead and the desires of the living (or at least one to strive for)? It seems at every level of this dilemma, and from every perspective, there is no clear answer. Michael Stocker writes: It is essential to the very concept of love that one care for the beloved, that one be prepared to act for the sake of the beloved. More strongly, one must care for the beloved and act for that person’s sake as a final goal, the beloved, or the beloved’s welfare or interest, must be a final goal of one’s concern and action. (Stocker 1997, p. 69) This statement is not too complicated or too daring a proposition: to put the welfare of those we love at the forefront of all decisions. However, this is an extremely difficult ask of a memoirist whose story is intertwined with another, particularly if this loved one is dead. To make my

256  Freya Latona ‘beloved’ mother and her welfare my ‘final goal,’ theoretically I would not share my memoir nor make steps to publish it. I may not have even written it, seeing as doing so poses a risk to her memory, in so much as she cannot check facts and details about statements made about her and that may, unintentionally, be incorrect. And seeing as I cannot ask her permission, to alleviate all risk I would have to stop pursuing my project. In this way I am acting on her behalf. However, I am also my mother’s ‘beloved.’ I must act on her behalf in recognition of this too. And to care for myself and my welfare as a final goal, my mother would allow me to write and share my memoir. We must weigh up our own rights to tell the story of our own story, which, as we have learnt, always incorporates the personal story of others. As much as the dead have rights to respect, the pursuit of truth, and privacy, the authorial living have the right to compose their own memoir. To grant the dead more rights than oneself as a narrator is arguably as dangerous as risking their rights to privacy. To do so may compromise the integrity of the author and need to reshape their life after trauma, which life writing can help to achieve.

The Epistolary Thread in Grief Memoir While the term ‘epistolary’ traditionally refers to handwritten letter correspondence, many contemporary scholars now incorporate modern forms of communication, such as emails and text messages, in their definitions of epistolary. Liz Stanley writes: Fundamentally, a letter is a material document of some kind (paper, words on a screen or taking other forms that signals its epistolary purpose through its form or structure by being addressed to one person and signed by another (Dear A, Yours Z’), although neither the signatory (or writer) nor the addressee (or reader) need necessarily be singular. (Stanley 2004, p. 207) Erin O’Dwyer unpicks epistolary scholar Linda Kauffman’s take on the modern epistolary: It should be noted that Kauffman gives great weight to the distinction between epistolary mode and genre. In her second work on topic, Special Delivery, she comes to the conclusion that mode should be the preferred term. The concept of mode allows her to consider epistolary as an incomplete and fractured form; with loose boundaries that make it resilient and adaptive; able to combine with and influence other kinds of writing; making it of continued and continuing relevance over centuries. (O’Dwyer 2014, p. 17)

The Epistolary Thread as Collaborative Writing  257 Keeping these definitions in mind, this paper analyzes emails as epistolary texts, as well as traditional letters. Amy Culler and Rebecca Styler ask: How does the [life writing] text give form to the relationship between biographer, subject and imagined reader? What records of collective life do we have and what critical methods can we adopt to challenge the individualistic tendency that has prevailed in traditional approaches to auto/biography? (Culley & Styler 2011, p. 237) The epistolary thread answers some of these queries. It creates a link between memoirist and relational subject, and acts as a record of ‘collective life’ – a document highlighting the preexisting relationship. Additionally, the epistolary, when utilized in relational life writing, challenges the ‘individualistic tendency’ of memoirists only drawing upon their own memory bank to recreate past events on the page. It exemplifies and highlights ‘…interpersonal and intertextual relationships within life writing’ (Culley & Styler 2011, p. 240). As Culley and Styler write: … there has been a shift within life writing (both its practice and criticism) away from the traditional emphasis on the autonomous individual who stands out of his or her milieu in favor of considerations of the relationality inherent in individual lives…. As a consequence of this critical shift, life writing in forms with obviously relational structures, such as the letter and family memoir, have gained in status in relation to the once-privileged form of the apparently autonomous, linear narrative. (Culley & Styler 2011, p. 237) We can consider the relational memoir as a part of this shift, sitting almost between the autobiography and biography – a method of exploring another in order to relate the self. I wish to explore my own creative work here to exemplify some findings about the epistolary thread in the context of grief memoir. I developed a relationship with the email and letter as a memoirist drawing on the epistolary to reveal my mother’s character and cancer experience, and my response as her daughter. This occurred in two distinct ways: drawing on the epistolary to ‘co-­author’ with the deceased, as a method of dispelling some of the ethical issues in writing relational memoir (these sections are those which include my mother’s own emails to me and others, and my emails to her); and using the epistolary in order to experience emotional proximity to and connection with the deceased (these sections are short letters composed to my mother after her death that feature in the later sections of my memoir).

258  Freya Latona

Epistolary as Co-authoring with the Deceased This paper argues that the use of the epistolary thread in relational memoir that speaks for the deceased may be a tool used by authors to dispel some of their ethical concerns about writing and publication, many of which have been listed above. If, after all, we can include their voice, quote them directly, haven’t we granted them some power over their own representation? It’s not a perfect model, but it may be a method for memoirists perturbed by the ethical predicament of speaking for their dead. Janet Gurkin Altman notes why the epistolary allows the relational memoirist to co-author with the dead: ‘The I-you relationship that governs epistolary discourse also governs our perception of which characters are to be the principal narrative agents’ (1982, p. 120). Therefore: ‘[t]he status of epistolary discourse as both a first-person and second-person narrative derives from the reversibility of the I-you pronouns. The you of any I-you statement can, and is expected to, become the I of a new text’ (Altman 1982, p. 121). Here, the epistolary stands as a conversation between two narrators. Altman identifies how the epistolary not only represents a special relationship between the authors, but highlights a writerly collaboration: It is the hallmark of epistolary language in general to make statements in order to elicit responses from a specific addressee. To write a letter is not only to define oneself in relationship to a particular you; it is also an attempt to draw that you into becoming the I of a new statement. (Altman 1982, p. 122) Despite the fact that the epistolary in memoir only provides snippets of the letter writer’s voice, its inclusion in a relational text is more broadly representative of their presence. As Liz Stanley writes: The temporal slipperiness of the epistolary connects with its characteristics of metonymy and a simulacrum of presence. Metonymy involves substituting an attribute or characteristic for the whole or entirety, referring here to how letters seemingly take on some of the qualities or characteristics of the writer; they involve a simulacrum of presence by ‘standing for’ or conjuring up the writer…. (Stanley 2004, p. 209) As well as providing a strategy for co-authorship, the epistolary in memoir provides documentary evidence. This is especially pertinent to memoir, because despite its claim to factuality, the genre has suffered from a history of fictionalization, and reader disappointment when their

The Epistolary Thread as Collaborative Writing  259 favorite memoir, for example A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, turns out to be partially or fully invented. Use of the epistolary in memoir can serve as evidential primary source material, lessening the creative control of the memoirist to some extent. My own memoir draws on this technique, incorporating my mother’s emails into the narrative, in order to give her a voice. However, I also use her emails to guide the narrative of the memoir in many respects, jogging my own memory about what particular events occurred and when. Some emails are also a point of discovery about my mother and her illness after she died. I learned, for example, that she was more fearful about her condition than she admitted to her loved ones after finding an email to her therapist. Additionally, my mother’s emails assist in guiding the factuality of my memoir. I draw on dates emails were sent and their content to accurately reconstruct the eighteen months or so from her diagnosis to her passing. These facts are inescapable – she had a treatment at a particular time; she was feeling positive or negative about her predicament and why; who she trusted and relied upon during her illness. Here, the inclusion of the epistolary thread in the creative work does more than give my mother a voice in my rendition of our traumatic experience. It in fact draws the narrative as close as possible to her lived experience. Following from this, epistolarity may be considered a method for staying on an ethical course for memoirists writing about the deceased.

Epistolary as Emotional Proximity with the Deceased In the later chapters of my work, when my memoir moves in time from my mother’s death and the events preceding it, there are no more relevant emails written by her that I could draw upon. Organically, I started writing to her, in letter form, and include these epistolary passages in the larger text. Although of a different tone and nature to the inclusion of previous emails, these one-sided letters addressed to my mother are further epistolary additions to the memoir. This need for me to compose letters to my mother signals an interesting discovery about grief and writing, and the unique function of the epistolary form. My impulse was to write letters to my mother, despite my writing a memoir about her and my response to her death. I was already writing, already on message. But the composition of short letters in their direct address to her felt different to write. The epistolary offers freedom for the memoirist to divulge information they may not be able to in the body of their work. Having a direct addressee, in my case my mother, ruled out the gaze of the reader and created a dialogue with her, formerly the co-composer of the text (I say this in reference to my publication of her emails). Here, the epistolary has the most emotional potency for me as a grief memoirist. Offering

260  Freya Latona an explanation, Janet Altman explores the notion of ‘pronominal relativity’: Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of epistolary language is the extent to which it is colored by not one but two persons and by the specific relationship existing between them… the confidant, and the reader, the interpersonal bond basic to the very language of the letter (I/you) necessarily structures meaning in letter narrative. Those works that we perceive as being the most ‘epistolary’, as cultivating the letter form most fully, are those in which the relationship shapes the language used, and in which I becomes defined relative to the you whom he addresses… (1982, p. 118) Altman’s last line is crucial: the notion that the addressee is inherently intertwined with the composer and, in fact, that their conversation forms the narrative. Despite no reply from the deceased addressee, the addresser’s message is still contextualized by their relationship to one another. Is it possible that the epistolary thread in grief memoir provides a unique opportunity for the author to ‘converse’ with a dead loved one, an attempt to draw them into responding in some way, even if simply through the author’s imagination? Stanley argues in the affirmative: Letters thereby share some of the temporal complexities of photographs: they not only hold memory but also always represent the moment of their production, and have a similar ‘flies in amber’ quality. This ‘present tense’ aspect of a letter persists – the self that writes is in a sense always writing, even after the death of the writer and addressee; and their addressee is ‘always listening’ too. (Stanley 2004, p. 208) Like Stanley, Altman identifies why the epistolary thread sits naturally within advertently relational memoir, such as matriographical texts, and even more directly in narrative conjuring the deceased: Epistolary language, which is the language of absence, makes present by make-believe. The particular you whose constant appearance distinguishes letter discourse from other written discourse (memoir, diary, rhetoric) is an image of the addressee who is elsewhere. Memory and expectation keep the addressee present to the imagination of the writer, whose narrative and narration, through a frequent oscillation between past and future, likewise seize the present through illusion. (Altman 1982, pp. 140–1)

The Epistolary Thread as Collaborative Writing  261 Given the connection between epistolary language and the conjuring of an absent character, it is important to consider its effects for writers of nonfiction on grief and mourning. It seems epistolary language in the context of such texts opens up the possibility of dialoguing with the deceased. Here, a grief memoir becomes less a recount of a past connection with a loved one and more a method of keeping the lines of communication open.

The Epistolary Thread: Solution to the Problem or Further Betrayal? The ethical difficulties of collaborative autobiography are rooted in its nearly oxymoronic status; the single narrative voice – a simulation by one person of the voice of another – is always in danger of breaking, exposing conflicts of interest that are not present in solo autobiography. Although the process by which the text is produced is dialogical, the product is monological…. (Couser 1998, para. 2) Of course, this exposition explores the term ‘collaborative’ memoir differently to the way Couser may have intended. Traditionally, collaborative writing refers to a text written by more than one party. It is difficult to find an adequate term to describe the scenario to which I am referring – the notion of writing a memoir about a personal experience that involves a major thematic focus on the life and words of a deceased mother. Despite this, Couser’s above statement is useful when applied to the scenario of co-authoring through epistolation. He reminds us that despite our best efforts: Still, there is a thin and not always clear line between making, taking, and faking the life of another person in print. Co-authoring another’s life can be a creative or a destructive act, a service or a disservice, an act of homage or of appropriation. (Couser 1998, para. 4) In The Ethics of Betrayal: Diary of a Memoirist, Nancy K. Miller takes her readers through her various thought processes on writing about others during the composition of her memoir, My Dangerous Relations. What is interesting here is that Miller, clearly by her choice to publish her memoir, and also by indications in her diary of her ethical process, is comfortable (for want of a better word) with exposing the stories of others in order to illuminate herself. However, she recalls the publication of her own epistolary communication without her permission by another writer and academic some two decades earlier. The publication of her

262  Freya Latona epistolary correspondence ‘… tipped the scale of ethical standards…’ in her eyes (2004, p. 153). While writing My Dangerous Relations, a memoir about her life and marriage, Miller recalls letters her husband wrote to her parents without her knowledge: ‘Uxorious is the word I want. Excessive concern for a wife. Even with the distance of time, I feel ventriloquized. My husband is telling my story in my place’ (2004, p. 154). Despite the fact that the letters were written by her then husband, and the fact that Miller is now exposing the contents of these letters in a memoir, she still feels, after all this time, that her own story belongs to her, that her then husband had no right to tell it on her behalf. This shows the depth of the complexity of epistolary communication and its publication. Miller, who is open to personal exposure in the text – having exposed others in her own writing, still feels that it is not ethical practice unless she is the one in control of the story. So what does this mean for my ethical positioning, having printed my mother’s emails in my memoir? Miller reminds us, crucially, that the epistolary can fill in the gaps of our memory when writing memoir (2004, p. 150). However, they may also tell only one side of a story. I have used my mother’s emails to attempt to be more truthful to her perspective of her experience of cancer, and yet, I am reminded by Nancy K. Miller to ask, are these emails truly representative of her? Do they tell only one side of the story? They are surely edited by her, in order to keep the recipient of the email happy. I note the last email she ever writes, which is to her friend Geoffrey, is positive about her health. Eight days later she died from her illness. I also note emails I found after her death which reveal stories she would not have told me – when she emails her healer after finding more blood in her saliva and is concerned, for example. There are many levels of necessary inquiry on my part. Am I stepping over an ethical line by reading and publishing my mum’s emails in order to tell my story? Am I in fact making steps in order to address this ethical problem by publishing them, giving her a direct voice in the story as best I can? Or am I deceiving my readers by publishing her emails, which may not tell the truth from my mother’s perspective, but simply keep up appearances of her health and good spirits in a time she was feeling anything but? Interestingly, a memoirist who publishes another’s epistolary text is transforming what was once a private epistolary message (between the addresser/s and addressee/s) into a public one, a notion raised by Stanley above. This of course brings with it a whole new set of ethical issues. It stands to reason that the inclusion of the epistolary can be considered a method of ‘co-authoring’ with a deceased relation to the memoirist, and as such, mark the intention to lessen the likelihood of incorrectly speaking on their behalf, allowing them to speak for themselves. However, in the same breath, the epistolary in this scenario, from

The Epistolary Thread as Collaborative Writing  263 its contextual movement from private to public, further ethically complicates a relational memoir. It is ironic that the inclusion of the epistolary emails creates both a predicament and a consolation for me as a relational memoirist. On the one hand, I feel tension about not only printing my own words about my mother and her cancer, but also printing her own words on the same subject. Words which I presume she never intended or even considered would end up on public record. Thus the story viewed through the epistolary prism becomes less narrative more reportage, drawing on source material, if you like. And with the lessening of the narration comes the lessening of distance. When my mother’s story is told through my observations as a daughter, the reader still has the opportunity to consider that the story is mine and not hers, that our renditions may be different. But when her own words are used? The memoir in the deepest sense becomes relational and collaborative, co-written. The protective, distancing effect of having a narrator and observer is lost, as Nancy Miller identifies. On the other hand, my mother’s true lived experience is also guarded, respected and upheld by my use of her emails, both as source material to inform my memoir factually, and because the reader can understand her directly – her take on the world, her use of language, her love of her children. It is more difficult to misquote somebody when using their words verbatim, using entire emails and/or letters, intertextually. Although of course, it is still entirely possible to use the epistolary intentionally out of context. I wonder if my mother would approve of my writing of this story, the one of her and I in the predicament of mortality that shapes us both? If not, I wonder if she would be appeased by my drawing upon her emails as an epistolary thread in my story, giving her a voice, rather than entirely spoken for?

Conclusion Given my heartbreak and grief over my mother’s death explored in my memoir, it is not hard to understand that beyond losing my mother, my greatest pain would be bludgeoning her memory and the truth of her life experience, and acting in any way that she consider reprehensible and personally offensive. However, I do not believe that my mother would be as harsh on me about publishing her emails as I am on myself. Indeed, some authors may feel they have free rein to write stories about their parents (or others in their life) once they are dead. It is perhaps not uncommon for certain authors to wait until the death/s of their parent/s until they can publish, feeling in no uncertain terms that their parent/s will be unaffected because they are not alive to experience the consequences. Instead, my appeasement about publishing her emails comes from the cathartic outpouring the composition of my entire memoir (including

264  Freya Latona the sections where I typed out her emails and wrote epistolary passages to her) had on me, her daughter, whose grief after she died, worried her during her illness. I hope that whatever reservations she may or may not have about the publication of her own words would be muted by her relief at my having found an outlet for the traumatic event that rocked my young life. As discussed in this chapter, there are strategies that help the relational memoirist come to terms with what they are writing about their deceased mother (or other deceased loved ones) from whom they have not garnered permission. These include: being aware of, and examining, the inherently relational nature of memoir; reconceptualizing the dead as a potentially ‘vulnerable subject’ whose legacy, which can be shaped by the written word, needs protecting; and using source material of some kind to inform the memoir and incorporate the deceased subject’s voice, which can include epistolary text interspersed throughout the creative artifact. Of course this is a mere suggestion, based on the personal experience of a tentative memoirist dedicated both to protecting her mother’s memory and to telling part of her own life story. The best-case scenario is that these ideals connect in a harmonious way, rather than existing in conflict in and out of the text; that the deceased, in some respect, has a say in the memoir’s content. It’s an almost impossible exercise for the writer to get right, nonetheless a worthwhile struggle.

References Altman, J. G. 1982. Epistolarity: approaches to a form, Ohio State University Press, Ohio. Couser, T. 1998, ‘Making, taking and faking lives: the ethics of collaborative life writing’, Style, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 334–50. Couser, T. 2004, Vulnerable Subjects: ethics and life writing, Cornell University Press, New York. Couser, T. 2012a, Memoir: an introduction, Oxford University Press, New York. Couser, T. 2012b, ‘Filiation in Barack Obama’s dreams from my father’, Life Writing, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 259–67. Culley, A. & Styler, R. 2011, ‘Editorial: lives in relation’, Life Writing, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 237–40. Dalziell, R. 2005, ‘Paul John Eakin ed., The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004, viii plus 271 pages. Cloth ISBN 0801441285, Paper ISBN 0801488338’, Life Writing, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 193–7. Eakin, P. J. 1999, How Our Lives Become Stories, Cornell University Press, New York. Freadman, R. 2004, ‘Decent and indecent: writing my father’s life’, in P. J. Eakin (ed.), The Ethics of Life Writing, Cornell University Press, New York, pp. 121–46. Lucy, J. 2012, Drink, Smoke, Pass Out, Penguin, Melbourne.

The Epistolary Thread as Collaborative Writing  265 Miller, N. K. 2000, Bequest and Betrayal: memoirs of a parent’s death, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Miller, N. K. 2004, ‘The ethics of betrayal: diary of a memoirist’, in P. J. Eakin (ed.), The Ethics of Life Writing, Cornell University Press, New York, pp. 147–62. O’Dwyer, E. 2014, ‘Love texts: the Lacanian gaze in epistolary literature in the 21st century’, PhD Thesis, University of Technology Sydney. Rieff, D. 2008, Swimming in a Sea of Death, Simon & Schuster, New York. Stanley, L. 2004, ‘The epistolarium: on theorizing letters and correspondences’, Auto/Biography, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 201–35. Stocker, M. 1997, ‘The schizophrenia of modern ethical theories’, in R. Crisp & M. Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 66–78.

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Section V

Recuperation

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17 Happy, Funny, and Humane South African Childhood Narratives Which Challenge the ‘Single Story’ of Apartheid Anthea Garman Introduction South Africa is awash in memoirs both of the formal, edited, published kind and the family stories which are often self-published and of varying quality (see Nixon 2012 for an assessment of the ‘boom’ in nonfiction writing in the post-apartheid era). Many evoke the rich intensity of lives under apartheid as well as the features of testimonial. However, my interest is in childhood narratives that have been written from the vantage point of the post-apartheid moment, which gives the added charge of reaching across a political gulf to explain why childhoods under apartheid might yet have been vivid and extraordinary. This possibility in itself (and readers’ present-day enjoyment of such stories) creates a ­political/ social dissonance – of the sort that unsettles the notion that the apartheid era was entirely without joy or fun. This element makes these texts fascinating to study and to place within the broader genre of memoir. A few of these stories are met with both critical acclaim and anger and dismay as they are understood by some readers to be making light of the sufferings meted out under apartheid and also of the atrocity of apartheid itself. My argument is that these stories are necessary additions and corrections to the solidified narrative of life under apartheid for black South Africans, which has become, borrowing the insight and words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009), a dangerous ‘single story.’ Theorists who deal with memoirs rooted in experiences of colonialism – and apartheid is a form of ‘late’ colonialism, see Mamdani (1996) – point out that these narratives are important texts to study. In particular those who study ‘settler’ autobiographies (Baena 2009; Whitlock 2000) are interesting because they offer insights into the complexities of such childhood narratives that are not often evident in other studies of memoir and memory. Baena asserts that by paying attention to childhood stories other facets – other than those that come through official ­history – of life under empire are illuminated. Whitlock argues: …the tension between history and myth, between colonised spaces and sweet places, tells us less about childhood subjectivity than the

270  Anthea Garman use of the idea of childhood in remembrances of things past in autobiography, and ways in which this stands ‘in vibrant relation’ to the present. (2000, p. 182) In looking in particular at the writings of Trevor Noah (Born a Crime and Other Stories, 2016), Jacob Dlamini (Native Nostalgia, 2009) and Chris van Wyk (Shirley, Goodness and Mercy, 2004), I am looking for this ‘vibrant relation to the present.’ I have selected memoirs that take the risk of disapproval and censure because they variously celebrate, poke fun at, and yearn for, life under apartheid. Why they take this risk as authors, how they challenge the ‘single story,’ and what they achieve in these accounts, are interesting questions to explore. I have asserted that such writings evoke a ‘frisson’ that adds to the already existing charge which comes from the delight of reentering the childhood mind, space, and experience. I see this frisson being generated by a number of components that characterize, in particular, the books I have singled out, but which also feature in other life stories. Firstly, it needs to be said that to write a life story about being South African or in South Africa places an immediate raced burden on the author. The author who is black (in the sense of all those various peoples oppressed by race under apartheid) is constrained by the burden of suffering and the recognition of that within the text. So to make light of this is to court opprobrium. The author who is white is burdened by the need to recognize their privilege and beneficiary status and to not only acknowledge it but skillfully negotiate it in the text. This is particularly tricky when writing about the white child, unconscious of the apartheid system: the adult author needs to address this lack of knowledge. A naïve child can be forgiven, but a naïve author, never. Secondly, the single story of the overthrow of apartheid has generated a narrative of how oppression operated routinely, forcefully, and collectively, and how certain designated heroes stood up against that oppression thus leading to its overthrow. To write one’s own life story as a ‘small’ person is to assert an individualism that breaks ranks with the account of collective oppression (and maybe also fractures accounts of its totalizing nature). But it also asserts a brand of heroism of the small and insignificant and writes into history the importance of the little individual who may not feature in any other stories.

Progenitors These post-apartheid stories are definitely indebted to the many that came before them like Ezekiel Mphahlele’s 1959 book Down Second Avenue, Mark Mathabane’s 1986 Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa, Denis Hirson’s 1986 The House Next Door to Africa, and Richard Rive’s ‘Buckingham Palace’,

Happy, Funny, and Humane  271 District Six, also 1986. Such personal stories and autobiographical accounts set the tone and the path which defined memoir writing under apartheid. Mphahlele’s book is a forerunner in telling an honest, true, personal story filled with pain, family dysfunction and dire poverty as a direct result of being black under ‘grand’ apartheid as it began to assert its hold over all facets of life in the 1950s. While Mphahlele grows up to become educated and an acknowledged intellectual and thus could be seen as a success story, the book ends with the adult Mphahlele explaining his need to leave South Africa for Nigeria because he feels so stifled and incapable of creativity living under apartheid as a teacher and writer. Many of my friends tried to dissuade me from leaving, ‘Stay on in the struggle,’ they kept saying. ‘I’m contributing nothing,’ I told them. ‘I can’t teach and I want to teach, I can’t write here and I want to write’. (1980, p. 210) Mathabane’s book is a story of a boy with a terrible life1 in Alexandra township on the outskirts of Johannesburg who attracts the notice of a tennis coach because of his sporting prowess. This attention enables Mathabane to move to the United States, pursue a career there, and tell a story which garners the attention of the Oprah Winfrey Show for its illumination of life under apartheid oppression. The book begins: The last thing I ever dreamed of when I was daily battling for survival and for an identity other than that of inferiority and fourthclass citizen, which apartheid foisted on me, was that someday I would attend an American college, edit its newspaper, graduate with honours, practise journalism and write a book. How could I have dreamed of all this when I was born of illiterate parents who could not afford to pay my way through school, let alone pay the rent for our shack and put enough food on the table; when black people in Alexandra lived under constant police terror and the threat of deportation to impoverished tribal reserves; when at ten I contemplated suicide because I found the burden of living in a ghetto, poverty-stricken and without hope, too heavy to shoulder; when in 1976 I got deeply involved in the Soweto protests, in which hundreds of black students were killed by the police, and thousands fled the country to escape imprisonment and torture? (1986, p. ix) Hirson’s story is written by using the device of short, distinct paragraphs of description and deal with his Jewish family life, his father’s opposition to apartheid leading to incarceration, and the family’s subsequent exile from South Africa. It is terse, stark, and often pained. 2

272  Anthea Garman It is my thirteenth birthday, special visit. I receive the khaki of my father’s clothes, the chocolate of his corduroy jacket, the grizzled warmth of the hairs on his chest. I receive the singleness of his glance, the multitude of what he wants; the finality of his surmounted will. I bear witness to him in the back of the Volkswagen, bring to him word of my mother his wife, my brother his son, my sister his daughter. So high, I show him with the flat of a hand. Crawls. I speak, and go numb. One clean nape twists around and announces that time is up. (1987, p. 65) The focus of all three of these books is on the horrors of life under apartheid, the grinding nature of its insistent presence, and the urgent need to escape to be able to live a free, happy, and fulfilled life. But Hirson, interestingly, has continued to mine his childhood for his writing career, and after House he then produced two books (I Remember King Kong (the Boxer), 2004 and We Walk Straight So You Better Get Out The Way, 2005) published in the post-apartheid era in which he used the device of the prompt phrase ‘I remember’ followed by a short or longer sentence: I remember the sting of a wet tennis ball. I remember when tennis balls were fluffier, and almost white. I remember the cinema ad for Brylcreem in which Gary Player ran his fingers through his hair. I remember the sweet oily smell of Brylcreem in its squat glass jar. I remember the commotion in a Yeoville bioscope3 during matinee performances. (2004, p. 11) This except is from I Remember, and its elicitation of a white South African childhood of a particular period (the ’50s and ’60s) had a powerful effect on readers who suddenly recalled the very same feelings, experiences, objects, and thoughts as children, which they had long put aside as childish things. Poet Antjie Krog’s response to the book was: ‘Extraordinary. This is unlike anything I have ever read… the form is as surprising as its subtle ability to tell the tales of our past’ (from the book’s front cover). The brilliance of the I remember refrain4 and the short sentences with their jumpy and jumbled up childhood logic and time-hopping perfectly captured the expression, preoccupations, and manner of a child of this moment in time. In We Walk Straight Hirson repeated the use of the I remember refrain but went further into his life as a teenager and young man and even ventured into his exile years in Paris. Hirson explains that after writing the first I remember book that he was giving a reading in Paris when another South African:

Happy, Funny, and Humane  273 …beamed up at me from a table: ‘Do you remember “We walk straight so you better get out the way”?’5 So I had a title, and then the text which begins ‘I remember how the girls would link arms like birds flying wing to wing’ (hereby dedicated to her), which turned into the first of a series of lean trajectories crossing this book. (2005, pp. 156–7) In an Africa Book Club interview, Hirson reflected on the timing of writing his first memoir and the two later books. He was asked: ‘You published your first novel some ten years after you left South Africa. Is it difficult to write from afar, both in time and distance?’ and responded: I would not have written in the same way if I had not left South Africa… More generally, distance is a double-bladed gift. It allows for perspective, gives leeway to the imagination, makes way for memory. But it can also cut the writer off from the source of writing, though I don’t feel that it has had this effect on me. When I was living in South Africa, much of my experience, political, social and intimate, was wrapped in layers of silence. When I left the country at the end of 1973 I felt like a mute. I think I could spend a lifetime continuing to unwrap those layers of silence, finding words to say what could never be said… There was a huge silence between The House Next Door to Africa and I Remember King Kong (The Boxer) which came out eight years later. (Diez 2011) What Hirson doesn’t say, and which is interesting in the light of my inquiry, is that the first book was written with apartheid still in place – 1986 was a dark time of detentions, repression, and despair – and the second two were published after the transition to democracy when the first truly representative government of the majority of South Africans was firmly in place. Somehow the recall of joy, fun, and childish delight seems to be possible with this shift in a way not entirely possible in the first book of memoir. Richard Rive’s book, by contrast, does not place the author at the center of the story of memory and perhaps creates for himself the distance and space to be irreverent and cheeky in his depiction of the lives of those who inhabited a row of rundown cottages called Buckingham Palace in District Six before the apartheid regime razed the suburb in 1966 and got rid of its offending mixtures of people. Rive’s treatment of his family, friends, and neighbors (including the prostitutes Mary and the Girls, the small-time gangsters Zoot and Pretty-Boy, the Barber Last-Knight, and the landlord Katzen) is wry, funny, and irreverent, and is possibly the true progenitor of the type of writing in the post-apartheid era that chooses to tell a slice of a story infused with joy and fun rather than repeat the trope

274  Anthea Garman of the totalizing story of ruin, despair, and hatred. Rive begins the book with a shortish, beautifully lyrical, italicized section in which he talks about himself. Interestingly, it starts with ‘I remember, those who used to live in District Six… when I was a boy and chirruping ten… when I was Tarzan and Batman…’ (1987, p. 1), and then after this section moves into rich description of a large cast of eccentric characters who populate this child’s life. Rive’s story was met with acclaim: Leadership magazine called it ‘a marvellous story, an absorbing mix of delight and hurt told with gusto and obvious pleasure’ (blazoned on the back cover). In this first italicized section there is a powerful moment of frisson which is emblematic for me of the type of charge such accounts evoke and which is powerfully evident in Rive’s text: In the afternoon, when the adults were snoring heavily, we children would roam the streets, always careful not to soil our Sunday suits. On rare occasions we ventured downtown to the Museum to see the models of Bushmen with big bums or furtively glance at the nude statues in the Art Galleries. What a wicked and enjoyable place the world was. What goings-on. And then we walked back through the Botanical Gardens whooping and shouting and raising havoc deliberately to frighten fragile little white ladies sitting on quiet benches, who would then complain to the attendants about those rude slum children. (1986, p. 6) This account refers to the Bushmen diorama in the South African Museum which was created in 1911 by modeler James Drury as an educational experience. It was famous for its lifelikeness and drew locals who visited it again and again and was also somewhat of a tourist attraction. But in the post-apartheid era this particular display of South Africa’s first Indigenous inhabitants, supposedly in their natural habitat, became the subject of a major public debate. This was provoked by artist Pippa Skotnes who mounted the exhibition ‘Miscast’ in 1996 which drew attention to the fact that these museum figures had been cast from actual humans. The diorama was removed permanently in 2001.6 So to read Rive’s account of children looking at Bushmen’s ‘bums’ with this subsequent knowledge is to experience the frisson of something that could be done in the apartheid era which is now no longer possible because such display is considered inhumane. This type of play at the edges of two eras and their differing political sensibilities is the hallmark I am looking for within the later life stories. There is also the certain knowledge for the reader that the child narrator cannot possibly understand the larger politics at play and so is free to say and do then what the wiser reader may not, now. An important point to note is that the books by Mphahlele, Mathabane, and Hirson certainly also operate in the terrain

Happy, Funny, and Humane  275 of testimonial, while for Rive to flirt with humor and impropriety is to forsake the high moral ground of the individual, testimonial account which complements the political, social knowledge with insight into the personal life. Here the life is so idiosyncratic, so quirky, so particular that it cannot simply stand in for the life or condition of the group. It is also entirely the author’s vision and creation and is not necessarily intended to do political, consciousness-raising work on the page. All of these books published in the apartheid era were treated as valid and important personal accounts of life under apartheid. Except for Rive’s book those published in this time were characterized by a certain despair at life under apartheid and were intended to convey the crushing and brutalizing nature of the apartheid system on creativity, relationships, and life itself.

‘There was Nothing Mournful about My Township Childhood’ It is interesting to read The New York Times 1987 review of Kaffir Boy (headlined ‘Book Plumbs Agony of South African and His Nation’) and the 2016 review of Born a Crime 7 by Trevor Noah (headlined ‘A raw account of life under apartheid’). The reviewers activate similar tropes in according bravery and survivalism to both men and speak mostly of the horror of the apartheid era for black South Africans: By turns alarming, sad and funny, his book provides a harrowing look, through the prism of Mr. Noah’s family, at life in South Africa under apartheid and the country’s lurching entry into a postapartheid era in the 1990s. (2016) Deprivation is highlighted in this article and little is said about the humor and irreverence, as well as the lightness with which Noah treats very serious subject matter like his own complex relationship with his white father. Noah tells, for example, of walking in a Johannesburg park as a child with his father and not being able to hold his hand or call him daddy because of the fear that this display would show that his parents were having a relationship across the color bar, and they would suffer the consequences. This is stated but not explored much further. There are other such devastating incidents (like his stepfather shooting but not killing his mother), but they are not allowed to dominate the narrative or define the protagonist. They do not become seminal plot elements which accumulate – as in the earlier memoirs – into a totalizing story about apartheid. Instead, the book makes much of Noah’s mother’s determination, resilience, and creativity in forging a life for herself and her two boys regardless of apartheid’s proscriptions and debilitations. One of the most

276  Anthea Garman delightful accounts in the book is of Noah’s mother teaching him to drive an ancient, unreliable Beetle when he is just six years old.8 This woman and her ingenuity loom large in the book and it is dedicated to her: For my mother. My first fan. Thank you for making me a man. (2016) Noah’s explanation of how his mother named him is illuminating of her intentions for him. He says: The deprivations of her youth, the betrayals of her parents, she never complained about any of it. Just as she let the past go, she was determined not to repeat it: my childhood would bear no resemblance to hers. She started with my name. The names Xhosa families give their children always have a meaning, and that meaning has a way of becoming self-fulfilling… When it was time to pick my name, she chose Trevor, a name with no meaning whatsoever in South Africa, no precedent in my family. It’s not even a Biblical name, it’s just a name. My mother wanted her child beholden to no fate. She wanted me to be free to go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. (2016, pp. 79–80) Two features stand out as characterizing these memoirs written in the post-apartheid era. First, there is a shrugging off of apartheid as a totalizing system of behavior and thought which reached comprehensively into one’s life and determined one’s identity and being. Noah infuses his book with his mother’s sensibility of taking her life into her own hands and refusing to be defined. This seems to be the greatest legacy he imbibed as a child. Secondly, the presence of strong, thoughtful, caring, competent mothers is placed centrally in these texts and tribute is paid to them in both protecting their children from and holding at bay the reach of apartheid into their lives. The publisher of Chris van Wyk’s book about growing up in the ‘coloured’ townships of Newclare, Coronationville, and Riverlea during the 1960s, Shirley, Goodness and Mercy, has dealt with the somewhat awkward situation of the book’s dependence on fun in the following way: Despite Van Wyk’s later becoming involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, this is not a book about racial politics. Instead, it is a delightful account of one boy’s special relationship with the relatives, friends and neighbours – often decidedly quirky – who made up his community, and of the important coping role laughter and humour played during the years he spent in bleak, dusty townships. Chris van Wyk has created a truly remarkable record of life in the black community at once informative and vastly entertaining.9

Happy, Funny, and Humane  277 The book illustrates that laughter is far more than a coping mechanism. It is absolutely integral to the characters that people the stories. They are people of fun and laughter and enjoyment and this characterizes them much more than the obligatory suffering, resilience, and resistance to apartheid. In fact it makes them self-determined and almost oblivious (certainly in the text) to apartheid’s defining intentions. The deprivations and limitations of apartheid are always present in the text, but they cease to be the single defining factor in response to which every action and thought must react. Van Wyk tells the story of his mother as a clever, precocious child who was keen to kill a live turkey for dinner when her older brother was too afraid to do it. He ends the story: Ten years later many things had changed in Shirley’s life. She had dropped out of school and, like hundreds of Coloured girls in the townships, had become a factory worker earning no more than one pound per week. (2005, p. 17) And yet in this text, the adult Shirley is powerful, important, full of wisdom and ingenuity, and central to the life and character formation of her oldest son Chris. Her name appears in the title because as a small child he learned the 23rd Psalm in church and was convinced that the line from the psalm was all about her: ‘Shirley goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life’ (2005, p. 31). I watch Ma listening to me and see her own soul being restoreth. She puts down her knife and her dishcloth, and stands watching me, a smile of pure pride lighting up her face. Then suddenly, as I reach the last two lines, Ma bursts into excited laughter. (2005, p. 17) Just as the mother in Noah’s book is larger than life, Shirley in Van Wyk’s book is larger, more powerful, and more defining than apartheid as an influence in his life. Both Noah’s book and Van Wyk’s book have been fairly uncontroversial. But the book which has provoked angry reaction10 has been Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia because it more deliberately seeks to upend the defining narrative of the totalizing nature of apartheid and to assert that lives in townships could be happy and fulfilled. Where Noah and Van Wyk ‘show’ (in true writerly style) Dlamini ‘tells.’ Of growing up in the township of Katlehong in the late ’70s and early ’80s, he says, ‘There was nothing mournful about my township childhood, despite standard portrayals of township life that sometimes paint it as miserable’ (2009, p. 63). Native Nostalgia seeks to challenge ‘the grand master narrative

278  Anthea Garman of black dispossession’ that he says dominates the historiography of the struggle against apartheid. Book critic Maureen Isaacson comments: Not all blacks suffered and fought apartheid in the same way – life was complex… by providing deeply complex, layered, richly ­textured memoir and cultural biography, he revisits the past, allows it to breathe again, in all its diversity in Katlehong… Dlamini is not here to lament but to remember…. (2009, p. 17) Dlamini injects into his text a more polemical approach to the dangerous single story of apartheid totality. He also mounts a more intellectually supported and obvious resistance to this narrative. His book’s intention is to show just how filled with agency, inventiveness, and evasion the people he lived with were. He explains: To say Katlehong was in theory a scientific township is to say that there was a wide gap between how government, with its bird’s-eye view of the place, saw it and how those who lived there experienced it. It is, in other words, to speak of the difference between Katlehong as it existed on paper for the state and Katlehong as it looked from the ground, as seen on a human scale. Residents did not so much undermine the grid as neutralise it with practices such as cutting double laps, shortcuts, through neighbours’ properties, and erecting stop-nonsense fences whose efficacy depended not on the fences’ height but their acceptance by neighbours. Here, the ground on which people lived and walked was founded not on official decrees but on relationships between neighbours. This does not mean the place existed outside politics, for, as Robert Hughes says, all cities are shaped by politics. (2009, p. 45) Unlike the two texts discussed above he doesn’t confine himself to a personal story or memories of a community, he also injects commentary that takes on the politics of the moment of writing the book. This then frames the personal story and some of the memories which are rich and textured. He is determined to make the case for a complexity that ‘not even colonialism and apartheid at their worst could destroy’ (2009, p. 19). … as if blacks produced no art, literature or music, bore no morally upstanding children, or, at the very least, children who knew the difference between right and wrong … this is not to say there was no poverty, crime or moral degradation. There was. But none of this determined the shape of black life in its totality…. (2009, p. 19)

Happy, Funny, and Humane  279 In attacking the single story of apartheid devastation and its resistance he aims his critique at the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and asserts that black South Africans did not all suffer the same way, struggle the same way, and resist the same way (2009, p. 20). Dlamini’s story deliberately complicates the hegemonic history that the ANC with its heroes wants to become the version adhered to by South Africans. Dlamini is the son of an ordinary family, and he’s determined to write himself and them into history too. Having made his position clear, he then embarks on some enchanting, beautifully evocative pieces of memory. In particular his account of listening to a boxing match on the radio as a young boy and his affinity for the Afrikaans language are fascinating. They are also provocative. The piece on the ubiquity and importance of radio in township life speaks of how he came to know and love the work of black radio announcers but how he also became a supporter of the white Afrikaans boxer Gerhardus Christiaan Coetzee: My family supported Coetzee and my mother would let me stay up to follow his fights on the radio each time the man went into the ring. He was one of ours and we cheered him on without reservation. (2009, p. 28) In the chapter on the Afrikaans language he explores and dissects the affection and use of the language of the oppressor by black South Africans but also the shame and repudiation of admitting to knowing and using the language. It’s an insightful, interesting account which complicates an understanding of black South Africans in exactly the way Dlamini intends. Dlamini’s book is also dedicated to his mother Evelinah Papayi Dlamini. He says of her: For my mother, there was no such thing as liberation before education. This is why she did not believe in class boycotts… To remember my mother’s insistence on education is to remember that there were sharp divisions within the black community about how to struggle for freedom. For someone like my mother, whose lack of education had limited the job opportunities available to her, education was key. She did not want her child and those of her siblings to be confined to a life of domestic service. My mother knew many of the political leaders of her day. She knew also that many were college and university graduates…. (2009, pp. 92–3) This mother is a powerful presence of independent thought, agency, and action which has important effects on the life and experiences of her

280  Anthea Garman son. Again, like Noah’s mother, she is not defined by apartheid. Her mind is her own; her decisions are her own. In all three of these books there is a desire to not let the single story of South Africa obliterate such women because in the grand narrative they are small and unremarkable. In fact Dlamini makes a claim that is quite startling towards the end of his book when he says of his memories of Katlehong and the bonds between people, ‘They constitute… an attempt to seize hold of memories without which we cannot understand why apartheid suffered the kind of moral defeat that led to its demise’ (2009, p. 152). I understand him to be saying that in the ordinary, daily life of women like this and their families and neighbors, through their bonds and commitments, by their moral actions, they refused to bow to the weight of apartheid, to let its tentacles enter their intimate spaces, and to live within the confines of its limitations. And therein lay its downfall, within the homes of people who loved each other, looked after each other, saw potential and possibility and nurtured it, who laughed and knew joy, who raised their children with love. In theoretical terms these books are lifting their authors – and their mothers and communities – out of subject status and bestowing on them agent status. And they are doing it in two main arenas – textually and politically. Biographer Sue Lovell talks of her project to write the life of the Australian artist Vida Lahey as a quest to discover the human agent ‘who exceeds the subject’ (quoting Paul Smith 2005, p. 10). She says: ‘I want to find in Vida (and perhaps in my mother and myself?) an agent who resists. I want to find that she consciously exceeds her positioning as a woman in a time, place and culture…’ (2005, p. 11). While a feminist, poststructuralist lens is used by Lovell to examine her female subject imbedded in a particular time and place, it is a ­useful one to apply to other oppressed subject positions. Bronwyn Davies elaborates: … agency is synonymous with being a person… agency is, by definition, a feature of each sane, adult human being. Those who are generally not constituted as agentic, such as women, children, natives… are by definition within that model, not fully human. (1991, p. 42) These three authors use writing to inscribe themselves as active agents and to position themselves differently in relation to apartheid under which previous authors suffered as ‘natives.’ These insights help me see that these authors are attempting to exceed their debilitating circumstances. The post-apartheid period within which they write has enabled their refusal to be merely subjects within discourses that remove their agency and humanity. Their choice of humor and fun to make this assertion is a technique of both deflection and provocation.

Happy, Funny, and Humane  281

Conclusion These memoirs yank on the memory, transporting an unsuspecting reader instantly into the past. They evoke a powerful nostalgia and the warmth of sharing something intimate and important. They also have the capacity to enchant those readers who are entering a foreign world guided by a child as to its workings and characters. Treading the pathway of naïveté and ignorance and discovery with this child, while holding at bay adult knowledge and cynicism, is part of the charm spun by the child/author. This creates the familiar frisson we have come to expect from such stories. Also evident in the memoirs by Van Wyk, Dlamini and Noah is that the post-apartheid era has made possible the once u ­ nthinkable: Apartheid is no longer the single defining condition of all South Africans’ lives, futures, and possibilities, especially for black South Africans. As a result, these accounts successfully fragment the dangerous single story of the totalizing nature of apartheid, but they also, somewhat dangerously, flirt with a subtle assertion (except in the case of Dlamini, whose claim is more overt) that it is not only the armies, politicians, and freedom fighters who delivered us into a new political dispensation, but the ordinary humans living their daily lives in ordinary ways – and in particular the women and mothers. This, combined with these authors’ refusal to let the apartheid experiences of their childhoods dictate the plots of their lives, adds an extra charge of electricity to the reading.

Notes 1 See the New York Times’ 1987 review at www.nytimes.com/1987/09/24/ books/book-plumbs-agony-of-south-african-and-his-nation.html. 2 See an interview with Hirson about the writing of this book from Paris at www.africabookclub.com/?p=6099 Hirson then went on to write two books (2004, 2005) of childhood memories in short fragments in which each memory begins ‘I remember…’ 3 A South Africanism of a particular era for a cinema. 4 Hirson borrowed the I remember device from Joe Brainard (I Remember) and Georges Perec (Je me souviens). 5 A game I too played at school and had completely forgotten until I read the title of Hirson’s book and immediately bought it feeling compelled to by the power of the memory. 6 S ee w w w.news24.com /x A rchive /A rchive / Bushman- ex hibit- closed20010403. 7 www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/books/review-born-a-crime-trevor-noahsraw-account-of-life-under-apartheid.html?_r=0. 8 An excerpt can be read at www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/arts/television/ trevor-noah-the-first-time-i-drove-a-car.html?mwrsm=Facebook&_r=0. 9 http://panmacmillan.co.za/catalogue/shirley-goodness-mercy-picador-40thspecial-edition/. 10 ‘There is a dangerous increase in books by black authors and so-called intellectuals that portray life under freedom and democracy negatively. One can even judge the content of these by their covers because they have vivid

282  Anthea Garman and memorable titles that assault the integrity of the first legitimate and elected black government and its democracy. Xolela Mancu’s To the Brink, Zakes Mda’s Black Diamonds, William Gumede and Leslie Dikeni’s Poverty of Ideas and Jacob Dlamini’s Native Nostalgia, for example, to understand how some black writers rubbish the achievement of freedom and democracy. These books, of course, reveal how the dawn of democracy and freedom under the ANC has opened up opportunities for black writers and intellectuals to articulate themselves. But what sits like a thorn crown among them is not just that they are witty and acerbic but their reactionary quality that negates anything positive.’ Sandile Memela, Saturday Star, 28 November 2009, p. 14.

References Baena, R. 2009, ‘“Not home but here”: rewriting Englishness in colonial childhood memoirs’, English Studies, vol. 96, no. 4, pp. 435–59. Davies, B. 1991, ‘The concept of agency: a feminist poststructuralist analysis’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Culture Practice, vol. 30, pp. 42–53. Diez, H. 2011, Africa Book Club, ‘An interview with Denis Hirson, novelist, poet, and long distance South African’, viewed 27 April 2017, www.africabookclub.com/?p=6099. Dlamini, J. 2009, Native Nostalgia, Jacana, Johannesburg. Hirson, D. (1987) 1986, The House Next Door to Africa, Carcanet, New York. Hirson, D. 2004, I Remember King Kong (the boxer), Jacana, Johannesburg. Hirson, D. 2005, We Walk Straight So You Better Get Out the Way, Jacana, Johannesburg. Isaacson, M. 2009, ‘Jacob Dlamini vividly remembers Katlehong a la Walter Benjamin’, Sunday Independent, 22 November, p. 17. Kakutani, M. 2016, ‘“Born a crime”, Trevor Noah’s raw account of life u ­ nder apartheid’, New York Times, New York, viewed 27 April 2017, www.­nytimes. com/2016/11/28/books/review-born-a-crime-trevor-noahs-raw-account-oflife-under-apartheid.html?_r=0. Lovell, S. 2005, ‘Seductive whisperings: memory, desire, and agency in auto/ biography’, Thirdspace: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, Viewed 27 April 2017, http://journals.sfu.ca/thirdspace/index.php/ journal/article/view/lovell/146. Mamdani, M. 1996, Citizen and Subject: contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Mathabane, M. 1986, Kaffir Boy: the true story of a black youth’s coming of age in apartheid South Africa, Penguin, New York. Mphahlele, E. (1959) 1980, Down Second Avenue, Faber and Faber, London. New York Times 1987. ‘Book plumbs agony of South African and his ­nation’, New York Times, New York, viewed 27 April 2017, www.nytimes. com /1987/09/24/books/book-plumbs-agony-of-south-african-and-his-­ nation.html. Nixon, R. 2012. ‘Non-Fiction Booms, North and South: A Transatlantic ­Perspective’, Safundi, The Journal of South African and American Studies, vol. 14, no. 1–2, pp. 29–49.

Happy, Funny, and Humane  283 Ngozi Adichie, C. 2009, ‘The danger of a single story. TED, viewed 27 April 2017, www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/ transcript?language=en. Noah, T. 2016, Born a Crime and Other Stories, Macmillian, Johannesburg. Rive, R. (1987) 1986, ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six, David Philip, Cape Town. Van Wyk, C. (2005) 2004, Shirley, Goodness and Mercy, Picador, Northlands. Whitlock, G. 2000, The Intimate Empire: reading women’s autobiography, Cassell, London.

18 Redressing the Silence Racism, Trauma, and Aboriginal Women’s Life Writing Willa McDonald Introduction Anita Heiss states in Dhuuluu-Yala, To Talk Straight (2003, p. 35) that: ‘Autobiographies are the history and text books of Aboriginal A ­ ustralia.’ Yet Aboriginal writers have long been struggling to assert their own voices. The skewering of the historical narrative in favor of settler versions of history created a silence around Aboriginal experience that has been fundamental to the British colonial project. It wasn’t until the publication of numerous texts by Aboriginal Australians in the latter part of the 20th century that identifiably Indigenous responses to the traumatic reality of British rule were heard, and murder and dispossession carried out in its name (Heiss 2003; Murray 2004). Aboriginal women’s life writing in particular has played an important role in fracturing the silence of colonialism and educating wider Australia about Aboriginal lives. Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987), Doris Pilkington Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996), and Anita Heiss’s Am I Black Enough For You? (2012) have been chosen as the focus of this chapter because they are landmark texts. All three books are high-profile works of Aboriginal life writing which have won (sometimes controversial) attention in the mainstream media, if not large non-Aboriginal readerships. They have been groundbreaking in the themes they confront. Besides breaking silences and putting on record otherwise untold conditions of Aboriginal lives, they use memory, testimony, and advocacy to convey the consequences of racism and violence on Aboriginal people and their communities under colonialism. They variously act as archives of information about Aboriginal knowledge and practices, while bringing the past into the present through the use of multiple voices, and by relating personal experiences in ways that both recognize and evoke affect. These books acknowledge important actions, omissions, events, individuals, and clan relationships, and they function as points of cultural and political resistance. They reculturate identity as a response to trauma in ways that overturn racial and cultural stereotypes. The release of these books across three decades of change in black/white relations, including the arguably ongoing period of the ‘history wars,’

Redressing the Silence  285 makes them particularly relevant. The time between the ­publication of Morgan’s My Place (1987), the year before modern Australia’s Bicentenary, and Heiss’s Am I Black Enough for You? (2012), is marked by a national debate over the way Australians should narrate their history – whether as settlement or invasion. The debate has been influenced by the findings of several public enquiries including the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987), the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (the Stolen Generation) (1995–97), and the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse (2006–7). In turn, these enquiries have confirmed the transgenerational trauma described in Aboriginal life writings and, in particular, in the narratives under discussion here.

Genre/Labels The term ‘life writing’ is used in this chapter instead of the contested term ‘autobiography’ and, by extension, ‘memoir.’ Modern Aboriginal life writers grapple with ways to use English – the language of the oppressors – to express themselves and their cultures. The imposition of literacy on Aboriginal peoples was key in the British program of imperial domination, not only by suppressing and marginalizing Aboriginal languages, but also ‘by re-shaping the ways in which Aboriginal peoples [came] to know and relate to themselves, to each other and to settler colonialism’ (Grossman 2006, n.p.). Aboriginal writers have had to break free from the constraints imposed on content, language, style, and structure by the non-Aboriginal literary and publishing industries (Heiss 2003; Huggins 2003; Jones 2004; Schaffer 2002). Because of this, many Aboriginal writers eschew western labels, wary of the way in which they may distort the way Aboriginal writing is edited, marketed, and read (Ferrier 1990; McDonell 2004, 2005). For example, critics often raise truthfulness as an issue in their dismissal of Aboriginal life writing, privileging official written records of the settler society over the oral testimony of the Aboriginal people themselves. As Margaret McDonell observes: Genre categories that require ‘truth’ leave the text and the writer open to attack on the grounds of veracity…Autobiographical writing could be categorized as autobiography, life-writing, memoir, biography, testimony, or family history but such choices have implications for its reception. [Aboriginal memory-based writing] is often referred to as ‘life-writing’ rather than ‘autobiography’ because of the preconceptions that are held about the literary form ‘autobiography’. (McDonell 2005, pp. 77–8)

286  Willa McDonald Much Aboriginal life writing passes on clan and community stories that have been told orally and written down by trusted collaborators or family members. Consequently, it is recognized as an extension of Aboriginal relationality which, in the words of Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000, p. 1), expresses ‘the self as part of others and others as part of the self within and across generations.’ She notes in her 1998 thesis, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman, her preference for the label ‘life writings’ as an acknowledgement of the collaborative and ‘fundamentally social’ approaches taken in these texts (p. 82, quoted in McDonell 2005, p. 78).

Breaking the Silence – Sally Morgan’s My Place Sally Morgan’s My Place is well known by most Australians, having found a favored place on high school and university reading lists. Published in 1987, in time for the year of the Bicentenary in 1988, the public celebration of the first 200 years of modern Australia, it describes the search by Morgan, and later her mother, to reclaim their Aboriginal identity. While the book takes the form of a quest, likened by Bain Attwood to a detective novel (1992, p. 305), here the search is not for a hidden killer but for a missing truth. The first half of the book tells Morgan’s own story of life in suburban Perth in a family that, because of discrimination and trauma, pretends to be Indian. It is a family struggling under the weight of poverty and a non-Indigenous father who has been ­severely affected by his war experiences. With sophisticated use of ­English literary techniques that make the text accessible to non-­Aboriginal readers (and appealing to educators who set school and university curricula), the manuscript follows Morgan’s transition to adulthood and her search for knowledge of her Aboriginal heritage. In this way, Morgan’s narration paves the way for, and frames, the second half of the book which is mostly comprised of three stories told orally to Morgan, and transcribed and edited by her – the stories of her mother Gladys Milroy, her uncle Arthur Corunna, and her grandmother Daisy Corunna. These stories relay horrendous experiences including sexual abuse, servitude, and child theft perpetrated by members of the settler communities. My Place has been enormously successful with non-Aboriginal ­readers  – over 600,000 copies have been sold so far (The Book Club 2014). Yet, despite its success, the book has been roundly criticized. Aboriginal critics have judged it for being written in ‘white’ rather than an Aboriginal style (Huggins 1993, p. 461); for failing to sufficiently confront non-Aboriginal perceptions of Aboriginal Australia (Heiss 2003, p. 102); for failing to give the story of someone living knowingly as an Aboriginal person (Heiss 2003, p. 102); for showing only what happened and not why things happened (Cathy Craigie quoted in Heiss 2003, p. 104); and for telling the stories of people who, in an ‘horrendous’ act of betrayal, had chosen to pass as non-Aboriginals (Huggins

Redressing the Silence  287 1993, p. 460). Isabel Tarrago (1993, p. 469) says the book ‘was written to justify [Morgan’s] existence to white people; this is the denial of one’s self to the Aboriginal peoples.’ Jackie Huggins (1993) expressed several concerns about the book in her essay ‘Always Was Always Will Be,’ commenting: Precisely what irks me about My Place is its proposition that Aboriginality can be understood by all non-Aboriginals. Aboriginality is not like that…To me that is My Place’s greatest weakness – ­requiring little translation (to a white audience), therefore it reeks of whitewashing in the ultimate sense. (p. 460) The book has also been derided because of its presence on reading lists as the sole ‘Black’ text at the expense of other works, such as Glenys Ward’s Wandering Girl, which was published the same year (Heiss 2003, p. 103). Marcia Langton (1993) wonders at the book’s appeal to large non-Aboriginal audiences: Perhaps Morgan assuages the guilt of the whites, especially white women, who were complicit in the assimilation program and the deception into which families like Morgan’s felt they were forced? (p. 29) Finally, there was talk of legal action being taken by the Drake-­ Brockmans, the white station owners who featured in the book; instead, some of the claims made by Morgan were challenged by Judith Drake-­ Brockman in her memoir Wongi Wongi: To Speak (2001). While not disputing these criticisms, this chapter argues that My Place nonetheless has played a pivotal role in breaking the silence in wider Australia around traumatic Aboriginal experiences. Trauma acts as its own muzzle, stifling truths and entrenching dark secrets. My Place was influential in revealing those secrets, putting Aboriginal experiences onto the national agenda (Schaffer 2002). Its publication, and its ongoing success, opened the way for dozens of other Aboriginal life stories to be published and read by non-Aboriginal Australians (Schaffer 2002, p. 6; see also Morgan’s own comments in Laurie 1999). According to some commentators, it also opened the way for Aboriginal testimonies ­ boriginal to be heard via the National Inquiry into the Separation of A and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (1995–97) (Schaffer 2002; Schaffer & Smith 2004a, p. 16). Paradoxically, Morgan did this by sharing the personal stories of her family and demonstrating the strength of the silence imposed on them, especially her grandmother and then, as a result, on the rest of the family. For all writers, the translation of trauma and pain for readers is

288  Willa McDonald difficult and culture bound (Kennedy 2008; Klein 2016, p. 599). In the Aboriginal communities, the impact of colonization has rendered many people mute – their suffering inexpressible in words; the recalling of distressing memories re-traumatizing. Compounding this is the loss of Aboriginal culture between generations. Jackie Huggins describes this as a ‘double fold of silence,’ a phenomenon she encountered when writing Auntie Rita, the book she co-authored with her mother, Rita Huggins: Each fold is of the same cloth – two centuries of colonisation. There are the acts of violence that attempted to alienate (with varying degrees of success) Black people’s access to knowledge of their own culture and its history: taking people from their lands, separating children from their parents, insisting on the surrender of traditional languages and customs and the adoption of European ways. This list goes on and continues into the present. There is another order of silence again, though, and this is the silence that you meet in Aboriginal elders who cannot bear to speak of the humiliations and mutilations they have experienced and have witnessed. (1994, p. 5) Morgan is a talented writer. Her own story plays an important role in drawing the reader into the narrative to hear the voices of the older people that testify to the cruelty of colonization. But despite her best efforts, Morgan never manages to get to the bottom of the secrets; she never manages to completely shatter the profound silence that enveloped her family. Morgan had no knowledge at the beginning of her project of the trauma lying behind the silence about her family’s origins, let alone any understanding of its depth. While Morgan’s uncle, Arthur, was willing to participate in the book, the older women in the family were reluctant. Her mother Gladys, who at the age of three was taken from her mother Daisy and put in the Parkerville Children’s Home, at first pleads with her to leave well enough alone: ‘“Can’t you just leave the past buried, it won’t hurt anyone then?” “Mum,” I reasoned, “it’s already hurt people. It’s hurt you and me and Nan, all of us… I have the right to know my own history”’ (Morgan 1987, p. 152). Although Gladys is eventually drawn into the search for the family’s history, Morgan’s grandmother Daisy repeatedly refuses to participate, intimating to her granddaughter of the un-speakability of some traumas. ‘I’ve got my secrets, I’ll take them to the grave. Some things, I can’t talk ‘bout. Not even to you, my granddaughter. They for me to know. They not for you or your mother to know’ (p. 349). Eventually, as she was dying from a terminal illness, Daisy revealed that she, like Arthur, had been taken from her mother on the grounds that she was to be sent to school. Instead, she was forced into domestic service for the settler family on the homestead and allowed no contact with the ‘camp natives,’

Redressing the Silence  289 including her mother. While Daisy never completely capitulated to her granddaughter’s repeated requests for information, the book makes clear that Aboriginal women were raped and abused by white settlers. It suggests incestuous abuse – that Howden Drake-Brockman was both Daisy’s father and the father of her daughter Gladys. In a reference to her great granddaughter, Daisy advises Morgan: You watch out for her after I’m gone. She’s goin’ to be very ­beautiful. All the men’ll want her. Some men can’t be trusted. They just ­mongrels. They get you down on the floor and they won’t let you get up. Don’t ever let a man do that to you. You watch out for Amber. You don’t want her bein’ treated like a black woman…We had no protection when we was in service. I know a lot of native servants had kids to white men because they was forced. Makes you want to cry to think how black women have been treated in this country. It’s a terrible thing. (p. 337) Foreshadowing the Stolen Generations’ inquiry, Morgan’s text reveals that while in service, Daisy gave birth twice. She had a child before Gladys, but the child was taken from her. ‘They took the white ones off you ‘cause you weren’t considered fit to raise a child with white blood’ (p.  336). It was Alice Drake-Brockman who removed Gladys from ­Daisy’s care and sent her to Parkerville: ‘I ran down to the wild bamboo near the river and I hid and cried and cried and cried. How can a mother lose a child like that? How could she do that to me?’ (p. 341). Twelve years after the publication of My Place, Morgan revealed in an interview that the family had subsequently discovered that Daisy had borne at least six children, and they were all taken away. ‘[F]or people like my grandmother, there’s nothing that could compensate for that scale of loss’ (Laurie 1999). Daisy’s reaction to her unimaginable pain was to bury her Aboriginality, contributing to the mutism that enveloped Aboriginal Australia. Her granddaughter’s book played a significant role in airing the hidden suffering and ending the silence.

Documenting Trauma – Doris Pilkington Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence Doris Pilkington Garimara’s book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence has become emblematic of the trauma of the Stolen Generations. It tells the story of the removal and incarceration of the author’s mother and aunts at the infamous Moore River Native Settlement and their escape as children across the desert back to their families. Without food, shoes, or maps, and while being tracked by Native Police and search planes, they walked 1600 kilometers across remote Western Australia, following the

290  Willa McDonald rabbit-proof fence. Doris Pilkington Garimara wrote the book in collaboration with Molly and her aunt Daisy who were anxious for their own accounts to be published before they died, which included the stories they had been told of their people (Pilkington Garimara 1996, p. xi). ‘Trauma’ is defined in different ways, in common parlance and between and within various relevant fields of study, such as psychology and trauma studies. Psychoanalytic approaches tend to focus on the subjective experience and predisposition of the individual to suffering in the face of disruptive event/s. In such definitions, resilience is equated with healing. But in recent decades, in light of the acknowledgement of the violent impact of colonialism on the world’s native peoples, there have been calls from researchers for the application of wider definitions of trauma and resilience. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith (2004b) for example, argue that the ‘psychoanalytic model leaves little room for the expression of a critical consciousness on the part of tellers of their knowledge of the politics of oppression’ (p. 112). Marie-Anik Gagné (1998) proposes a broad definition of trauma in relation to the experiences of the Aboriginal peoples in Canada. Describing trauma as transgenerational, she argues it results from external factors, specifically the historical, political, and social triggers stemming from colonization, which should be acknowledged. Judy Atkinson (2002), reframing definitions of trauma concerning Aboriginal Australians, refocuses on the ability of survivors to ‘cope,’ noting that crisis events can affect extended family parenting and cause communal disorder, family breakdown, impaired parenting, violence, antisocial behaviors, and relating skills across and down generations. Eliana Suarez also cites the need for alternative definitions of trauma in the face of concrete and often collectively experienced events, such as violence, oppression, and natural disasters. ‘Resilience’ in this context, notes Suarez, is more complex than the usual definition which focuses on recovery, and rather relates to strength in the aftermath of trauma in a way ‘that can co-exist with distress’ (2011). Pilkington Garimara’s text is in two parts, constructed from interviews/family storytelling, archival documents, and the author’s own memories. The first part describes the history of Western Australian settlement from the point of view of several Aboriginal groups. The second section describes the removal of the three girls and their escape. It demonstrates that the trauma experienced through the forced removal of children is untranslatable in words, let alone cross-culturally. Her description is spare and factual and barely communicates the emotions entailed: Molly and Gracie looked back just once before they disappeared through the river gums. Behind them, those remaining in the camp found strong sharp objects and gashed themselves and inflicted wounds to their heads and bodies as an expression of their sorrow.

Redressing the Silence  291 The two frightened and miserable girls began to cry, silently at first, then uncontrollably; their grief made worse by the lamentations of their loved ones and the visions of them sitting on the ground in their camp letting their tears mix with the red blood that flowed form the cuts on their heads. This reaction to their children’s abduction showed that the family were now in mourning. They were grieving for their abducted children and their relief would come only when the tears ceased to fall, and that will be a long time yet. (pp. 44–5) It would take the director Phillip Noyce and the language of film to reframe the experience in a way more accessible to non-Indigenous audiences. His hit Hollywood movie narrowed the focus of the scene from the clan’s loss to the mother and child. By gendering the scene to concentrate on maternal loss and longing for home, he found a way to communicate unequivocally to international audiences the despair of these forced separations (Kennedy 2008). Pilkington Garimara’s book also testifies to the intergenerational nature of the trauma imposed on the stolen generations. The book concludes with the revelation that nine years after the girls’ escape, following an emergency operation for appendicitis, Molly was prevented from returning home from the hospital by the authorities. Instead, she was sent again to Moore River, this time under ministerial warrant. By this stage a mother herself, her daughters were with her – the four-yearold Pilkington Garimara and her 18-month-old sister Anna (Annabelle). Remarkably, Molly successfully escaped a second time, but she was forced to leave Pilkington Garimara behind. Unable to elude capture and survive the desert with two small children in tow, she only took the baby Anna with her. Despite her efforts to keep Anna, the child was removed from Molly’s care three years after the escape and sent to Sister Kate’s Children’s Home in Queen’s Park (pp. 131–2). Pilkington Garimara was never returned home to Molly and her clan. She remained at Moore River till she was 18 years old: She became another child, lost in the maze of the Moore River Native Settlement. She tells of daily chores and hard work and discipline and beatings. She speaks of aloneness and unhappiness. She tells of indoctrination against her people and her culture. She speaks of a discourse, convincing her that her mother did not love her and gave her away. (Joseph 2016, p. 28) When she died in 2004, Pilkington Garimara’s mother Molly said her one regret was that she did not see her daughter Anna again (Stephens

292  Willa McDonald 2004). A year later, at a screening of Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, Pilkington revealed to the audience that she had contacted Anna before her mother died, passing on her mother’s wish to see her. Anna, for her own reasons, declined to travel to Jigalong and meet her mother and other relatives, although her children went instead (Kennedy 2008, p. 172). According to Roseanne Kennedy: This anecdotal fragment suggests complexities of experience, emotion and memory that go beyond what can be conveyed through images of suffering mothers and vulnerable children. Pilkington’s poignant revelation shocked the audience, confronting us with a concrete case in which the intended aim of the assimilation policy – to pervert and estrange intimate Aboriginal family bonds by severing relations between children and their Aboriginal kin – was realised. Her oral commentary reveals the traumatic, intergenerational legacy of child removal: for her mother, unrequited love and life-long suffering; for the daughter and her children, loss of culture and family. (p. 172) As Kennedy intimates, Pilkington Garimara’s comments at the film screening reposition Molly as ‘not only a bereaved mother but also a rejected one,’ while at the same time speaking to the extended trauma passed on intergenerationally through the Stolen Generations (p. 172).

Reinscribing Identity – Anita Heiss’s Am I Black Enough for You? The rise in Aboriginal life writing has been met with hostility in some quarters. In 1997, Leon Carmen caused a storm when it was revealed that he was Wanda Koolmatrie, an Aboriginal woman and member of the stolen generations, who won the Nita May Dobbie Award the year before for her ‘autobiography’ titled My Own Sweet Time. The award is only open to Australian women writers and their first published works. Koolmatrie never existed. She and her autobiography were rather the cynical inventions of Carmen and his literary agent John Bayley. Carmen was required to return the prize money (Leon Carmen entry, Austlit). More recently, the conservative Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt has undermined Aboriginal women’s life writing by attacking the authenticity of Aboriginal writers such as Anita Heiss and Larissa ­Behrendt. Heiss’s book Am I Black Enough for You? (2012) challenges Bolt’s attempt to control Aboriginal identity politics and is partly a response to two articles written by Bolt and published in 2009. Titled in the print versions ‘It’s so hip to be black’ (2009a) and ‘White fellas in the black’ (2009b), Bolt’s articles implied Heiss and 17 other people were fair-skinned Australians who identified as Aboriginal for personal gain.

Redressing the Silence  293 Bolt’s first article began, ‘Meet the white face of a new black race – the political Aborigine.’ It went on to list prominent Aboriginal people and their career successes, interspersed with such statements as: Not yet convinced that there is a whole new fashion in academia, the arts and professional activism to identify as Aboriginal? Not yet convinced that for many of these fair Aborigines, the choice to be Aboriginal can seem almost arbitrary and intensely political, given how many of their ancestors are in fact Caucasian?… I certainly don’t accuse them of opportunism, even if fullblood Aborigines may wonder how such fair people can claim to be one of them and in some cases take black jobs. In this context, Bolt said of Heiss that she had made a deliberate decision to identify as Aboriginal and that ‘it was lucky, given how it’s helped her career.’ He also alleged she had ‘won plum jobs reserved for Aborigines at Koori Radio, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board and Macquarie University’s Warawara Department of Aboriginal Studies’ (Heiss 2012, p. 8). Part life writing, part manifesto, Am I Black Enough For You disputes those allegations. It is framed by the court case Heiss and eight others took under the Racial Discrimination Act against Bolt. While a suit could have been brought under defamation law, Heiss and the other plaintiffs decided more was at stake. ‘[I]t was about the history of negative stereotyping of Aboriginal people in the media, the lack of fair response for us against such appalling journalism, and our rights particularly under the law, to self-identification’ (Heiss 2012, p. 167). While monetary compensation could have been awarded in a defamation action, Heiss (2012) wanted ‘the publication of under-researched, race-based misinformation to end…Australian readers deserved better’ (p. 169). Bolt lost the action. Justice Bromberg of the Federal Court found he breached the Racial Discrimination Act because the articles contained ‘errors of fact, distortions of the truth and inflammatory and provocative language’ (Eatock v Bolt 2011, decision point 23). None of the plaintiffs, he said, ‘chose’ to be Aboriginal or used their Aboriginal identity to inappropriately advance their careers (point 22) as Bolt had claimed. ‘People should be free to fully identify with their race without fear of public disdain or loss of esteem for so identifying’ (point 335). Justice Bromberg noted the intimidatory effect of the articles ‘on some fair-skinned Aboriginal people and in particular young Aboriginal persons or others with vulnerability in relation to their identity’ (point 415). He also took into account that the articles were likely to reinforce, ­encourage, or embolden racially prejudiced views already held by readers (point 421).

294  Willa McDonald Heiss is an urban Wiradjuri woman raised in suburban Sydney. Her father was an Austrian immigrant while her mother’s extended family were Aboriginal. Heiss’s grandmother and great aunt were members of the Stolen Generations, having been removed from their family in ­Nyngan and put into the Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls and later into a Catholic institution for girls in ­Ashfield, Sydney. Heiss argues for the right of Aboriginal people to self-­identify without being put down by a demeaning racial caste system. As she notes, most non-Indigenous Australians are of mixed ethnicities, yet are never labelled as ‘half-caste Australian’ or ‘part-Australian.’ ‘The way in which we choose to define ourselves is similar to these white ­Australians: that is, we have one identity (being Aboriginal) and many mixed ­heritages…’ (p. 124). Heiss describes herself as ‘a concrete Koori with Westfield dreaming’ (p. 1), challenging the notion that ‘authentic’ Aboriginal people are poor, uneducated, desert dwellers. Feeling no need to reiterate the trauma and abuse historically suffered by Australia’s First Peoples, she tells her story, and that of her family, to demonstrate that Aboriginal identity is not something that one chooses. My identity is not simply about race: it’s about my family history, it’s about the history of Aboriginal Australia generally, it’s about the way I have been shaped as a human being since birth. It’s not about blood quantum or the colour of my skin, or whether or not I work in an ‘Aboriginal position’, although all my work (paid and unpaid) is for the betterment of the Aboriginal community in some way. (p. 80) Heiss argues that underpinning Bolt’s reasoning is a prejudice that only white people can be successful. ‘[I]f you are educated, professional, savvy and smart, then you can’t possibly be Aboriginal?’ (p. 80). She bristles against the requirement in some quarters that Aboriginal people are expected to ‘remain static’ and ‘not evolve as a community, even after being moved from homelands and shafted onto missions and reserves under acts of protection and assimilation’ (p. 81). Heiss points out that 32 percent of Aboriginal Australians live in urban centers and enjoy all the experiences and challenges that city life brings (p. 81). Observing that Bolt’s reasoning is that to be urban and successful equates with whiteness, ‘myself and the other people mentioned in the Bolt article must therefore be whites taking Black jobs. Our reality, though, is that we are all educated Blackfellas wanting to give back to our communities by working in roles that allow us to do just that’ (p. 81). While some journalists have interpreted Justice Bromberg’s decision as a criticism of poor and inaccurate journalism (e.g. David Marr 2011; see also Heiss 2012, p. 333), Bolt and his supporters have framed it as a

Redressing the Silence  295 suppression of free speech. Bolt wrote a further blog post published in April, 2012, a week after the publication of Heiss’s book, with the heading, ‘Are we censored enough for you?’. The article is no longer available online for legal reasons, but an article for the Sydney Morning Herald by Saffron Howden (2012) – which itself drew criticism from the Australian Press Council, not for its content but for its inappropriate headline and use of a photograph caption that linked Bolt to racist online posts by others – gives some idea of what Bolt said. Bolt included in his blog a link to the US-based site Amazon.com, stating: ‘Only in America, it seems, is an open debate on this Australian issue able to be had. That should embarrass us’ (Howden 2012). He also said Random House and the ABC had deleted and ‘censored’ comments on their websites about Heiss’ book (Howden 2012), although researcher Imogen Mathew notes the closures were in response to heavy trolling traffic (2016, n.p.). The American-based Amazon received almost 80 ‘reviews’ of Heiss’s book following Bolt’s post and before the Sydney Morning Herald article. Some were ‘openly racist’ and some ‘attacked Heiss personally and referred to a perceived lack of freedom of speech in Australia that prevented the writers from expressing their views here’ (Howden 2012; see also Mathew 2016). Mathew, in an analysis of the online reviews of Heiss’s book, found there was a difference between the comments posted on Goodreads and those posted on Amazon. Reviews on the former generally found Heiss’s book to be educative and to prompt ethical reflection. Those on Amazon typically blurred reviews and commentary, with the book reviewing space becoming for many a platform for denouncing Heiss’s role in a perceived silencing of civil liberties. Referring to the large number of negative comments on the site, Mathew observed ‘the Amazon reviews more closely approximate bitter and protracted online flame wars than book reviews,’ noting that they ‘measure just how deeply contested racial politics and Aboriginal identity remain in contemporary Australian society’ (n.p.). [T]hese reviews are remarkable for their insistent negativity and their obdurate focus on the court case and Heiss at the expense of reviewing the book itself. Moreover…in these reviews, ‘not reading’ practices and ‘non-readers’…play a crucial role in generating controversy. (p. 74) As Mathew points out, Heiss’s book ‘demonstrates, with withering ­clarity, that white Australians cannot be exempted from racial politics. They sit at its deeply entangled heart’ (p. 7). Heiss has dedicated her career as a writer and activist to educating non-Aboriginal readers about Aboriginal history and literature: introducing Aboriginal stories and characters into

296  Willa McDonald mainstream Australian literature, for example, through her own novels in the genre she light-heartedly calls ‘choc lit’; giving voice to Aboriginal writers themselves through her academic work; ­advocating for equal rights for Aboriginal people, in particular by improving literacy rates among the young; and arguing for all First Australians to be allowed to be themselves, comfortable in their own identities. While the success of the court case against Bolt was gratifying, she wrote in Am I Black Enough for You? that ‘victory did not remove the trauma of the previous two years or undo the damage done to race relations in Australia’ (p. 331).

Conclusion It is impossible to read Aboriginal women’s life writing outside of its political context. The three books discussed here were produced over a ­period when Australians have been grappling with settler history and how it should be written and remembered. Their publication has run parallel with government enquiries in recent years, enabling the stories of the First Nations’ peoples to be heard, and to be heard differently over time. All three books discussed in this chapter perform an educative role. From their reading, three themes emerge pertinent to Aboriginal experience: the silence that has covered Aboriginal history and the reality of Aboriginal lives since white settlement (My Place); the role of Aboriginal life writing in recording and dealing with trauma induced by colonialism (My Place and Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence); and the importance of Aboriginal people gaining control of identity politics (Am I Black Enough for You?). By testifying to the traumatic cruelties of European settlement, the writers of the first two books aim to retrieve and reclaim an anguished past that was either never written down in English or was inaccurately recorded, omitting reference to invasion, colonization, and attempted genocide (Heiss 2003, pp. 35–6). Am I Black Enough for You?, written most recently, argues for the right of the First Nations’ peoples to assert their own identities, while tracing the way in which discrimination continues to circumscribe Aboriginal lives. These books are only a few of the dozens of volumes now available that have been written to reclaim Aboriginal history, identity and, as Jackie Huggins says, ‘[our] place in Australian society on our terms’ (1993, p. 259). Given the range of Aboriginal experiences, voices and viewpoints available, this chapter argues that curriculum design and research practice should include multiple books of life writing by Aboriginal women. Taken together, they constitute a long-term dialogue about Aboriginal history and politics, speaking to the traumas Aboriginal people have suffered, the racism they continue to confront, and the need for wider Australia to take effective action to redress the wrongs of the past and ensure Aboriginal people are given the respect, rights, and opportunities to which they are entitled.

Redressing the Silence  297

References Atkinson, J. 2002, Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: the transgenerational effects of trauma in Indigenous Australia, Spinifex Press, North Melbourne. Attwood, B. 1992, ‘Portrait of an aboriginal as an artist: Sally Morgan and the construction of aboriginality’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 25, no. 99, pp. 302–18, viewed 17 March 2017, doi:10.1080/10314619208595912. Austlit, Leon Carmen entry, www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A24086. Bolt, A. 2009a, ‘It’s so hip to be Black’, published online as ‘White is the New Black’, Herald Sun, 15 April, viewed 17 March 2017, www.­heraldsun. com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/column---white-is-the-new-black/news-story/ 2d639a94bb361ca786b9b2c171a4da04. Bolt, A. 2009b, ‘White Fellas in the Black’, published online as The New Tribe of White Blacks, Herald Sun, 21 August, viewed 17 March 2017, www.­heraldsun. com.au / blogs /and rew-bolt /colu m n- -the-new-tribe- of-white-blacks / news-story/2084e333d698f20fafd8b0a3f88c77b4. The Book Club 2014, ‘Review of Sally Morgan’s my place’, ABC Television, 5 April, www.abc.net.au/tv/firsttuesday/s4196443.htm. Eatock v Bolt 2011, Federal Court of Australia, 1103, 28 September, viewed 17 March 2017, www.judgments.fedcourt.gov.au/judgments/Judgments/fca/ single/2011/2011fca1103 Ferrier, C. 1990, ‘Questions of collaboration: an interview with Jackie Huggins and Isabel Tarrago’, Hecate, vol. 16, no. 1–2, pp. 140–7. Gagné, A. 1998, ‘The Role of dependency and colonialism in generating trauma in first nations citizens’, Chapter in Y. Danieli (ed.), International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, part of the series The Plenum Series on Stress and Coping, Plenum Press, New York and London, pp. 355–72, viewed 17 March 2017, https://link.springer.com/ chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4757-5567-1_23#page-2. Grossman, M. 2006, ‘When they write what we read: unsettling Indigenous Australian life-writing’, Australian Humanities Review, Issues 39–40, September, viewed 17 March 20107, http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-September-2006/grossman.html. Heiss, A. 2003, Dhuuluu-Yala, to Talk Straight: publishing Indigenous literature, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. Heiss, A. 2012, Am I Black Enough for You? Bantom/Random House, North Sydney. Howden, S. 2012, ‘Bolt link to racist reviews of book’, Sydney Morning Herald online, 12 April, viewed 17 March 2017, www.smh.com.au/entertainment/ books/bolt-link-to-racist-reviews-of-book-20120411-1wsa1.html. Huggins, J. 1993, ‘Always was always will be’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 25, no. 100, pp. 459–64. Jones, J. 2004, ‘Indigenous life stories’, Life Writing, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 209–18. Joseph, S. 2016, Behind the Text: candid conversations with Australian ­creative nonfiction writers, Hybrid Publishers, Melbourne. Kennedy, R. 2008, ‘Vulnerable children, disposable mothers: holocaust and stolen generations memoirs of childhood’, Life Writing, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 161–84. Klein, D. 2016, ‘Narrating a different (hi)story’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 588–604.

298  Willa McDonald Langton, M. 1993, Well, I Heard it on the Radio and I Saw it on the Television, Australian Film Commission, Woolloomooloo, viewed 17 March 2017, http://afcarchive.screenaustralia.gov.au/profile/pubs/default.aspx. Laurie, V. 1999, ‘An interview with Sally Morgan’, Unionsverlag, 23 October, viewed 17 March 2017, www.unionsverlag.com/info/link.asp?link_id= 6000&pers_id=91. Marr, D. 2011, ‘In Black and White, Andrew Bolt trifled with the facts’, Sydney Morning Herald online, 29 September, viewed 17 March 2017, www.smh. com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/in-black-and-white-andrew-bolttrifled-with-the-facts-20110928-1kxba.html. Mathew, I. 2016, ‘Reviewing race in the digital literary sphere: a case study of Anita Heiss’ Am I Black Enough for You?’, Australian Humanities Review, Issue 60, November, viewed 17 March, 2017, http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2016/11/08/reviewing-race-in-the-digital-literary-sphere-a-­c asestudy-of-anita-heiss-am-i-black-enough-for-you/. McDonell, M. 2004, ‘Protocols, political correctness and discomfort zones: Indigenous life writing and non-Indigenous editing’, Hecate, vol. 30, no. 1, May, p. 83. McDonell, M. 2005, ‘Locating the text: genre and Indigenous Australian women’s life writing’, Life Writing, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 71–90, published online, 8 May 2007, viewed 17 March 2017, www.tandfonlinecom.simsrad.net.ocs. mq.edu.au/doi/abs/10.1080/10408340308518290. Moreton-Robinson, A. 2000, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous women and feminism, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland. Morgan, S. 1987, My Place, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Freemantle, Western Australia. Murray, T. 2004, ‘In the footsteps of George Dutton: developing contact archaeology of temperate aboriginal Australia’, in T. Murray (ed.), The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Pilkington Garimara, D. 1996, Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, Queensland. Schaffer, K. 2002, ‘Stolen generation narrative in local and global contexts’, Antipodes, June, pp. 5–10. Schaffer, K. & Smith, S. 2004a, ‘Conjunctions: life narratives in the field of human rights’, Biography, vol. 27, no. 1, winter, pp. 1–24. Schaffer, K. & Smith, S. 2004b, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: the ethics of recognition, Palgrave Macmillan, New York. Stephens, T. 2004, ‘Daughter dies with her story still incomplete’, Sydney Morning Herald, online, 15 January, viewed 17 March 2017, www.smh.com. au/articles/2004/01/14/1073877902433.html. Suarez, E. 2011, ‘Re-visiting traumatic stress: integrating local practices and meanings in explanatory frameworks of trauma’, Munk School Briefings, Comparative Program on Health and Society Lupina Foundation Working Paper Series, 2009–2010, edited by Lisa Forman and Laurie Corna, University of Toronto, Toronto. Tarrago, I. 1993, ‘Response to Sally Morgan and the construction of aboriginality’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 25, no. 100, pp. 469–9.

19 Lest We Forget Mateship, Masculinity, and Australian Identity Jack Bowers In the opening scene to Steve Bisley’s Stillways, the reader is invited to stand with the narrator by the pump shed on the family farm: ‘There is no rain, but a thin wetness. There is no whisper through the casuarinas brought by other winds; they are bowed and heavy and all things feel sunk and riven’ (Bisley 2013, p. 1). The narrator alerts us to his father, Bruce, walking towards them along one of the tracks between the paddocks: ‘He has a small sack in his hand that swings as he walks and even at this distance you can hear the kittens crying’ (Bisley 2013, p. 2). The sack of kittens, weighted with a brick, is dropped into the water ‘down, down to the countless sacks’ (ibid). The cats, brick and water are metonymic of the relationship between father and son. The image also captures something of their respective predicaments and vulnerabilities: the son caught by his father’s parental sack, the father caught in his own sack of desperation and circumstance, both of them drowning. We soon learn of the father’s pain at drowning the kittens, that this pain reflects his own sense of being trapped, and that the inevitable and repeated cruelty is also inflicted on the whole family. After dumping the kittens in the lake Bruce sits at the kitchen table where he drinks ‘long and deep from the longnecks.’ His family remains distant, feeling both empathy and fear, the father alone, soaked in alcohol: ‘we will sit with the sadness of our father, till it takes hold and never leaves us’ (Bisley 2013, p. 3). As the reader soon learns, Bisley’s parents are market gardeners near Lake Macquarie on the Central Coast of New South Wales. Embittered by the miserable prices he gets for the produce, his father drowns his sorrows in the bar on his way home from the markets just after dawn, where he becomes ‘brooding, dark and dangerous.’ The young boy waits ‘quietly in the truck until he comes, the smell of dirt and beer is all over him’ (Bisley 2013, p. 11). Later that day, accused of swearing at his brother, Steve receives his beating: ‘He lays into the back of my legs. I can smell his breath, still beery from the pub, as he thrashes me, and I know this is not really about my behaviour; it’s about the price of fruit’ (Bisley 2013, p. 12). The father feels powerless, unable to make a decent living for his family, without the resources to get a better property, stuck between hard labor and poor returns. The cycle of entrapment, alcohol, and physical abuse is played out again and

300  Jack Bowers again in this narrative, the father’s abyss casting waves of tyranny across the family. The legacy of Bisley’s father reflects a national narrative. Bruce Bisley is a war veteran whose experiences reverberate through his family after the war. He sees himself as living out an Australian ideal: a man of the land, resilient, hard working, providing for his family. He is tough and practical and sits at the center of his family, in control. For Bruce, this is the way it should be, but it isn’t. That ideal is a construction which evolved from the colonial experience of the 19th century and the vision of a federated Australia. It stitches together a value system drawn from war and the bush; at its heart is a portrayal of masculinity by which an Australian male may measure himself. Brutalized sons don’t always become brutalizing fathers; going to war doesn’t always end in psychological trauma; being male isn’t necessarily dysfunctional – it’s impossible, of course, to tease out with any accuracy the threads between gender and national stereotypes, the legacies of war, self-identity, parental influence, and personal circumstance. But what the following narratives show is that, time and again, a national identity which is fundamentally masculinist, misogynist, violent, and controlling, has sent ripples of trauma across generations of Australian families.

National Identity and Gender National identity, as Richard White observed nearly 40 years ago, is an invention (White 1981). A discussion of national identity is of interest, however, for it allows us to unpick discourses inherent in that identity. Australian national identity has been intensively scrutinized for decades, but the ramifications of its discourses have rarely been considered outside some particularly astute feminist critiques (Dixson 1976; Schaffer 1988; Summers 1975). The Anzac (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) narrative builds on a social Darwinist narrative of Australian born colonial settlers who lived and worked in the bush. Ironically, however, the Anzac legend is a narrative constructed not so much at the battle fronts in Europe but through, by, and for an Australian domestic audience; likewise, the bushman legend is less a reflection of rural Australia than it is an idealized image of the bush from the eyes of a predominantly urban perspective (Davison 1978). Australian national identity can be read through a masculinist discourse which simultaneously speaks for men and their place in the world, just as it also speaks to – and silences – women. Discursive practices are ultimately about exercising power and influence. To appreciate the masculine in Australian identity, Linzi Murrie suggests, requires one ‘to read it as a dynamic construction: a complex set of strategies and negotiations, of inclusions and exclusions, which enable and legitimate gendered power relations’ (Murrie 1998, p. 68). Echoing the words of

Lest We Forget  301 Russel Ward and CEW Bean, Murrie sums up the Australian masculine construction: Our man is practical rather than theoretical, he values physical prowess rather than intellectual capabilities, and he is good in a crisis but otherwise laid-back. He is common and earthy, so he is intolerant of affectation and cultural pretensions; he is no wowser, uninhibited in the pleasures of drinking, swearing and gambling; he is independent and egalitarian, and is a hater of authority and a ‘knocker’ of eminent people. This explicit rejection of individualism is echoed in his unswerving loyalty to his mates. (Murrie 1998, p. 68) As we’ll see when we look at the Anzac myth, applied masculinity is founded on a range of competing and inconsistent values, herded into a binary value system, legitimating and excluding certain behaviors. On one hand, the masculine celebrates a role of procreation, fathering progeny (preferably sons), keeping the family safe from ‘outsiders,’ and providing shelter and food. In contradiction is the way in which ‘family’ serves to domesticate men, to yoke them and take away their instinctive need for (and right to) freedom. In David Carlin’s Our Father Who Wasn’t There, his paternal grandfather exemplifies this contradiction. Carlin explores his own father’s suicide at a farmhouse near Bridgetown in Western Australia in 1964 when David was only six months old. In his discussion of Brian’s depression, his service in the war, his gender identity, and his relationships, the narrator returns frequently to Brian’s father Tom, ‘the arch-villain of the piece, the Tom-cat, spraying all and sundry with his poison’ (Carlin 2010, p. 6). And the poison, it seems, ran deep. Tom was handsome, hardworking, and headstrong. Four children were born in quick succession. Tom took up a variety of jobs, the family moved frequently in a struggle which continued for years before Tom finally joined the army. Tom’s brother, Ben, likewise joined the army, a larger-than-life John Wayne figure in the narrative who roamed the world in a kind of perpetual ‘Boys’ Own’ adventure. Ben’s life was free of responsibility, full of action, unyoked by domesticity, until several strokes left him permanently disabled, bedridden, and mute. Despite these family examples, Brian is shy and bookish: ‘he sees himself reflected in his father’s eyes: a puppy, not a man’ (Carlin 2010, p. 25). Brian’s father was a disciplinarian who beat his sons, but when Brian stood up to him, ‘Tom just snarled and brushed him aside, and Brian saw himself forever after weak and pathetic in his father’s eyes’ (Carlin 2010, p. 90). Far more damaging, though, is what Brian as a young boy witnessed one night between his parents, his father ‘in the moonlight, hammering himself into [Brian’s mother, Doris], beating up against her; she is crying out, it is violent and

302  Jack Bowers confusing and unforgiving’ (Carlin 2010, p. 58). Gradually, the narrator draws connections between the humiliating father and the humiliated son. The damaged son, suffering bouts of depression, perhaps not only the victim of a bully, but a carrier of the damage into his own fathering. Outlining the ramifications of experience across three generations, Our Father Who Wasn’t There refuses to be either biography or autobiography. The autonomous ‘I’ is constantly undermined as a singular referent, drawn via a complex web of relations. Like Bruce Bisley, Tom Carlin models himself on the popular masculinist markers of national identity, straining between caring for his family and the yearning for adventure and ‘freedom.’ He ‘dreamt of leasing his own station and becoming a man of the land’ (Carlin 2010, p. 59, emphasis in original). He bought a farm in the wheat belt, but with drought, the Depression, and rabbits, ‘Tom watched his dreams of landed style and grace slither to the shithouse’ (Carlin 2010, p. 79) and was forced into seeking work in Perth. When he is laid off once again and forced to move his family into his father’s house, ‘Tom must have felt he had reached rock bottom: unable to provide under his own roof for his family … his two young sons watching him across the table must have been just about unbearable’ (Carlin 2010, p. 87). But carting sand for a military construction, Tom sees the officers, ‘their shiny new shoes and uniforms, their camaraderie in the mess tent … these blokes had a mission, a team; they had respect’ (Carlin 2010, p. 87). Tom serves during the Second World War and continues with the army after the war. In 1952, the British exploded their first atomic bomb at the Montebello Islands off the West Australian coast, and Tom was there; in 1954 he died from cancer. As his grandson observes, what Tom Carlin enjoyed about the army was ‘the discipline, the hardness, the sheer masculinity of it all – he found it changed his breathing, made him taller’ (Carlin 2010, p. 89, emphasis in original). A career in the army served both to feed his family and to free him from many of the constraints of domesticity. At home Tom remained distant from his sons: ‘they encountered him if not across the silent dinner table then at the other end of the razor strop. Discipline and punishment of these children played out in a cruel and protracted ritual, albeit one perhaps not uncommon in its day’ (Carlin 2010, p. 89). Despite the modeling of his father, Brian as a high school student ‘didn’t like getting dirty. He didn’t like getting grease on himself’ (Carlin 2010, p. 99). The image from other members of the family is that Brian was ‘the dandy, at home with his model aeroplanes, books, and personal grooming’ (Carlin 2010, p. 99). And yet, aged 17, Brian joined the navy, where he remained from 1945 until 1947. The narrator imagines that Brian, ‘in his own eyes, would always fall short of what Tom wanted of him. Despise his father as he might, he nevertheless craved his approval. Joining the navy was his opportunity to prove himself as a man,

Lest We Forget  303 whatever that might mean’ (Carlin 2010, p. 101, emphasis in original). Whatever ‘being a man’ entailed, it didn’t appear very attractive. Brian watched as his mother was controlled and criticized, forever having to live up to the expectations of her husband. Doris was, it seems, ‘never quite good enough for the Carlins’ (Carlin 2010, p. 57) and, until Tom’s death, she was cowed and submissive. The narrator imagines a ‘weak mother, overbearing father: a poisonous combination for a young boy growing up.’ Brian as a young man, ‘watching his father and mother together, was confused: is this what a man does? Is this what I must do to be a man? This bullying that I despise? Because am I not a man? If not a man, what am I?’ (Carlin 2010, p. 57, emphasis in original). Brian clearly suffered depression for much of his life. He tried to commit suicide on numerous occasions, was hospitalized regularly, and underwent electroconvulsive therapy. ‘Was Brian gay?’ (Carlin 2010, p. 111). Carlin returns to this question again and again, searching for what his father desperately sought to understand about himself, to find the source of his trauma; at the same time, the narrator self-consciously alerts the reader to his own anxieties about depression, gender, and sexual identity. He interviews relatives and friends; he looks at Brian’s army record, his psychological profiling scores, and his health record. Although the narrator is ‘fascinated by its fevered possibilities’ (Carlin 2010, p. 113), there is no conclusive evidence. There are ambiguous hints of sexual encounters, Brian’s study of and fascination with psychology, a history of him articulating physical and psychological difficulties, and what seem to be ongoing feelings of shame and inadequacy. At the time, homosexuality was a criminal offence in Australia, necessarily clandestine, and the only thing clear to the narrator is that his father is traumatized in some way. Brian tells university friends of an incident in the Solomon Islands while in the navy. He was on a jetty at night, and apparently raped by a group of American sailors: ‘He was worried he might have enjoyed the rape, Judy [a university girlfriend] told me’ (Carlin 2010, p. 129). Feelings of guilt experienced by victims of sexual assault are not uncommon, and the relationship between gender identity and sexual preference is obviously multilayered and complex. There is no way of knowing if Brian was gay, only that he seemed unable to escape an ongoing psychological trauma against the backdrop of an unremitting gender identity. With his masculinist, bullying, and violent father, representative as he was of a prevailing stereotype in which heterosexuality is seen as strength and homosexuality as weakness, any questioning of sexuality would have brought with it considerable stress. Whatever happened during this time of his life, the Brian who returned to take up university in Perth was ‘a changed man’ (Carlin 2010, p. 102). Biography and autobiography inevitably intersect, and David Carlin’s sophisticated, self-conscious narrator is alert to what Gillian Whitlock has called the ‘disobedient subject’

304  Jack Bowers (Whitlock 1996). At every turn, the biographical imperative of Our Father Who Wasn’t There leaks into memoir and personal reflection, the narrator projecting his own anxieties and interpretations into the narrative, searching for the father in the son. Just as the narrator asserts his centrality, life writing becomes caught in the tar of history, solid and verifiable. The narrator’s notions of gender insinuate themselves into the father’s, and father and son become disobedient subjects together, entangled by gender, generation, and identity.

The Anzac Myth No one looking at Canberra’s design can miss the centrality of the military to national identity. Bisecting the national capital is Anzac Parade, a majestic boulevard with an immense median strip of reddish gravel and bountiful flower boxes, its width and low relief deliberately allowing for the full impact of the copper-domed art deco war memorial at its zenith. Prominently displayed outside the Australian War Memorial is a statue recalling the iconic story of Simpson and his donkey. With Simpson’s story in mind, the front cover of Paul Livingston’s Absent Without Leave shows a somewhat comic photograph of his father Stanley sitting on a donkey in the blazing sun somewhere in the Middle East where he was deployed with the 2/17th Australian Infantry Battalion during the Second World War. Livingston references Simpson and his donkey, and wryly observes that ‘the Simpson legend has all the necessary ingredients: heroism, anti-authoritarianism, selflessness, larrikinism and mateship.’ And he also notes that there are many tales around Simpson, innumerable stories and myths which can no longer be verified. ‘One thing is certain – the legend wasn’t Simpson’s doing’ (Livingston 2013, p. 4). Like Bisley’s Stillways, Absent Without Leave draws the political, social, economic, and generational legacies of history into the lives of individuals, disrupting the notion of ‘self’ as somehow given and inviolable. Like Carlin, Livingston shows the slippages of history, between fact and story, fiction and interpretation, archive and artifice – the threads of memoir inevitably stitching them together more skillfully than simple portrait. Similarly, in George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack, the eponymous brother of the narrator personifies the Anzac legend and its antecedents from the bush. The hallway of their childhood home is filled with accoutrements from the First World War – a gas mask, a wheelchair, prosthetic limbs, and crutches. Their father fought at Gallipoli; their mother served as a nurse in France. After the war, his mother worked in a hospital and the brothers slept on the verandah to make way for ‘all the derelicts of war whom Mother brought home to stay’ (Johnston 1964, p. 11). Most are dismembered, and some are traumatized; they are symbolic of a personal, social, economic, and national legacy. There are also souvenirs

Lest We Forget  305 and photographs, an accumulated memorabilia of horror, which defines the narrator’s childhood. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Jack is one of the first to enlist. His portrayal is neither an uncritical celebration of the Anzac myth, nor a simplistic denunciation. Rather, Johnston shows how Jack – an essentially decent man who acts as a foil to the duplicitous and disillusioned younger brother Davy – is let down by the illusory myths on which he’s based his life. Jack is, at one level, a hero: open, honest, plain speaking, and unpretentious; physically and morally, Jack is the bush legend incarnate. Davy, in contrast, is deceitful, conniving, opportunistic, and urban. Ironically, the younger brother enjoys social and professional success whereas the ill-fated Jack never gets to the war for which he so willingly enlisted, and ultimately fails as a hero. The power of the Anzac myth has waxed and waned since 1915, enjoying an emphatic resurgence – as has nationalism generally – since the 1990s. There is also a growing appreciation of the emotional damage that results from war, not just for those at the frontline, but for those at home. In Broken Nation, Joan Beaumont examines the impact of the First World War on ‘the home front’ as it became known. She highlights the irony that ‘the war that caused such damage should have spawned what is now the foundational narrative of Australian nationalism. Beginning almost as soon as the AIF [Australian Imperial Force] landed at Gallipoli in 1915, the “Anzac legend” would gain a firm hold on the cultural imagination of the Australian media and public’ (Beaumont 2013, p. xxii). Perhaps the Anzac myth is not really for soldiers at all, but for public consumption, for the home front, a way of making the sacrifice and loss more palatable, the only way of finding something positive in the slaughter and destruction for what are so often dubious political objectives. As Adrian Caesar observes, ‘whether he was a bushman, a “dag,”1 a natural aristocrat, or working-class hero, whether he was a private school chum or a crusader sporting the cross of St George, a Homeric warrior or laconic humourist, these various images of the Australian soldier collapsed into the single signifier “Anzac” which in turn became part of the nation’s idea of itself’ (Caesar 1998, p. 156). ‘Anzac’ comes to signify a range of characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors, a set of discourses in which particular values are promulgated. That is, the making of any myth or shared narrative necessarily entails the exercise of power. The Anzac myth is a particularly influential site of power in which competing discourses overlay their own meanings. Different themes and meanings are emphasized by different people (and organizations) at different times, multiple versions of a story through which power is enacted and contested. For autobiographical writing, it serves as a canvas on which self-identity is painted into the foreground. ‘Mateship’ is at the heart of both the bush legend and the Anzac myth. In relation to the latter, what I find so intriguing about the Anzac myth

306  Jack Bowers and its foundation in mateship is the way in which this mateship – a public bonding of masculine camaraderie – is evinced so loudly in the town square while what took place on the battlefield is so comprehensively silenced domestically (or, when it isn’t, sterilized to conform with the myth). The mateship is clearly fundamental to the experience of war, but the rest is for ‘members only.’ War forms part of a codified ‘secret men’s business’ – not even all men, just those who fought. In Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, Germaine Greer’s father says nothing about his experience of war, though he was undoubtedly traumatized by it (Greer 1989, p. 66); Bruce Bisley ‘never spoke of the war or his part in it’ (Bisley 2013, pp. 54–5); in My Father’s Son, Captain Hugo Throssell, likewise shared nothing; and Brian Carlin kept his war largely to himself until he, like Hugo Throssell, killed himself (Carlin 2010). Bruce Bisley served in New Guinea, and his son reflects that he only knew his father after the war: ‘I don’t know what my father endured over there. What he saw, what he did, what he had done to him. I could only imagine. Lest We Forget. There was no chance of that’ (Bisley 2013, p. 56). It didn’t occur to Paul Livingston to ask his father about the war until Paul was well into adulthood. Unfortunately, ‘Stanley didn’t live to tell the full tale. By wandering through my own memories, as well as those of people who knew him and many more who didn’t, I wondered if I might catch a glimpse of the man I never knew’ (Livingston 2013, p. 2). In Absent Without Leave, the narrator grapples with the authority of experience that memoir necessarily assumes; as readers, we rely on that authority. There is factual history, fixing the personal within the social, locating the individual within the broader movements of the time. Stanley Livingston fought in Operation Lightfoot at El Alamein, General Montgomery’s attack designed to force Field Marshal Rommel into retreat. Later, he was sent to Milne Bay in Papua and to Borneo. After five years’ service, Stanley Livingston was discharged under the descriptor ‘General Debility’ (Livingston 2013, p. 241). He was 27 years old. There are numerous layers to the title Absent Without Leave, and an obvious one is the habit of Stanley and his mates Gordon and Roy to abscond regularly, including an extended absence by Stanley and Gordon of more than 100 days. Stanley’s sister Lilly, who was to become Gordon’s wife, had become catatonic with stress and worry at the possible loss of her brother and Gordon. As the narrator observes, going absent without leave (AWL) was not a dereliction of duty at all: ‘His was a crisis of duty, personal versus national. He was no coward – nor was he a deserter. He may have been AWL from the army but he had not deserted his sister’ (Livingston 2013, p. 112). Livingston combines the political, social, and personal narratives of the period and shows just how war comes home. Despite the comic asides and witty puns, Absent Without Leave traces the evolution of ‘shell shock,’ which became ‘battle fatigue,’ and ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)’; the social history of medicine becomes a very personal infliction.

Lest We Forget  307 There is an insanity at the heart of war. In order for war to take place, states must persuade their citizens that their lives are worth sacrificing. Individuals must find a way of rationally subordinating the value of their own life for the life of the state. Livingston recalls psychologist WHR Rivers’ description of shell shock as a ‘repression of one’s natural instinct; that is, to flee the battlefield’ (Livingston 2013, p. 143). Anyone ‘complaining of shell shock had their pleas interpreted as an admission of their lack of discipline, and therefore, in the minds of their superiors, they were expendable’ (Livingston 2013, p. 143). ‘Call it fatigue, shell shock or post-traumatic stress, the condition was a manifestation of a kind of internal AWL. The flesh may have been willing but the spirit had deserted it’ (Livingston 2013, p. 211). Livingston narrates the stories of many men who went AWL, many of whom were clearly traumatized by war. He creates a picture not only of men suffering PTSD, but of women and families suffering emotionally under the strain of worrying about their relatives away at the war, and of caring for children, parents, farms, and businesses on their own, often under the duress of extremely limited finances. Added to this was a military administration with little regard for the plight of individuals. When Stanley was demobbed, he became utterly listless, lacking ambition, did not feel like he fitted in, and spent more time drinking and gambling. ‘There was a dark cloud over Stanley; his lack of ambition both personal and professional was palpable’ (Livingston 2013, p. 242). In his own way, Private Stanley Livingston survived the war, although defeat and victory are uncomfortably blurred in this memoir. He returned to the working class inner Sydney suburb of Zetland as a tool setter in a Westinghouse factory; it was as if the war had never ­happened  – he ­simply ‘got on’ with life. When he wasn’t drinking and gambling with mates, he provided (in a limited way) for his family. With his wife and two children, he lived out his days in a small house behind the barber shop of his parents-in-law with only one electric power point, no running water, and an outside toilet. Clearly, beneath the ‘Aussie battler’ façade, part of Stanley remained absent without leave. His Anzac myth was a working class narrative of anti-authoritarian ‘digger,’ laid back and dismissive of pretension. His version of the myth differs considerably from the one inculcated by Captain Hugo Throssell in Ric Throssell’s My Father’s Son. Decorated with the Victoria Cross for his bravery at Gallipoli, Throssell embodied the Anzac legend – an easy-going larrikin, boxer, farmer, and expert horseman – he returned from the war a hero, celebrated as a specimen of all that was good in Australian manliness. When Throssell spoke against the war at the Victory Day celebrations of 1919, the irreparable damage to him was now compounded by social battlelines, turning hero worshippers into foes who ‘disowned him in droves…They resented their war hero selling out, trading on his reputation…It was a bitter lesson to a man who had grown up with popularity

308  Jack Bowers to find himself cold-shouldered’ (Throssell 1989, p. 74). It wasn’t that Throssell resiled from what he had said: rather, he had misunderstood the responsibility bestowed on him by the Anzac discourse. My Father’s Son is two war stories − the father at Gallipoli and the son working in the Department of Foreign Affairs during the cold war. In many ways the narrative exemplifies Caesar’s observation about the power of the Anzac discourse. It’s not that Ric goes to war, exactly, but that his father’s ‘betrayal’ of the myth mirrors his son’s later ‘betrayal’ of the country for his alleged communist sympathies and (unproven) suspicions that he was a spy. Although the memoir largely follows a chronology of events from Throssell’s life through the son’s life, the father’s gradual decline – ­reputationally, financially, and emotionally – sets the conditions in which Ric Throssell recalls his own decline against the discourses of national power. As Throssell’s demise shows, the power of the Anzac myth – indeed, the power of national myths generally – lies in their consumption by the public. No matter how vicariously we relate, no matter how distorted it is from reality, narratives of nation require citizens to accept them. What was demanded of Throssell was that he maintain the image of the brave Australian soldier who fought and survived, and that he implicitly confirm the righteousness of going to war. The narrative that Australians could – and should – prove themselves in war is fundamental to the national identity. The narrative is intrinsic to nation states generally, a legitimation of the state’s quest for power (Hobsbawm 1990). And perhaps this is why, when Hugo Throssell spoke against the war that the public turned against him. The narrative may be a fiction, and war may be scrubbed of its pointlessness and monumental waste of life, but those left at home need this narrative; the importance of myth is not so much in what it is, but who is telling it. And as a country, we have kept telling it to ourselves. It’s become unpatriotic almost to the point of heresy to say anything critical about the Anzac legend (Lake 2010) – the keepers of the legend translate such criticism as undermining the sacrifice of soldiers, thereby committing a blasphemy on the dead. But, of course, it’s not the soldiers or their sacrifice which is being questioned and critiqued, but the ­stereotype – it’s not even about people at all, but about resisting the power of hegemonic discourses, and about the creation of counter discourses. In questioning the Anzac myth, we are potentially unraveling the national identity and, in so doing, undermining the bushman legend, questioning the legitimacy of that legend as a settler narrative, and contemplating the implications of that narrative for the society at large.

National Identity and ‘The Bush’ The bushman legend encompasses moral, racial, and physical elements, but gender politics are at its core. It is a classic settler narrative, writing new history on an old page, erasing or diminishing Indigenous history

Lest We Forget  309 in place of the stories of colonization. As the commentariat around the time of federation were fond of noting, Australia was effectively without a history, thereby making a space for national narratives in which the population could locate its values and legitimacy (McKenna 2016). In contrast with earlier affiliations of belonging to New South Wales and the other colonies, and all the tedious parochialism which made federation so fraught, and in growing distinction from Great Britain, ‘Australia’ was becoming an entity with its own characteristics, its own identity. This is fundamentally the origin from which CEW Bean drew his characterization of the Anzac soldier in his Official History. Indeed, as Adrian Caesar has observed, the portrait of the Anzac is a later iteration of the descriptions of bushmen depicted in Bean’s 1910 monograph On the Wool Track (Caesar 1998, p. 152). The best example of life writing which purposefully brings together the legends of Anzac and bushman with national identity is Albert Facey’s A Fortunate Life (1981). From his upbringing in the bush to his survival on the beaches of Gallipoli and his working life in the railways of Western Australia, Facey’s narrative displays the stoicism that makes the bush legend so attractive. Facey doesn’t swear or drink, is not violent or disturbed, neither disempowered by women nor requiring his ‘freedom.’ Facey frames his life as a ‘fortunate’ one indeed, reflecting everything positive we could imagine in an archetypal Australian, a counterpoint to the dark side of the national identity I am discussing here. The legend of the bush casts its long shadow across Australian life writing. In I Can Jump Puddles, the father of author Alan Marshall is a horse breaker: ‘he had a bushman’s face, brown and lined with sharp blue eyes embedded in the wrinkles that came from the glare of saltbush plains’ (Marshall 1955, p. 3). His father may be a bushman who doesn’t mind a drink, but he’s also the personification of domesticated decency, a proletarian nationalist and very much Marshall’s image of idealized Australian identity. Central to this identity is ‘the fair go.’ In a key father–son moment in which Alan’s future employment is being considered, his father opines, ‘We own this country and we’ll make it a paradise. Men are equal here’ (Marshall 1955, p. 220). If his father symbolizes the virtues of the bush, Alan epitomizes the required stoicism and resilience ‘to get on.’ Marshall makes it clear that I Can Jump Puddles should be read as fiction as much as autobiography – his father was a storekeeper, not a horse breaker and bushman – and the characters within the narrative serve particular purposes. In one sense, such ‘clarity’ makes a mockery of the term ‘autobiography,’ but this is a naïve reading of the genre, a reading which places too much faith in Philippe Lejeune’s ‘autobiographical pact’ between author and reader. Marshall’s narrative gains its authority from the authenticity of experience, not from its factual correspondence; the same could be said of narratives as diverse as Drusilla Modjeska’s Poppy (1990) in which objectivity is deliberately undermined, and Jill

310  Jack Bowers Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain (1989), discussed below, in which objectivity is consciously constructed. What is interesting in Marshall’s story is that, like so much of his journalistic style of writing, the characters are drawn against the backdrop of rural Australia, which Marshall wanted to promulgate, characters made out of the environment in which they live. The bush is, necessarily, what the city is not. This pairing of opposite values is part of an idealized version of the bush – authentic, natural, life-giving – compared with the dirty, unnatural dullness of the city. In I Can Jump Puddles, the narrator recounts a rite of passage when he’s taken to the bush by his father and another bushman, and this event symbolizes an initiation into manhood, the final test of which is to prove to his father that he can ride a horse (Colmer 1989, p. 25). In The Road from Coorain, Ker Conway is more ambivalent about the bushman legend. Recalling her childhood on the family property in western New South Wales, the narrative draws explicit connections between the attitudes of her parents – a malevolent mother and an idealized father – and the discourses of national identity. Ker Conway’s father was part of a soldier settlement program, a popular scheme which was built in part on the idea (l) that these ex-diggers were resourceful, hardworking, resilient, and adaptable, even if they were from urban backgrounds and lacked any skills in agricultural production. The scheme ‘promised to restore men, many of whom had been damaged physically and psychologically by war, to their “natural” status as breadwinners and providers. As we will see, this intensely gendered discourse pervaded almost every aspect of the scheme’ (Scates & Oppenheimer 2016, p. 4). Drawing links between the bush ethos and the Anzac legend, Ker Conway sketches this nationalist history not because she accepts it, but because it provides the motivation for her departure. After many years of drought, her father dies in what may be an accident or suicide; either way his death is a consequence of the values inculcated through the masculine ideal. The Road from Coorain shows how those stereotypes prove to be not only unattainable but undesirable; elsewhere Ker Conway has remarked that ‘the great heroes who are celebrated in Australian myth… are non-functional or dysfunctional white males who can’t bond with anyone − like the Man from Snowy River’ (Ker Conway 1993, p. 146). Ker Conway, a professional historian, slips easily between social and political history and personal memoir: while Marshall’s narrative may be more openly ‘creative,’ the father figure in I Can Jump Puddles is no less authentic than Ker Conway’s soldier settler figure. At the intersection of national identity, Anzac and the bushman legend is mateship. At times, mateship represents a ‘brotherhood of man,’ a collective of (white, Anglo-Celtic) men, and is manifest in the ‘White Australia Policy’ (Dyrenfurth 2007, p. 212); at times, mateship is expressed as the generalized assumptions of patriarchal privilege; and at other times, it is simply misogyny. The authority enjoyed by men – their right to that

Lest We Forget  311 authority and its supposed erosion by women – is intrinsic to the bush legend. As Kaye Schaffer writes, to the rebellious male, this authority often appears as a stand-in for a father figure. The authority figure also signifies respectability, particularly women who become the arbiters of manners, sobriety, parsimony, and domesticity. Women, othered as they are in contrast with the bushman, represent everything that constrains the ‘natural’ impulses of men (Schaffer 1988). In the classic Australian autobiography, The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony, Hal Porter draws a number of social markers in order to frame his own family, in particular his father, whom he describes as ‘an indubitable Australian, one of a nation of men willing to live in a feminised house’ (Porter 1963, p. 13). The idea of women controlling and domesticating men was a powerful image within the popular press, which was aimed mostly at men, such as Lone Hand, the Bulletin and Smith’s Weekly. As Marilyn Lake writes, the narrative persisted that the responsibilities imposed on men made them weaker. Women, representing an authority against which men should rebel, were ‘the spoilers of men’s pleasures’ and ‘vain, snobbish, conservative, parson-worshipping killjoys’ (Lake 1993, p. 4). It is the manifestation of these values, drawn in the individual contexts in which memoirs are set, which underpins the self-identities such narratives reveal.

Legacy National identity creates the illusion of speaking for all of us, as if a nation’s people speaks with one voice. Its power is representative of the whole society – it’s the full, collective, inviolable consciousness of the public instruments that make up the nation, from our media to our social structures, our stories, our holidays, and our values; it is perhaps the only thing which we all might truly share – even if we, as individuals, disagree with its sentiments – it’s a faith in both the past and the future of the nation. What makes it fascinating is its capacity to speak to and for individuals: it decides our place as citizens because, if we don’t ascribe to the narrative of nation, we are seen by others as belonging outside of that narrative or of somehow being disrespectful to that narrative. At no time in Australia’s recent history was this conveyed so clearly as the riots which took place in Sydney suburb of Cronulla in December 2005. This was a confrontation between those of Anglo-Celtic and Middle Eastern origins, a contest around the legitimacy of competing behaviors, and an ugly reminder of the power of national narrative to decide who belongs and who doesn’t. Exercising the behaviors of a national stereotype declares one’s allegiances, demonstrates a belonging; the acknowledgement of the community – in this case, a consensus of a national stereotype – is the response which accepts those behaviors. War and life in the bush provide spaces for men to be courageous, violent and dominant; they reward physical prowess and risk-taking;

312  Jack Bowers fraternal solidarity creates a legitimacy of purpose. But, as Stephen Garton has suggested, this narrative was founded on a dichotomized view which divided the world into masculine and feminine: ‘it fostered an image of home as a feminised, domestic, mundane world and such images made it doubly difficult for many men to adapt to an idealised role as breadwinner. In other words it was founded on a pervasive opposition between a noble masculinised world and a lesser feminised world’ (Garton 1998, p. 94). This opposition is embedded in contemporary Australian culture. It is in television commercials for four-wheel-drive vehicles, alcohol, and hardware stores. It is in the casualized misogyny of The Footy Show (Brooks 2000); the rates of male suicide in rural areas (Altson 2012); the high number of women killed by domestic violence (Fitz-Gibbon & Walklate 2016). It is reflected in literature and in cinema. 2 Gender is usually considered, quite rightly, as a sociological, political, economic, and cultural phenomenon. Life writing, however, provides a unique insight into individuals and their relationship with the world, ­situating the personal within the political. That’s not to say that life writing is some transparent window into the soul: rather, the narrativizing of one’s life is inherently complex, giving a clarity of pattern and a neatness of hem which belies the tattered rag of one’s life. Individuals have their own motivations, circumstances, and personal narratives of identity, which make extrapolating from the individual to the social a fraught activity. Self-identity evolves from context: gender, family, relationships, education, experiences, attitudes, social forces, economic situation, and political events are all threads woven into the ongoing narrativizing process of self-identity. National narratives are an intrinsic part because they set the context for gender relations and social attitudes. It is astounding that society continues to promulgate a national identity which produces ramifications so damaging, and not just to men. Mateship is the unquestionable glue of that identity. As a behavior to instill a sense of community it is laudable: but mateship is more than that, and so much less. It is a set of gender-polarizing discourses, a socially agreed-upon framework of rules which require certain behaviors and attitudes for both men and women, and forbids expressions outside of those discourses. Recent decades have seen the rise of counter discourses around LGBTI groups, and undoubtedly there has been erosion, mostly within urban environments, of the rigidities of gender. But as these narratives show, the legacy of national identity will be around for many years yet.

Notes 1 ‘Dag’ refers to the mixture of wool, dirt, and excrement which sometimes collects at a sheep’s rear; by extension, it also describes someone who dresses poorly or is unkempt or untidy.

Lest We Forget  313 2 Crocodile Dundee (1986, 1988, 2001), for example, simultaneously celebrated and parodied the Australian stereotypic male. Rinsed of its more odious characteristics, this pastiche of Australian masculinity drew its inspiration from ‘Bazza’ McKenzie (1972, 1974). The other side of that masculinity appeared a few years later in the form of Mick Taylor in Wolf Creek (2005), in which the protagonist is a laconic, self-sufficient kangaroo hunter with a predilection for torture and murder. Although the film’s antecedents are more Wake in Fright (1971) than Crocodile Dundee, Mick Dundee is explicitly referenced by doppelgänger Mick Taylor in Wolf Creek.

References Altson, M. 2012, ‘Rural male suicide in Australia’, Social Science and Medicine, vol. 74, no. 4, pp. 515–22. Bean, C. E. W. 1910, On the Wool Track, John Lane, New York. Bean, C. E. W. 1921–1942, The Official History of Australia in the War 19-141918, Angus and Robertson, Sydney. Beaumont, J. 2013, Broken Nation: Australians in the great war, Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Bisley, S. 2013, Stillways: a memoir, Fourth Estate, Sydney. Brooks, K. 2000, ‘“More than a game”: the footy show, fandom and the construction of football identities’, Football Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 27–48. Caesar, A. 1998, ‘National myths of manhood: Anzacs and others’, in B. ­Bennett & J. Strauss (eds), The Oxford Literary History of Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, pp. 147–65. Carlin, D. 2010, Our Father Who Wasn’t There, Scribe, Melbourne. Colmer, J. 1989, Australian Autobiography: the personal quest, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. Crocodile Dundee. 1986, Rimfire Films, directed by Peter Faiman; Crocodile Dundee II. 1988, Paramount Films, directed by John Cornell; Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles. 2001, Silver Lion Films, directed by Simon Wincer. Davison, G. 1978, ‘Sydney and the bush: an urban context for the Australian legend’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 18, no. 71, pp. 191–209. Dixson, M. 1994 [1976], The Real Matilda: women and identity in Australia 1788 to the present, Penguin, Melbourne. Dyrenfurth, N. 2007, ‘John Howard’s hegemony of values: the politics of “mateship” in the Howard decade’, Australian Journal of Political Science, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 211–30. Facey, A. B. 1981, A Fortunate Life, Fremantle Arts Press, Freemantle. Fitz-Gibbon, K. & Walklate, S. (eds) 2016, Homicide, Gender and Responsibility, Routledge, London and New York. Garton, S. 1998, ‘War and masculinity in twentieth century Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 22, no. 56, pp. 86–95. Greer, G. 1989, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, Hamish and Hamilton, London. Hobsbawm, E. J. 1990, Nations and Nationalism since 1870: programme, myth, reality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Johnston, G. 1979 [1964], My Brother Jack, Collins/Fontana, Glasgow. Ker Conway, J. 1989, The Road from Coorain, Heinemann, Melbourne. Ker Conway, J. 1993, ‘Frontiers of nationhood: the US and Australia’, Sydney Papers, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 138–51.

314  Jack Bowers Lake, M. 1993, ‘The politics of respectability: identifying the masculinist context’, in S. Magarey, S. Rowley & S. Sheridan (eds), Debutante Nation: feminism contests the 1890s, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, pp. 1–15. Lake, M. 2010, ‘What have you done for your country? in M. Lake, H. Reynolds, M. McKenna & J. Damousi, What’s Wrong with Anzac? The militarisation of Australian history, UNSW Press, Sydney, pp. 1–23. Livingston, P. 2013, Absent Without Leave: the private war of Private Stanley Livingston, Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Marshall, A. 1955, I Can Jump Puddles, Cheshire, Melbourne. McKenna, M. 2016, From the Edge: Australia’s lost histories, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne. Modjeska, D. 1990, Poppy, McPhee Gribble, Ringwood. Murrie, L. 1998, ‘The Australian legend: writing Australian masculinity/writing “Australian” masculine’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 22, no. 56, pp. 68–77. Porter, H. 1963, The Watcher on the Cast-iron Balcony: an Australian autobiography, Faber and Faber, London. Scates, B. & Oppenheimer, M. 2016, The Last battle: soldier settlement in Australia 1916–1939, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. Schaffer, K. 1988, Women and the Bush: forces of desire in the Australian cultural tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Summers, A. 1975, Damned Whores and God’s Police: the colonization of women in Australia, Penguin, Ringwood. The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. 1972, Longford Productions, directed by Bruce Beresford; Barry McKenzie holds on. 1974, Reg Grundy Productions, directed by Bruce Beresford. Throssell, R. 1989, My Father’s Son, William Heinemann, Melbourne. Wake in fright. 1971, Madman/NLT/Group W, directed by Ted Kotcheff. Ward, R. 1966 [1958], The Australian legend, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. White, R. 1981, Inventing Australia: images and identity 1688–1980, George Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Whitlock, G. (ed.) 1996, Autographs: contemporary Australian autobiography, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia. Wolf Creek. 2005, Film Finance Corporation et al., directed by Greg McLean.

20 Bridges across Broken Time Armenian ‘Minor-Memoirs’ of the Turn of the 21st Century Gülbin Kiranoğlu ‘Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would be destined not to see but to weep. For at the very moment they veil sight, tears would [….] cause to surge up out of forgetfulness, there where the gaze or look looks after it, keeps it in reserve.’ —Jacques Derrida, The Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins

The first decade of 21st-century Turkey started as a period where more and more authors of ethnic minority communities could record their experiences of discrimination in memory narratives. This was part of the global popularization of witness literature, the theme of the Nobel Centennial Symposia in 2001. This wave of memoir was also remarkable in post-1980s Turkey, in tandem with discussions of identity politics due to a growing demand for self-definition by communities who have been ‘other’ed1. The voices of Christian and Jewish minorities in Turkey were for a long time heard only by their interethnic or diasporic audiences until the formation of a more pluralist public sphere. In this chapter, I shall explore the genre of contemporary memoir in Turkish, and trace its frontiers in ‘minor literature’ by examining narratives about the loss of minority memory in Asia Minor (Mignon 2009). The memoirs are by writers of Armenian descent. Armenians were the first non-Muslim community to be subjected to Turkification, catastrophic assimilation policies regarding Anatolian non-Muslim populations in the 20th century. The Armenian question remains taboo in contemporary multi-ethnic Turkey. Among the books recounting the Armenian experiences of displacement, discrimination, and othering that led to Armenian minoritization, two popular pioneer memoirs are chosen to demonstrate the challenge of Armenian memory to the hegemonic claim of homogenous Turkish identity. These are Mıgırdiç Margosyan’s Tespih Taneleri (2006) and Fethiye Çetin’s Anneannem (2004). There have been few attempts to examine this witnessing literature generically and to illuminate the relationship between the politics of remembering and the formation of a minority literature. This study argues that the impact of writing which recounts the marginalization of Armenians in

316  Gülbin Kiranoğlu modern Turkey has played a significant role in forming a countermemory by means of the genre of memoir. This chapter assesses the genre of memoir as part of the larger body of memory literature by minority communities. It will demonstrate the function of minority countermemory in rewriting the history of minoritization of non-Muslims. The study is inspired by broader questions such as: Is ‘minor(ity) literature’ gaining currency, and if so, could minority literature lead to cultural recognition? Can the formation of a collective memory open to appreciation of diversity, be made possible through the ethnic minority literature by the Armenian writers of Turkey? Is there space, in the Turkish cultural field, for the countermemories of Armenians?

Memoir Boom As a nonfiction mode of knowing the self, memoir has been the primary means for articulating the experience of discrimination and redressing the collective amnesia concerning ethnic minorities. Although memoir was already popular in post-1950s Europe and postcolonial contexts, the turn of the 21st century has been described as a ‘memoir boom’ (Couser 2012, p. 12). Julie Rak uses the Oxford Dictionary definition to show the evolution of the word in English since the 14th century and draws attention to its secondary position against the primacy of autobiography until recent decades. She describes the perception of memoir as ‘a minor form of autobiography’ and its ‘dangerous supplement (2004, pp. 305–6). Yet, since memoir is believed to have reversed this hierarchy with its recent popularity, it is important to differentiate the two. C. Hugh Holman and William Harmon write that memoirs are usually concerned with personalities and actions other than those of the writer, whereas autobiography stresses the inner and private life of its subject (1992, p. 285). Similarly M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham contrast the two, writing that ‘[autobiography] is to be distinguished from the memoir, in which the emphasis is not on the author’s developing self but on the people and events that the author has known or witnessed’ (2009, p. 26). Gillian Whitlock argues that autobiography is a post-Enlightenment form representing the sovereign and autonomous self, and emphasizing the uniqueness of the individual personality, whereas memoir captures a subjective view of the historical environment (2015, p. 65). Memoir is written in retrospect and thus has a pragmatic function, illuminating and reflecting on a past period which has recent preeminence. As such, memoirs are vital sources for glimpsing the past. Memoirists may also make use of photographs, letters and memorabilia with the aim of creating an historical aura for their writings. These remnants of the past can also be used as historical evidence, establishing the writer’s credentials as witness.

Bridges across Broken Time  317 This function of memoir as a storehouse of witness accounts can present a challenge to statist understandings of history, which is especially true for historians operating within the limits of a nationalist discourse. Max Saunders also sees memoir as ‘often avowedly inspirational in its aim, offering a sense of historical solidarity for oppressed minorities, and seeking to record counter-cultural memories that official cultures tend to repress or try to forget’ (Saunders 2008, p. 327). A good example is provided by postcolonial writers who sought to incorporate back into history the stories of the subaltern. They showed that silences need to be heard in order to confront the master narrative of colonial history, against the authority of the legitimate ‘we.’ From a postcolonial perspective, memoir is a more apt form for bearing a voice than an historical document. As Couser writes, memoir, ‘has been a threshold genre in which some previously silent populations have been given voice for the first time’ (2012, p. 12). According to Jay Winter, the countercultural solidarity of the previously silenced in a struggle against institutionalized exclusion, repression, and forgetting started in the post-1950s period, and was rooted in the democratization of suffering (Kalaycı, 2009, p. 29). The average individual is considered to be a subject of history as much as grand makers, since emphasis shifts to a sense of self-­ entitlement for those who have experienced horrors. For this reason it is also accessible, as Couser claims, for ‘it is, or has the potential to be, by far the most inclusive and democratic of genres [….] because, … its roots are not literary … [a]nd being rooted in these everyday practices, it is more available to amateurs than other genres’ (2012, p. 26). Against the unifying coherence of the master colonial narrative, testimonial narrative of a colonized subject is more crowded and ‘more collective’ (qtd. in Whitlock, 2015, p. 96). For Lee Quinby, the presented self in testimony literature is destabilized. Such narratives consist of ‘composite, anecdotal, multiple and discontinuous subjectivities [which] accentuate the conflicts and confusions of identity, and a discursive “I” caught in the turbulence of a specific moment in history, in “countermemory”’ (qtd. in Whitlock, 2015, p. 97). This countermemory situates the ‘I’ with its affinities to the collective identity. According to Whitlock, it is a t­ estimonial response to the plight caused by the privileged sovereign with a view to enabling ‘subaltern access to a powerful voice to speak as a political subject’ (2015, p. 67). Based on this view, it could be claimed that the ‘I’ of memoir sees and reflects publicly the spectres of the ­lingering and hurting past with a view to ending silence.

Breaking the Silence: Countering Invisibility and the ‘I’ of the Nation An example of testimonial literature, which endeavors to articulate minority voice(s) comes from non-Muslim writers in Turkey. Their dawning

318  Gülbin Kıranoğlu artistic articulation in late 20th century was a breakthrough after almost a century of disconnection between Muslim and non-Muslim literatures. Since the 1980s Turkish multiculturalism has been discussed in a celebratory tone, and memoir has become an important form for ethnic minorities of Turkey. Although as of the mid-19th century a more pluralist intellectual culture was developing 2 , it was interrupted by the shift towards Turkish nationalism and its literary propaganda emerging in the early 20th century. The nationalist literature was formed under the shadow of the ghosts of 19th-century pluralist and multicultural print culture shaped by non-Muslim and Muslim writers alike. In his work on the exclusive formation of national identity, the Greek literary critic Hercules Millas examined hundreds of Turkish novels to assess the representation of the Orthodox Greeks (and non-Muslims in general), drawing attention to this disconnection. Categorizing Turkish novels from the late 19th-century Ottoman period to contemporary times according to the ideological connections of the writers, Millas’ survey can be used to conclude that since the 1960s there has been decreasing interest in non-Muslim existence and experiences in Turkey (2005, p. 318). The post-World War II period is the high period of disconnection as it is a significant transitional phase of Turkification of the material and immaterial cultural heritage in Thrace and Anatolia.3 Therefore it could be stated that the initial othering and elimination of non-Muslims in literary history later turned into indifference. Until the end of the 20th century, non-Muslims were hardly represented outside their historico-political significance; their negative representation or absence had a particular function in national(ist) literature. Prior to the post-1980 period, the growing indifference towards minority lives as a result of the exclusivity of cultural policies in the Republican era is what characterizes the Turkish novel tradition. Within the course of the Turkish nation-building project, non-Muslim writers were denied inclusion in the canon. Few writers of Armenian, Orthodox Greek, or Jewish origin wrote in Turkish. Millas claims that it was the Armenian writer Zaven Biberyan4 who broke this silence on the part of non-Muslims in 1966 with his novel Yalnızlar (Loners), which was his own translation of his 1959 book in Armenian, Lıgırdadzı 5 (2005, p. 325). Biberyan’s contribution to the Turkish literary scene was remarkable although it did not immediately ignite an influential literary trend. The publication of non-Muslim writers’ works by mainstream publishers became possible in the late 20th century when Armenian leftist writers such as Vartan Ihmalyan, Hayk Açıkgöz, and Sarkis Çerkezyan published their memoirs. This history of indifference could be read as a history of invisibility and oblivion, a strategy of nationalist politics. For the last quarter of a century there has been an increasing visibility of non-Muslims both as subjects and authors. Armenians, Greeks, and Jewish writers can now find popular outlets to document their

Bridges across Broken Time  319 experiences of physical violence, historical exclusion, and cultural discrimination in the form of oral history and memory narratives. Encouraged by the rise of identity politics, the need to discuss the hegemony of Turkish identity and the crimes committed in its name became obvious in the 1990s. The increasing interest by the publishing houses can be seen in their lists of publications of fiction and nonfiction alike on the matter. Belge Publishing house, founded in 1977 just before the 1980 coup, was one landmark example. The foundation of other leftist publishing houses such as Metis Yayınları and İletişim Yayınları followed in the post-coup years as outlets of public discussions for the growing civil society; the first was established in 1981, the latter two years afterwards. Although the efforts of these Turkish liberal and leftist intellectuals were substantial, the most critical development was the opening of a space for self-representation for the Armenians of Turkey. This became possible with the establishment of Aras Yayıncılık6, the first bilingual publishing house of contemporary Turkey. Founded in 1993 by the Armenian leftist intellectuals Hrant Dink7, Yetvart Tomasyan, Ardaşes Margosyan, and the writer Mıgırdiç Margosyan, the publishing house Aras broke new grounds. Mıgırdiç Margosyan8, whose major work is included in this study as a case example, publishes his works by Aras. All these publishing houses have shaped the post-1980s memory culture immensely by providing outlets for voicing and recording the experiences of the ‘others’ of the nation. The sociologist Fatma Müge Göçek calls this a ‘post-nationalist critical narrative’: the body of knowledge which is critical of the official nationalist narrative (2011, p. 49). Meltem Ahıska appreciates the rise of memory culture and argues that the Armenian Question has become more visible due to the popularity of remembering: through memoirs, films, music, and exhibitions, rather than the authority of archival documents. However, Turkish historians who are in pursuit of maintaining the authority on the matter and reproducing the official historiographic discourse are uneasy about the popularity of remembering Armenian presence and culture, declaring memoir as an unreliable source of fallible memory. As the statement shows on the General Directorate of State Archives website, there is a struggle against the impact of memory culture: ‘In the Western public opinion the claims of Armenian genocide are based on some subjective publications in memoirs which have not been verified to date’ (qtd. in Ahıska 2009, p. 13). This struggle is the consequence of the denialist stance ­engaging in efforts to undermine the power of memoirs and memory narratives9. Nevertheless, in the early years of the republic when literature was used almost as an ideological tool, memoir served to affirm the official discourse. In fact, until the formation of a postnationalist discourse, memoirs were produced in a strategic manner, not discarded as fallible. In an article examining the canonical autobiographical narratives of the Republican era, Hülya Adak claims that until the 1980s

320  Gülbin Kiranoğlu in Turkey, autobiographical writing was mainly practiced to supplement and justify the official discourse; the memoirs of the state and military elites were considered acceptable due to their perceived sense of entitlement to speak and represent the ‘ethnically homogenous “I”’ which aligned with the interests of the nation (2011, p. 2). This phenomenon marks the narrative borders of the national identity: Only the ruling class of the founders could testify, and only their testimonies were deemed worthy of historical value. This selective evaluation of the genre of memoir according to the ­writer’s symbolic and cultural capital is the consequence of what Adak calls ‘the narrative monopoly of Nutuk’10 – the foundational text of Turkish official historiography (2011, p. 14). Constructed in 1927, ­Nutuk establishes the foundational myth of modern Turkey by erasing all traces of the Ottoman Empire. With the aim of opening a blank space for a new present, any possible connections to the past – especially the deeds of the Committee of Union and Progress11 – were destroyed. The ­transition from empire to republic was formulated as a tabula rasa to erase of the burden of an Ottoman legacy. In her study, Adak examines several autobiographical narratives and memoirs of the Unionists who were responsible for the mass killings and deportations in 1915 and finds out that memoir as a nonfiction form is used as an instrument to publicly deny any responsibility and claim innocence (2011, pp. 14–15). This can be seen in the use of passive voice to disavow accountability in almost all memoirs. As Adak notes, the abstention with the aim of shifting the blame is in contrast to the agency and command associated with the victorious I of the nation (2011, p. 2). Nevertheless, the historical value that these memoirs are endowed with because of their authors is assessed, and made historiographically canonical due to their accordance with Nutuk. In his article on the relationship between the canon and the minorities, the Belgian Turkologist Laurent Mignon marks the gaps and omissions in the Turkish literary canon. Mignon points out that minorities were long ignored in Turkish literary historiography and criticizes the uncertainty of criteria for inclusion. He argues that it is not the nationality nor homeland but the religious affliation of the writer that matters. He claims that the elimination of non-Muslims counts as a ‘reverse canon’ comprised of the authors and works erased from the ‘national’ literary memory. Yet Mignon also acknowledges that the recent changes since the turn of the century have paved the way for non-discriminatory attitudes toward non-Muslim writers such as Karin Karakaşlı, Mario Levi, and Roni Margulies, all of whom have been awarded important national literary prizes (2009, p. 30). Mignon calls this literature by non-Muslim authors, borrowing the concept from Gilles Deleuze and Felix ­Guattari, a ‘minor literature,’ defined as ‘the literature of a minority in a majority language’ (Mignon 2009, pp. 40–1). For Deleuze and Guattari there are three characteristics of ‘minor literature,’ listing them

Bridges across Broken Time  321 as deterritorialization, politicalness, and its collectivity, thus creating a concept for the literature capable of embracing other voices of the nation and other notions of nativeness (Deleuze & Guattari, 2008, pp. 16–17). Although the Turkish literary canon has historiographically excluded the works of non-Muslim authors writing in Turkish in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, the concept of minor literature creates room for the oppressed to record their countermemory.

Outside the Archive: In Search of Armenian Memory The surge of memory literature can be seen in the growing number of books recording ethnic lives and pasts. Starting with the publications of liberal and leftist publishing houses on the minoritization of non-Muslim populations, the literary field expanded its borders. The selected memoirs of Mıgırdiç Margosyan’s Tespih Taneleri (2006) and Fethiye Çetin’s Anneannem (2004) are pioneer works of the early 21st century not only for Armenians but for all non-Muslims. They epitomize the high period of the rise of minor(ity) literature. Drawing from Deleuze and ­Guattari’s concept, in this study, these texts will be characterized as ‘minor-­memoirs,’ which could be understood as a subtype of memoir practiced in a majority language with the aim of articulating the voices of ethnic minorities and enhancing their role in forming a countermemory. The first minor-memoir destabilizing the nationalist discourse by remembering the course of minoritization is written by Mıgırdiç ­Margosyan, one of the founders of the aforementioned Armenian-­ Turkish publishing house Aras Yayıncılık. Margosyan is known for his memoirs about the non-Muslim Quarter in the southeastern city of Diyarbakır, or Dikranegerd in Armenian. Having written initially in Armenian, he then published his first short story collection in Turkish entitled Gavur Mahallesi (The Infidel Quarter) in 1992. His other memoirs on the same quarter followed successively in 1995 and 1998, peeling off other layers within the palimpsestic history of Diyarbakır amidst the peak period of the Kurdish armed struggle for self-determination. In his following work Margosyan continued writing about this neighborhood as a writer who acknowledges the historical mission of fighting against oblivion and amnesia about Anatolian Armenians. Margosyan’s portrayals in Tespih Taneleri (Beads of Prayer) of the mid-century everyday life of Armenians in the historically Armenian city of Diyarbakır became popular because the book shed light on the Armenian provincial past in Anatolia which challenged stereotypical gentrified Armenianness when published in 2006. When Margosyan was growing up, the Armenian community in the non-Muslim neighborhood of Hançepek (where not only Armenians but Jews also resided in Diyarbakir) was largely dominated by the traumatic memory and consequences of the 1915 massacres and deportations.

322  Gülbin Kiranoğlu This made the elderly, and in particular Margosyan’s father, more conscious of the need to protect the culture and preserve the language. As recounted in the book, it prompted Margosyan to undertake ‘a struggle against history’ which Margosyan identifies as an endeavor not to become half-Armenian (2006, p. 14). The resistance against losing identity and forgetting is the writer’s impetus in claiming a place in history through recording their version of the past. Margosyan laments the erasure of their past from Anatolian history by questioning the master narrative of history when he writes: ‘Were there any good or bad traces of our ancestors on the pages of history? Wasn’t it a right to learn one’s past?’ (my translation, 2006, p. 444). Characterized as a memoir-novel on its cover, Margosyan’s 2006 book Tespih Taneleri (Beads of Prayer), recounts his life in Diyarbakır’s ‘quarter of infidels’ – as it is pejoratively called by the Muslim population. The book brings together the forms of bildungsroman and memoir, recounting the period of the writer’s coming of age from the 1940s until 1955 and making the writer a historical witness of the incidents concerning the non-Muslims. In that sense it is the account of a temporal and spatial journey starting from Diyarbakır, continuing with traveling to İstanbul for his education, and ending with one of the most devastating episodes of Turkification aimed to eliminate and plunder the non-Muslim economical power. The incident known as the September 6–7 ­pogrom,12 which was considered to be a Turkish equivalent of Kristallnacht, would also pave the way for another wave of non-Muslim immigration abroad, and lead to further Turkification of Asia Minor. Margosyan’s motivation to write about his experiences and recover the historical memory of Armenians by learning his language and culture in İstanbul reflects his awareness of the importance of articulating, exposing, and bringing to public notice through literature the historico-spatial memory regarding Diyarbakır. Documenting the memory of Armenian existence in Anatolia has been an important motivation for Armenian writers in diasporas, as well as Armenia and Turkey. To name a few, the Armenian-American author William Saroyan has written about ­Bitlis; the exile Zabel Yeseyan made Armenian Üsküdar memorable; and Hagop Oshagan recorded Solöz in his writings. It has been a common practice among survivors to hand down stories through generations. Margosyan feels responsibility to his father and to his community to give meaning to their existence as one of the few survivors, just like the rosary beads of the title. Thus the son Mıgırdiç, as a bead, learns the language to record and to persevere as he was sent to İstanbul from Diyarbakır to get an Armenian education. He assumes a mission of rememberance on behalf of his siblings, relatives, and ancestors to claim what was taken from this community: their home, their language, and their memory of ­A rmenian existence in Anatolia. Thus Tespih Taneleri does not only speak for ­Margosyan but, as a minor memoir, bears a collective voice.

Bridges across Broken Time  323 Through his works, Margosyan confronts history by contributing to a countermemory which challenges the official history narratives testifying for a multiethnic coexistence in Anatolia. By articulating a collective voice via memoir, Margosyan resists the erasure of Armenian memory regarding his hometown Diyarbakır. He reminds readers of the Armenian name for Diyarbakır, ‘Dikranagerd’ – the city of King Dikran – which is echoed in the practice of naming Armenian boys as Dikran, acknowledging the past bonding with the land (2006, p. 25). Margosyan also refers to other displaced communities now almost extinct or minoritized due to the implementation of demographic engineering in Anatolia: Assyrians, Chaldeins, and Jews who lived together in the region. In this sense, the history of Turkish nation building is the history of physical and cultural displacement. Margosyan remembers the immigration to Israel of the Jews in the neighbourhood when it was founded in 1948. After their departure, the name of the Jewish neighborhood was changed to Kore Mahallesi (Korean Quarter) in order to commemorate the Turkish war veterans sent to the Korean War. These renamings are examples of cultural effacement of the non-Muslims in the region and may be understood not only as physical deportation or displacement but as disarticulation of a minority community’s sense of belonging. Margosyan also reminds his readers of a pejorative name epitomizing Turkish hatred for Armenians: the expression, ‘kılıç artığı’ (remnants of the sword) which designates the survivors of the mass killings and deportations of 1915. This idiomatic expression illustrates the nationalist attitudes towards the survivors by suggesting that they ­escaped their deserved destiny and that they are the embodiment of unfinished business. The impetus to protect and reclaim the erased pasts is also seen in Fethiye Çetin’s 2004 memoir entitled Anneannem (My Grandmother). Anneannem is another groundbreaking memoir work which paved the way for a paradigm shift in the first decade of the 21st century. Challenging notions of ethnic purity for both Armenians and Turks and moving away from an ‘us versus them’ dichotomy, Fethiye Çetin recounts the story of her grandmother who, as a ‘remnant of the sword,’ was forced to live as a Turk all her life whilst carrying her secret Armenian identity as a burden. Focusing on the grandmother who has suffered the suppressed trauma of being a crypto-Armenian until her final years, Çetin’s story offers two intertwined memory narratives: one by herself in which she confronts the shock she experienced after learning of her grandmother’s Armenian origin; and one by the grandmother Heranuş who discloses the story of her hidden identity to her grandchild Fethiye Çetin. The first narrative frames the second one and draws attention to the acts of transmitting memory and bearing witness. At stake in Çetin’s narrative was the melting of ‘they’ into ‘us,’ denying any antagonism for the Turkish subject of hegemony.

324  Gülbin Kiranoğlu The phenomenon of forced conversions to İslam has been a motif in several works by both Armenian and Turkish authors writing on the issue. For example, Margosyan also draws attention to the double lives ­ rivate. of crypto-Armenians: a Muslim life in public, a Christian one in p (2006, pp. 272–73) Margosyan also talks about his own father’s past conversion as a cost of survival. As a male survivor he manages to convert back to Christianity and raises his family as Armenians. Nonetheless the female survivors, especially orphan girls, were either adopted as handmaidens or forced to marry Muslim men. Çetin’s narrative begins with her grandmother’s death and her subsequent funeral when she confronts the shame of Turkifying an Armenian survivor, forcing her to live an assimilated life away from her family and her culture. Çetin learns the truth about her grandmother’s Armenian origin and her real name ‘Heranuş’ after her grandmother decides to find her family members before her death and asks Çetin for her help. Çetin also discovers that her grandmother had to conceal this story from her own daughters and son. The children learned this secret later from other children in the neighborhood who labelled them as ‘dönmenin dölü’ ­(offspring of a convert). The hostility toward Armenians can further be seen in the incident about the uncle’s application for military school. Çetin’s uncle is not accepted in the military school because he is defined as möhtedi, the son of a convert (2004, p. 64). With the publication of this memoir, the unearthing of a deep hidden truth about the widespread existence of muslimized convert-Armenians has led to a trend of discovery of Armenian grandparents, especially grandmothers. Çetin’s book received immediate public attention and has been so popular that works with similar revelations followed13. This has resulted in scholarly interest, which led to a conference on ‘Islamized Armenians’ in 2013 and shed light on the extensiveness of hybrid identities and the impossibility of pure ethnicity. With the aim of providing an outlet for the subjective experience of a historical witness and redefining her own identity, Çetin challenges official narratives concerning the purity of Turkishness. However, her struggle to open up a space for giving a voice to her grandmother is not personal but collective. The burden of Çetin’s identity confusion in Anneannem is painful, as the dissolution of the proud Turkish subject who encounters the antagonized ‘other’ within herself. The crack which leads to doubling and the splitting of her identities becomes a catalyst for her confrontation with the official memory. Çetin’s transformation is irrevocably traumatic. Her memory of her childhood pleasure in reciting epic poems about the Turkish heroic deeds during the Independence War disintegrates into horror and torment: ‘What I have learned does not conform with what I knew…. The poems of “glorious past” that I recited with heartfelt cry, now all shatter hitting the images of scared eyes of children, disappearing heads of children in water, and crimson red river flow’ (2004, p. 55). In this regard, Çetin’s

Bridges across Broken Time  325 work is a response to the Turkish traumatic past which exemplifies the role minority memoir can play in revealing the spectres of the past within the public sphere.

Conclusion Turkification, which relied on the confiscation of the cultural and economic heritage of the autochthonous Anatolian ethnic communities and the denial of their existence on the nationalized territories, led to the effacement of and amnesia regarding Anatolian cultural diversity. Ethnic minority pasts were erased from the collective memory of Turkish people, and minority communities which are native to the Anatolian homeland have been treated as strangers and others. This politics of alienation throughout the Republic’s history became the legitimate means for physical, psychological, and symbolic violence wrought upon ethnic minorities. As a result of decades of displacement policies, these minorities were cut off from their history, memory, and culture. In this respect, Armenians are exiled from the imagination regarding Anatolia’s past, present, and future. The embryonic rise of ‘minor memoir’ writing could be interpreted as part of a promising social conjuncture urging the formation of a cultural discourse, potentially critical of the regime of homogenization and of the authoritarian imagination of a monolithic Turkishness. As one of the repositories of culture and lived experience, memoirs serve a social function: they remember in order to understand the past. This mood of remembering is especially important because a generation of victims who witnessed catastrophes and crimes against humanity during much of the last century is gradually passing away. In order to build a more inclusive collective memory, the need for remembering is urgent. Through their memoirs, writers of minority origin can today find popular outlets more easily than in earlier decades, and a significant number of publishing houses willingly and deliberately promote works of ‘minor(ity) ­literature.’ Margosyan’s and Çetin’s memoirs in particular expose the politics of forgetting and remembering which shape the foundation myths of the nation state. By fostering countermemory, they challenge the hegemony of national history and make collective memory a ­contested site at the turn of the 21st century.

Notes 1 The rise of identity politics in post-1980s Turkey shed light on the domination by the Turkish identity over other ethnicities. It paved the way for the broadening of the public sphere to include the voices of the communities that claimed to have been othered with the foundation and the ensuing nationalist politics of the Turkish Republic: the voices of Armenians, Orthodox Greeks, Assyrians, Jews, Alawites, and Kurds started to be heard. Among these ethnic communities the Kurdish movement is the major and most influential ethnic movement due to its population, whereas the Armenians are the most populous non-Muslim community.

326  Gülbin Kiranoğlu 2 On the interrelations among Muslim and non-Muslim populations within 19th-century print culture see Uslu and Altuğ (2014). 3 This period can be particularly characterized as transitional. In many fields the negative representation, humiliation, and demonization of non-Muslims can be seen from novels to cinema to popular magazines. For cinema and magazines see Balcı, (2013) and Kıranoğlu (2016). 4 Zaven Biberyan (1921–1984) was a leading figure of Armenian journalism in modern Turkey, contributing to Armenian newspapers Jamanak, Nor Lur, Nor Or, Marmara, Nor Tar (Biberyan 2014, pp. 2–3). 5 The first Turkish version was published in 1966 by minor underground publishing houses: Öncü and Payel Publications. This information is taken from the 2014 Aras edition of the Turkish translation (Biberyan, 2014, p. 2). 6 Aras Yayıncılık (Aras publishing house) takes its name from the river Aras which runs along the border between Turkey and Armenia. 7 Hrant Dink would later publish the weekly bilingual Agos, the first Turkish-­ Armenian newspaper in Turkey since 1996. Dink was assassinated in 2007. The assassination of an Armenian journalist was argued to be continuous with the historical crimes against the Armenians, both during the Ottoman period and modern Turkey. Although the development of a post-nationalist discourse and Hrant Dink’s personal popularity caused more than 100,000 people to attend his funeral, the fact that he was killed and the people responsible for the crime were not punished points to a less optimistic state of readiness by the Turkish public sphere in coming to terms with the past. 8 Margosyan first started writing in Armenian, and was published in 1984, for which he was awarded a literary prize from France. 9 With a view to supporting the importance of memory narratives and their impact on the following generations, the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink declared every single Armenian alive to be an historical document. 10 As a speech delivered in 1927 by the official founder to present the canonical version of the historical incidents from the War of Independence to the foundation of the Turkish Republic, Nutuk is the historiographical model. 11 The Committee of Union and Progress ruled the Ottoman Empire between the years of 1913–1918, aiming to establish a nation in which Muslim populations were defined to be dominant. 12 During the 6–7 September 1955 pogroms, İstanbulite Greeks were deemed to be responsible when the news about the fire burning Mustafa Kemal’s house in the Greek city of Thessaloniki hit the headlines. Considering the Greek population in Turkey as hostage and using them as a card in international politics in this crisis resulted in two days of Kristallnacht in İstanbul’s non-­Muslim districts. The consequences of this particular incident were irreversible, causing Greeks and non-Muslim communities to leave İstanbul and Turkey. 13 İrfan Palalı’s 2004 book Tehcir Çocukları: Nenem bir Ermeniymiş (The Children of Deportation: I’m Told that My Grandmother was Armenian) or Filiz Özden’s 2007 book Korku Benim Sahibim (Fear Owns Me) are other examples of the same collective discovery.

References Abrams, M. H. & Harpham, G. G. 2009, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 9 edn. Wadsworth Cengage Learning, Boston. Adak, H. 2011, ‘Ötekileştiremediğimiz kendimizin keşfi: Yirminci yüzyıl otobiyografik anlatıları ve Ermeni tehciri’ [WWW Document]. http://research. sabanciuniv.edu/1282/1/3011800000194.pdf.

Bridges across Broken Time  327 Ahıska, M. 2009, ‘Arşiv korkusu ve Karakaplı Nizami Bey: Türkiye’de Tarih, Hafiza ve İktidar’, in K. M. Güney (ed), Türkiye’de iktidarı yeniden ­düşünmek. Varlık Yayınları, İstanbul, pp. 59–91. Balcı, D. 2013, Yeşilçam’da öteki olmak: Başlangıcından 1980’lere Türkiye sinemasında Gayrimüslim temsilleri, Kolektif Kitap, İstanbul. Biberyan, Z. 2014, Yalnızlar, 4. edn., Aras Yayıncılık, İstanbul. Çetin, F. 2004, Anneannem, Metis, İstanbul. Couser, G. T. 2012, Memoir: an introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. 2008, Kafka: toward a minor literature, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Göçek, F. M. 2011, ‘Reading genocide: Turkish historiography on 1915’, in R.  G. Suny, F. M. Göçek, N. M. Naimark (eds), A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the end of the Ottoman Empire, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, pp. 42–54. Holman, C. H., Harmon, W. 1992, A Handbook to Literature, 6th edn. ­M acmillan Publishing, New York. Kalaycı, S. M. 2009, ‘Interview with professor Jay Winter’, Tarih, vol. 1, pp. 29–36. Kıranoğlu, G. 2016, ‘İstanbul nostaljisinin kültürel mitolojisi: 1953–1965’. PhD thesis, Ankara Üniversitesi, Ankara. Margosyan, M. 2006, Tespih Taneleri, Aras Yayıncılık, İstanbul. Mignon, L. 2009, ‘Bir Varmış, Bir Yokmuş…Kanon, Edebiyat Tarihi ve Azınlıklar Üzerine Notlar’, Ana metne taşınan dipnotlar: Türk edebiyatı ve kültürlerarasılık üzerine yazılar, İletişim, İstanbul, pp. 121–32. Millas, H. 2005, Türk ve Yunan romanlarında ‘öteki’ ve kimlik. İletişim Yayınları, İstanbul. Rak, J. 2004, ‘Are memoirs autobiography? A consideration of genre and public identity’, Genre, vol. 37, p. 483. Saunders, M. 2008, ‘Life-writing, cultural memory, and literary studies’, in Cultural Memory Studies: an international and interdisciplinary handbook. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, pp. 321–31. Uslu, M. F., Altuğ, F. (eds), 2014. Tanzimat ve edebiyat: Osmanlı İstanbulu’nda modern edebi kültür. Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, İstanbul. Whitlock, G. 2015, Postcolonial Life Narrative. Testimonial transactions. ­Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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Notes on Contributors

Bunty Avieson is a Lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. A former journalist and author, she has published three novels, a novella, and two memoirs, which have been variously translated into Japanese, German, and Thai, and been awarded two Ned Kelly Crime Writing Awards for crime fiction. Her most recent memoir, The Dragon’s Voice: How Modern Media found Bhutan, was about the year she spent in Bhutan as a media consultant funded by the UN and Bhutan Observer. Her research interests include literary journalism and memoir. Jack Bowers is Senior Lecturer in Professional Military Education at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University, and also teaches at the Australian Command and Staff College, Canberra. He is the author of Strangers at Home: Place, ­Belonging, and Australian Life Writing (2016), published by ­Cambria Press. Megan Brown is a Professor of English at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and the author of two books: American ­Autobiography After 9/11 (University of Wisconsin Press 2017) and The Cultural Work of Corporations (Palgrave Macmillan 2009). Her work has also appeared in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, ­Biography, ­Women’s ­Studies Quarterly, College Literature, South Atlantic Quarterly, ­Cultural Studies, and Journal of Medical Humanities. She teaches courses in memoir and autobiography, personal essay, and American literature. Kylie Cardell is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Flinders University. She is the author of Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary (University of Wisconsin Press 2014) and is the co-editor (with Kate Douglas) of Trauma Tales: Auto/biographies of Childhood and Youth (Routledge 2014). She recently edited (with Rachel Robertson) a special issue of the journal TEXT on ‘The Essay’ (2017). Simon Clarke has lived experience of psychosis and using mental health services. He is a UK Health and Care Professions Council-registered

330  Notes on Contributors clinical psychologist and is currently working as a Senior lecturer within the Department of Psychology at Nottingham Trent ­University. Simon qualified with his Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (DClinPsy) in 2009 from Salomons Centre for Applied Psychology at Tunbridge Wells. Following this, he worked as a clinical psychologist in early intervention in psychosis services at Oxleas NHS ­Foundation Trust, then in physical health clinical psychology services for Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, and then as an academic tutor at University of Lincoln on the Trent DClinPsy training program. Simon is currently completing his PhD in authenticity and madness narratives in the School of Education at University of Nottingham, UK. Tony Davis is a Sydney-based journalist, author, and academic. He has worked in a wide range of roles for Fairfax publications (­ Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Financial Review) since the late 1980s while also writing fiction and nonfiction for children and adults. His books include The Big Dry (a novel shortlisted in the 2014 NSW ­Premier’s Literary Awards and adapted as a stage play by the Ensemble and Australian Theatre for Young People), the eccentric literary memoir F. Scott, Ernest and Me, the children’s series ­Roland Wright (published in the US and Germany), and Wide Open Road (the companion book to the ABC television show). His novella ‘The Flight,’ about a fleeing journalist/whistleblower, appeared in ­Griffith Review 50. He has taught journalism and creative writing at the ­University of Sydney and Macquarie University and is currently working on a new novel. Kate Douglas is an Associate Professor in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Flinders University. She is the author of ­Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory ­(Rutgers 2010) and the co-author of Life Narratives and Youth Culture: ­Representation, Agency and Participation (Palgrave 2016; with Anna Poletti). She is the co-editor (with Laurie McNeill) of Teaching Lives: ­Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives (Routledge 2017), (with ­Kylie Cardell) of Trauma Tales: Auto/biographies of Childhood and Youth ­(Routledge 2014), and (with Gillian Whitlock) Trauma Texts ­(Routledge 2009). Kate is the Head of the Steering committee for International Auto/ Biography Association Asia-Pacific. Anthea Garman is an Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University in South Africa where she teaches writing and editing, longform journalism, and multimedia storytelling, and edits the Rhodes Journalism Review (www.rjr.ru.ac.za). In 2015 the book version of her doctoral thesis was published as Antjie Krog and the Post-Apartheid Public Sphere: Speaking Poetry to Power (UKZN Press). She has been leader

Notes on Contributors  331 of the Mellon-funded and National Research Foundation-funded research project Media and Citizenship: Between Marginalization and Participation. The intersection of literary journalism and inventive storytelling with politics and the complexities of the post-apartheid South African public sphere, is key to her research commitments. Fiona Giles is a Senior Lecturer in feature writing and creative nonfiction in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. Recent publications include ‘“The magazine that isn’t”: The future of features online,’ (TEXT 2014); ‘What is The Point of the Profile? The Curious Cases of Jack Marx on Russell Crowe and Mark Dapin on Gordon Ramsay’ in The Profiling Handbook ­(Abramis 2015); and ‘“Mastering the art of being powerless and completely stupid”: Australian Gonzo Journalism as l’écriture masculine,’ in Fear and Loathing Worldwide: Gonzo Beyond Hunter S. Thompson (Bloomsbury 2018). Fiona is currently writing a book for Routledge, provisionally titled Literary Journalism in a Multimedia Age. Sue Joseph is a journalist and academic whose journalism spans 35 years in Australia and the UK. A Senior Lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, she teaches journalism and creative writing, particularly creative nonfiction writing, in both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Her research interests are around sexuality, secrets, and confession, framed by the media; ethics and trauma narrative; memoir; reflective professional practice; ethical HDR supervision; and Australian creative nonfiction. She has published four books, the most recent entitled Behind the Text: Candid ­Conversations with Australian Creative Nonfiction Writers (Hybrid Publishers 2016). She is currently Reviews Editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. Kath Kenny is a PhD candidate and Australian Postgraduate Award recipient in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. She is currently researching the connections between first-person storytelling and feminism. Kath is also a journalist, comment writer, reviewer, and essayist whose work has been published by journals such as Meanjin, Arena Magazine, and Overland, as well as newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald and The ­Australian. She has been an award-winning author with Lonely Planet and a contributor to various books including DIY Feminism (Allen & Unwin) and Guide to Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait Islands. Gülbin Kiranoğlu received her PhD degree in Communications from ­Ankara University, Turkey, where she studied the urban nostalgia of İstanbul in the mid-20th century. Since 2006 she has worked as a Lecturer at Kocaeli University and teaches courses in American Literature and Cultural Studies.

332  Notes on Contributors Freya Latona is a Sydney-based writer. Her non-traditional PhD explored the memoir genre’s potential as a therapeutic outlet for grief. Her academic work has been published in the Auto/Biography Yearbook; New Writing; and the Australian Association of Writing ­Program’s refereed conference proceedings (co-authored with Dr. Sue Joseph), and she has presented at numerous creative writing conferences across the UK. Freya works as an academic tutor and freelance lifestyle writer for several publications, including Junkee Media’s The Cusp, Peppermint Magazine, The Planthunter, and Your Zen Mama. Her memoir, which recounts her experience of losing her mother to cancer, was shortlisted for the Finch Memoir Prize 2017. Emma Maguire teaches English and Creative Writing in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Flinders University. She researches gender, youth, autobiography, and digital media. She is currently working on a book based on her doctoral research about young women’s online autobiographical practice (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). Willa McDonald is Senior Lecturer in Media at Macquarie University where she teaches and researches creative nonfiction writing and literary journalism. A former journalist, she has worked in print, television, and radio, including for the Sydney Morning Herald, Bulletin, Times on Sunday, ABC TV, and ABC Radio National. Her books are Warrior for Peace: Dorothy Auchterlonie Green (2009, A ­ ustralian Scholarly Publishing) and The Writer’s Reader: Understanding ­Journalism and Non-fiction (with Susie Eisenhuth 2007, Cambridge University Press). She is currently researching the history of A ­ ustralian literary journalism from the early days of the colony. Siobhán McHugh teaches podcasting and journalism at the ­University of Wollongong. She is an award-winning writer, oral historian, and podcaster/broadcaster, whose work is concerned with capturing and transforming marginalized voices through the affective power of sound and storytelling. Her history of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, The Snowy: The People Behind the Power (Harper ­Collins 1995), won the NSW Premier’s Award for Non-Fiction; Minefields and Miniskirts (Lothian 2005) recounted the untold stories of ­Australian women’s role in the Vietnam war; and Cottoning On (Hale & ­I remonger 1996) was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s ­H istory Prize. McHugh is founding editor of RadioDoc Review, the first journal of in-depth criticism of crafted audio storytelling. Her article, ‘The Affective Power of Sound: Oral History on Radio’ is included in the Oral History Reader (Routledge 2016). Siobhan was consulting producer on Phoebe’s Fall, a podcast from The Age newsroom (2016), which won two national awards and was a finalist at the New York Radio Festival.

Notes on Contributors  333 Marie O’Rourke is a Perth-based creative writer and PhD candidate from Curtin University, Australia. Her research interests lie in the field of life writing, specifically, investigating the quirks of memory. Marie’s current creative work-in-progress is a collection of lyric essays that experiments with form and language to push the boundaries of post-postmodern memoir. Her creative and critical work has been published in TEXT Journal; a/b: (Auto)biography Studies; New ­Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing; Westerly and Australian Book Review. Matthew Ricketson is Professor of Communication at Deakin University and has worked as a journalist and editor at The Australian, The Sunday Herald, Time Australia, and The Age. His journalism awards include a national prize for freelance journalism. He is the author of a biography of Australia author Paul Jennings, a journalism textbook, and Telling True Stories. He has edited an anthology of profile articles and Australian Journalism Today. In 2017 a revised edition of Writing Feature Stories, co-authored with Caroline Graham, was published. In 2011 he was appointed by the federal Labor government to work on an independent inquiry into media accountability that reported to government in 2012. He is a chief investigator on two ­Australian Research Council grants, examining large-scale redundancies in newsrooms and the future of journalism. Carolyn Rickett is an Associate Dean of Research, Senior Lecturer in Communication and creative arts practitioner at Avondale College of Higher Education. She is coordinator for The New Leaves Writing Project, an initiative for people who have experienced or are experiencing the trauma of a life-threatening illness. Together with ­Judith Beveridge, she is co-editor of The New Leaves poetry anthology. Other anthologies she has co-edited with Judith Beveridge include: Wording the World; Here, Not There; and A Way of Happening. Her research interests include: trauma studies, writing as therapeutic intervention, medical humanities, journalism ethics and praxis, literature, and poetry. Ben Stubbs is a Lecturer in journalism and writing at the University of South Australia. He has written two books of travel writing: Ticket to Paradise, (2012, ABC Books) and After Dark (2016, Signal Books) and numerous guides, essays and feature articles for publications including The Guardian, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Southerly, and The Sydney Morning Herald. He has also published numerous academic book chapters and journal articles on nonfiction writing and the plurality of travel writing. Georgiana Toma completed a PhD at the University of Sydney on strategies to construct a personal brand in the context of co-created online

334  Notes on Contributors forums. The study transposes a narrative approach to branding and online marketing studies with the aim of proposing a model of personal branding whereby blogger identity is simultaneously the product of authorial control and consumer-driven cultural work. She has worked in the higher education sector for over ten years as TESOL lecturer and trainer, and her research interests are narrative theory, human brands, social media, blogs, and aesthetic theories. Kathleen J. Waites is a full Professor of English and Gender Studies in the Literature and Modern Languages Department of Nova Southeastern University’s College of Arts, Sciences, and the Humanities where she teaches literature, memoir, and a range of Women’s and Gender Studies courses. Her scholarly work focuses on memoir and autobiography, and on the representation of gender in popular culture. It has appeared in Routledge’s Chick Flicks and Palgrave ­Macmillan’s Bad Girls and Transgressive Women in Popular Television, Fiction, and Film, and in such journals Biography: An Interdisciplinary ­Quarterly, Auto/Biography, and Film/Literature Quarterly. In 2007, she published a memoir, Particular Friendships: A Convent Memoir, and has just completed her first novel. Jessica White is the author of A Curious Intimacy (2007), which won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award, was shortlisted for the Dobbie and Western Australia Premier’s awards, and longlisted for the international IMPAC award. It was followed by her second novel, Entitlement (2012). Jessica’s short fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in numerous Australian literary journals, and she is the recipient of funding from Arts Queensland and the ­Australia Council for the Arts, which has included a residency at the BR Whiting Studio in Rome. Jessica is currently an ARC postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland, where she is writing an ecobiography of nineteenth-century botanist Georgiana Molloy.

Index

ABC 224, 241, 243, 295 Aboriginal 151, 198, 201, 284–96; dispossession 149, 284 Abrams, Muhal Richard 316 Aciman, Andre 25 activism 62, 64, 65, 227, 293 Adak, Hülya 320 Addis, Donna 16 advocacy 80, 82, 183, 284 agency 30, 81, 82, 85, 94, 101, 129, 152, 211, 278, 280, 320 Ahıska, Meltem 319 AIDS 112, 207–19 Altman, Irwin 176 Altman, Janet Gurkin 258, 260 Altuğ, Fatih 326n2 Amazon 295 Anatolia 315, 318, 321–3, 325 Anderson, Leon 59, 60, 62, 174 Anderson, Stephen 14, 24 Angelou, Maya 31 Anneannem (2004) 315, 323, 324 anthropogenic climate change 147 antisocial behaviors 290 Apartheid 269–81 apostrophe/ic 93, 211 apps 157, 158, 163, 164, 169 Aras Yayıncılik 319, 321, 326n6 archive 3, 7, 150, 158, 165, 166, 168, 169, 183, 281n6, 284, 304, 319, 321 Armenian 8, 315–25 Armfield, Neil 213 Armstrong, Heather 173–85 Armstrong, Lance 50–6 Arthur, Paul 161 Asia Minor 315 Atkinson, Judy 290 Atkinson, Paul 62 Attwood, Bain 286

audience engagement 110, 173, 180, 183 audio memoir 6, 105, 106, 112, 115, 118 audio storytelling 104, 106, 109, 110 aural 106, 110, 118 Australia 8, 22–3, 44, 47–8, 53, 91, 106–12, 141–55, 162–3, 192–202, 208, 212, 214, 218, 221–2, 225, 232, 237, 238–9, 248, 280, 284–96 Australian Press Council 295 authenticity 38, 39, 62, 63, 65, 78, 105, 133, 135, 158, 174, 175, 178, 182, 185, 197, 292, 309, 330 autobiographic memory 13, 25 autobiographical pact 13, 123, 214, 309 autobiographical subject 123, 127, 129 autobiography vs. memoir 1, 4, 13, 43, 60, 63, 87, 88n1, 124, 159, 174, 252, 257, 261, 270, 285, 303, 316 autochthonous 325 autoethnography 60–9 automatic narration 99–100 Ballantine, Jessica 143 Barthes, Roland 16, 185, 209 Baudrillard, Jean 134 Bayley, John 292 Beach, Joseph 93 Beads of Prayer (2006) 321, 322 Bechdel, Alison 34 Behrendt, Larissa 292 belonging 60, 88n3, 142, 143, 255, 309, 311, 323 Benterrak, Kim 199 Berlins, Marcel 78 Berman, Jeffrey 209, 210 Berry, Richard 104 betrayal 237, 246, 261, 276, 286, 308 Biberyan, Zaven 318

336 Index Biden, Joe 79 Biewen, John 105, 109, 111, 112 biodiversity 141, 150, 154 biography 3, 43, 44, 46–8, 62, 159, 217, 239, 242, 248, 252, 257, 285, 302, 303 Bird, Nickolas 216 Bjork, Elizabeth 18 Bjork, Robert 18 black/white relations 284 Bolt, Andrew 292–6 Bonheim, Helmut 92, 100 Bonini, Tiziano 104 Booth, Tracey 78 Born a Crime (2016) 275, 279 boyd, danah 165 Bradfield, Scott 100 brand authenticity 174–5 brands 223, 334 Brewster, Anne 20, 152–4 Brexit 31 Bright Lights, Big City (1984) 92 British rule 284 Brown, Hazel 141, 148, 149, 152–4 Brown, Vanessa 162, 163, 165 Brownmiller, Susan 224, 232 Bruns, Axel 159, 170 Buckingham Palace: District Six (1986) 270, 273 Butler, Judith 64, 85 BuzzFeed 77–9, 85, 89 Caleo, Bob, John & Lois 207–19 Calvino, Italo 93 Calwell, Arthur 91–101 cancer narrative 50, 60, 117, 210, 217, 225–6, 230, 254, 257, 262–3 canon 18, 79, 202, 208, 318–21, 326n10 care ethics 67, 69 Carmen, Leon 292 Cathcart, Michael 243 celebrity/ies 7, 48, 49, 133, 134, 160, 161, 168, 208, 223, 232, 234n14, n16, 240, 254 Çetin, Fethiye 32–5, 316, 321 Changeux, Jean–Pierre 14 child narrator 274 child removal 292 childhood memoirs 43 cinematic eye 6, 123 Cixous, Helene 87, 128 clan relationships 284

CNN 78 Coalition for Victims’ Equal Rights 80 Coates, Ta–Nehisi 32–4, 41 cognitive neuroscience 14, 25–6 collaborative memoir 5, 8, 21, 149, 213, 251–65 collective memory 159, 316, 325 colonial project 284 colonialism 269, 278, 284, 285, 290, 296 colonization 142, 147, 149, 154, 288, 290, 296, 309 Concrete Koori 294 Confession Booth (2015) 112 Conigrave, Anna, Mary Gert, Nicholas & Timothy 210–19 consciousness raising 222–4, 228, 233–4 consumer loyalty 175 consumer trust 174, 176 contextual nature of remembering 21 Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls 294 coping 276–7 counterculture 128, 132 countermemory 316, 317, 321, 323, 325 country 50, 141, 144, 148–54, 193, 195–6, 198–200 Couser, Thomas 1, 2, 124–5, 159, 192–3, 201–2, 214, 217–19, 240, 242–3, 247, 251–5, 261, 264, 317 criminal 78, 80–2, 303 crypto-Armenian 323–4 cultural memory 21, 146, 148, 149, 151 Dahmer, Jeffrey 89 Dalziell, Rosamund 252 Davidson, Robyn 192–200, 202 de Man, Paul 211 deep time 154–5 defamation 2, 51, 293 depression 3, 69, 84, 176–83, 186n7, 186n10, 227, 229, 241, 301–3 dialogic 6, 65, 124, 261 disability tourism 64 Discrimination Act 293 displacement 8, 323, 325 dispossession 149, 150, 278, 284 dissociation 23, 62, 98 Diyarbakır 321–3 docudrama 5, 207–8, 212–13, 216, 218

Index  337 Documemoir 123–34 Doe, Emily 77–89 domestic service 279, 288 Down Second Avenue (1959) 270 Dr Zhivago (1957) 98 Drake–Brockman, Howden 287, 289 Drake–Brockman, Judith 287, 289 duty of care 244, 247 Eakin, Paul J. 2, 15, 25, 26, 124, 133, 237, 241, 252, 258, 261, 262 eco-memoir 6, 141–56 ecobiography 142 ecology 104, 143, 147 Edlich, Micah 142 Egan, Susannah 123, 124, 132 electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) 67, 68, 303 Ellis, Carolyn 59 environment (the) 141–51, 153, 155, 159, 198, 310, 312 ephemera 118, 157–69 epigenetics 21 epistolary 8, 32, 251–64 Erdrich, Louise 143 Erez, Edna 81 Erll, Astrid 143 ethical dilemma 7, 8, 49, 62, 112, 196 ethics of memoir 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 207–19, 237–48, 249n7, 251–64, 295 ethnic minority 315, 316, 318, 321, 325 Europe 106, 109, 144, 300, 316 European 8, 141, 147, 149, 151, 201, 288, 296 factuality 31, 37, 38, 258, 259 fair-skinned Aboriginal people 292, 293 Farr, Cecilia 142 feminism 129, 221–33; celebrity feminism 223, 232, 234n16; feminist care ethics 4; second–wave 129, 222, 223, 228, 229, 232, 233, 234n8; third–wave 134, 230 feminist campaigners 80, 225, 227 feminist scholarship 88n1, 174, 186n9, 280, 300 feminist writing 222, 223n1 Fernyhough, Charles 18 Ferrier, Carole 285 Fidler, Richard 107, 24, 243 filmic self–representation 6, 123

finsta 162, 170n4 First Australians 296 First Nations 296 first person 6, 7, 18, 20, 40, 61–4, 69, 81, 91–100, 105, 111–12, 157, 177, 185n2, 216, 221–33, 234n10, 258, 331 Fisher, Jeremy 98 Flannery, Tim 154, 194, 199 flashbulb memories 24 Fludernik, Monika 93, 100, 101n4 Foss, Sonja 84, 85 Foucault, Michel 63, 66, 68 Fowler, Kathleen 210 fragmentation 13, 17, 18, 141, 210 Frank, Arthur 60, 61, 65, 67–9, 210 Freadman, Richard 237, 238, 244, 253 free indirect discourse 94 Freedman, Diane 143 Freedman, Mia 221–2, 225–7, 229–33 Freeman, John 242 Freeman, Robin 25 Friedan, Betty 222–4, 227, 229, 231–2, 234n2, 234n9 Frosh, Paul 4, 61, 63, 64 Frost, Robert 240 Gagné, Marie–Anik 290 Gammage, Bill 148 Gardner, Chris 32 generosity 67–9, 96 Genette, Gerard 99 genocide 154, 296, 319 ghostwriters 5, 9, 43–56 Gibney, Alex 53 Gilmore, Leigh 40, 41, 77, 159 Gimlet Media 111 Glamour Magazine 79 Glass, Ira. 109, 117 Glass, James 63, 64 Göçek, Fatma 319 Goodreads 295 Grant, Alec 59, 60, 61, 63 Greene, Edith 78, 80 grief 1, 7, 8, 36, 40, 209–19, 228, 251–64, 291 Griffiths, Tom 154 Griffin, Cindy 84, 85 Grossman, Michele 285 Gusdorf, George 128, 130

338 Index half-caste 294 Hall, Alan 107, 108, 118 Hançepek 321 Hantzis, Darlene 93 Harmon, William 59 Harpham, Geoffrey 316 Harrison, Colin 127, 133 Harvey, David 30 Hayek, Friedrich 29 Heavyweight (2016) 111 Heer, Jeet 36 Heiss, Anita 284, 285, 286–7, 292–6 Herman, David 93, 94 heterodiegetic narratee 93 heterodiegetic plane 99 Higgins, Charlotte 237 Hirson, Denis 270, 271–4, 281n2, n4, n5 history wars 284 Holding the Man (1995) 7, 207–19 Holman, Hugh 59 Holmes, David 142 homodiegetic narratee 103, 109 homodiegetic plane 99 homogenization 325 Hopkins, Mary Francis 93, 94, 98 Hopper, Stephen 141, 150 House Next Door to Africa (The) (1986) 270, 273 Howden, Saffron 295 Huggins, Jackie 286, 287, 288, 296 human brand 174, 185 Human Rights Award for Non–Fiction 207 Humanism 60 I and Eye 123–35 I Remember King Kong (the Boxer) (2004) 272 I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983) 40 ideal narratee 99 identity claims 124 identity politics 40, 292, 296, 315, 319 If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) 93 Illness 6, 50, 61, 65, 97, 99, 180, 181, 183, 186, 209–12, 219, 227, 233, 254, 259, 262, 264, 288, 333 illness narrative 65, 210, 211 immersion 105, 151, 193, 195, 196, 199, 200, 202

incarceration 94, 98, 101, 271, 289 Indigenous 8, 141–55, 193, 195, 196, 198–202, 219n1, 274, 284, 286, 291, 294, 308 individualism 4, 8, 31, 32, 41, 62, 128, 230, 270, 301 Instagram 7, 157, 158–72, 176, 218 intended audience 78, 99 intergenerational life writing 24 intergenerational trauma 20, 291, 292 internal dialogue 99 internal monologue 22, 98, 99 invasion 83, 254, 285, 296 investigative journalism 104 invitational rhetoric 84, 86, 88 involuntary memories 23 Islamized Armenian 324 Jackson, Neville (penname of G.M. Glaskin) 101n1 Jenkins, Sally 50, 51, 52, 54, 56 Jigalong 292 Johinke, Rebecca 174, 175 Johnson, Lacey, M 38 Jones, Alan 47 Jones, Holman 59, 60 Jones, Jennifer 285 Joseph, Sue 291 journalism 4, 5, 57, 88n1, 104–6, 110, 111, 117, 118, 202, 225, 236n4, 239, 244, 271, 293, 294 Justice Bromberg 293, 294 Kacandes, Irene 93 Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa (1986) 270 Karr, Mary 1, 31, 34, 37, 45 Kellermann, Natan 21 Kelly, Paul 239, 246 Kennedy, Roseanna 288, 291–2 Kennedy, Simon 211, 212 Kermode, Frank 16 Kitzmann, Andreas 158, 170n2 Klein, Dorothee 288 Kocan, Peter 6, 91–101 Kontopodis, Michalis 30 Koolmatrie, Wanda 292 Koori 293, 294 land 141, 144–55, 193–202, 288, 294, 300, 302, 323 Langton, Marcia 287

Index  339 language 1, 17, 23, 24, 63–4, 69, 82, 98, 104, 109, 146, 152, 153–5, 182–4, 186n8, 201, 224, 226, 244, 258–63, 279, 285, 293, 320, 321, 322 Laurie, Victoria 287, 289 Le Masurier, Megan 174, 175 Le Rossignol, Karen 25 legacy 106, 169, 208, 218–19, 247, 253, 253, 255, 264, 276, 292, 300, 304, 311–12, 320 Lehrer, Jonah 15 Lejeune, Philippe 13, 15, 26n1, 123, 129, 158, 214, 309 Leopold, Aldo 143 Leser, Bernard 239, 243, 245, 247, 248, 249n2 Leser, David 7, 8, 237–48 Life is But a Dream (2013) 123, 133 life writing 2, 16, 24, 34, 37, 61, 88n1, 142, 149, 157, 169, 170n2, 173, 192, 193, 201, 202, 211, 222, 232, 242, 251–3, 255–7 limit experience 63 Lindgren, Mia 111 Lines, William 147, 154 literary journalism 4, 105, 106, 110, 117, 118 lived experience 1, 59, 60, 160, 210, 238, 259, 263, 325 Lopez, Barry 143 Lopez, Lori 222, 224–6, 228 Lucashenko, Melissa 151 Lucy, Judith 253 Lynch, Tom 143 lyric essay 17 madness 5, 59–73, 98, 330 Malcolm, Janet 47, 237, 243 Manson, Charles 80, 81 Margolin, Uri 99 Margosyan, Mıgırdiç 315, 319, 321–7 Marr, David 47, 294 massacre 150, 153, 321 master narrative 65, 277, 317, 322 Mathabane, Mark 270, 271, 274 Mathew, Imogen 295 matriography 253, 254 Mayer, Jane 43, 49 McClelland, James L. 14 McCooey, David 3, 88 McCrone, John 16 McDonald, Willa 92, 95

McHale, Brian 93 McHugh, Siobhán 105, 109, 110 McInerney, Jay 92, 94 McRobbie, Angela 230–3 memory and identity 14 memory and imagination 21 memory bias 46 memory studies 25 Menchú, Rigoberta 40 mental health services 6, 65, 67, 329 mental illness 6, 97, 99, 186n7, 227, 293 Mignon, Laurent 315, 320 Millas, Hercules 318 Millennial (2015) 111 Miller, Nancy K. 5, 16, 22, 237, 238, 252, 261, 263 mimesis 100 minoritization 8, 315, 321 minority literature 8, 315–27 minority memory 3, 115, 316 Miscavige Hill, Jenna 52, 53 Modjeska, Drusilla 25, 309 mommy blogs 7, 174–6, 179, 185n2, 224–6 Monbiot, George 29 Moore River Native Settlement 289 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 286 Morgan, Robin 232 Morgan, Ruth A. 147 Morgan, Sally 284–9 Morisset Hospital 91 Morrison, Aimée 161 Morrissette, Bruce 94, 98, 100 motherloss 8, 231 Mphahlele, Es’kia 270, 271 multiple subjectivity 93, 101 Murphy, Tommy 213 Murray, Tim 284 mutism 289 My Grandmother (Anneannem) (2004) 315, 323, 324 Myers, Bryan 78, 80 Myers, Norman 156 Nadesan, Majia 30, 31, 35 Nalbantian, Suzanne 25 Nance, Kimberly 93 narrative practice 159, 247 narrative research 4, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 69 narrative of trauma 2, 3, 18, 21 narrative turn 60

340 Index Native Nostalgia (2009) 270, 277, 282n10 Nelson, Maggie 16–20 neoliberalism 29–31, 35, 37, 41, 230 Noah, Trevor 270, 275–81, 281n7 Non-human 145, 152, 153 Non-Indigenous 141, 143, 144, 149, 151, 153, 154, 286, 291, 294 Non-Muslim 2, 3, 12, 315, 316, 317, 318, 320–3, 325n1 Noongar 149–50, 152 nostalgia 281 Not By Accident (2016) 111–12 novella 6, 92, 95–7, 99, 100–1

posthumous 7, 9, 208 Prebble, Sally C. 16 present tense 95, 97–8, 100–1, 260 Priv 162–3 privacy 55, 135, 165, 170n4, 217–18, 227, 237, 244, 247, 251, 254, 256 professional activism 293 Pryor, Lisa 221–2, 225–7, 229–31, 233, 233n1, 234n5 psychoanalysis 61, 63–4 psychoanalytic model 290 public dialogue 8 Pulitzer, Lisa 52–4, 56 Pung, Alice 20–4

O’Dwyer, Erin 256 Oates, Joyce Carol 210 observer memories 18 omniscient narrator 97 online followership 183 oral history 149 orally 286 oral memoir 150 oral testimony 151 Ortega, Francisco 24 Ottoman 318, 320, 321, 326n7

Quadrant 92, 95, 96 quadrilogue 5–6, 59, 64–9 Quah, Nicholas 106 qualitative research 59, 63, 162 quoting the deceased 237, 240, 252–5, 257–62, 264

paranoia 6, 67, 69, 97, 99 paratext 95, 249 part-Australian 294 Pascoe, Bruce 147–8 past tense 95, 97 patriography 7, 253 Peretz, Evgenia 41n2 performativity 64–5 Perkins, Leon 93–4, 98 personal blogs 173, 185n2 photography 135 Pilkington Garimara, Doris 284, 289–92 plasticity 15, 26 plurality 5, 192, 333 podcasting 5–6, 104–6, 111, 118, 332 political context 296 politics of forgetting 325 politics of remembering 8, 315 positivist 59 post –1980 315, 318–19, 325n1; –apartheid 269–70, 272–4, 276, 280–1, 330–1; –nationalist 319, 326n7; –traumatic stress disorder 35, 110, 306; –colonial 224, 316–17; –writers 317; –postmodern 16, 19, 60, 63, 333; –ism 16; –ist 127–8

race 32, 50, 270, 293–4, 296 racial caste system 294 racial prejudice 32, 150, 293–4 racism 29, 32, 34, 284, 296 Radio Diaries (1996) 112 Radiotopia 111–12 Rak, Julie 38, 316 rape victim/s 80, 83 reconsolidation 15, 17 recovery 6, 37–8, 50, 61, 81, 86, 124, 141, 149, 153–4, 186n7, 225, 290 redress/ing the silence vii, 284, 316 reinscribing identity 292 relational lives 159, 252 relational memoir 8, 251, 257–8, 260, 263–4; –ity 252, 257, 286 Remembering The Man (2016) 212, 216 repressed memories 22 resilience 24, 147, 200, 275, 277, 290, 390 restorative justice 6, 81 Richardson, Alan 21 Richardson, Brian 92–3, 97, 99, 101 Ricketson, Matthew 5, 43, 47 Rieff, David 253–5 Rive, Richard 270, 273–5 Roberts, Dmae 112 Rodgers, Daniel T. 38–9 Roe, Paddy 199 Rooney, Brigid 148, 151

Index  341 Rose, Diana 67 Rose, Deborah Bird 148, 152 Roy, Ravi 31 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987) 285 Ruby, Jay 125 Ryan, Marie–Laure 93 S–Town (2017) 6, 106, 117 Salinger, Jerome D. 48, 93 Saunders, Max 317 Schaffer, Kay 285, 287, 290, 300, 311 Schama, Simon 145–7 Schofield, Dennis 93, 99, 100 Schwartz, Tony 49, 56 science/s 6, 18, 25, 33, 36, 43, 59–60, 62, 141; neuro– ii, 5, 14, 25, 109 Scott, Kim 6, 141, 146, 148–55 scriptotherapy 7, 173–4, 179, 183 second person 5, 17, 82, 91–5, 97–101 secrets 3, 25, 54, 170n4, 287–8, 331 self 2–4, 7, 14–17, 24, 30–1, 38, 61, 63, 65–6, 68, 77, 87, 98, 124, 127–30, 133, 135, 142, 152, 154, 158–9, 163–4, 166, 169, 173, 175–6, 193, 197–8, 200, 211, 222, 227–30, 238, 251–2, 257, 260, 286–7, 304, 316–17; –aggrandizing 31; –analysis 61; –annihilation 228; –aware 39, 202; –awareness 7, 202; –brand 169, 233; –broadcast 158; –care/ care of the self 66, 68; –censorship 2; –centered 7, 192, 196, 202; –chiding 114; –conscious 132, 134, 158, 161, 194; –consciously 94, 106, 303; –consciousness 125; –definition 315; –deleting 7, 164, 168–9; –delusion 243; –deprecating 114, 195; –destructing 166; –determined 277; –determination 321; –disclosure 7, 77, 173–8, 180, 183–5; –document 158; –documentation 158; –driven 133; –enclosed 62; –entitlement 317; –esteem 228; –evident 85; –examination 17; –expression 127; –fashion 230; –fulfilling 276; –government 35; –help 230; –hood 63, 159; –identify 294, 29–4, 300; –identity/ies 305, 311–12; –improvement 30, 62, 230; –indulgence 113; –judgment 98; –knowledge 63, 88, 99; –life 169, 252; –managing 134, 230; – mortification 114; –narrated 111;

–narration 7, 165, 168–9; performing– 132; –portrait/s 34, 315; –portraiture 4, 157; –possession 198; –presentation 165–6, 169; –promotion 233; –published 269; –referential 142; –reflection 202; –reflective 179; –reflexive 125–6, 130, 132–3; –reflexivity 113, 239; –regulating 230; –reliance 30, 32; –representation 6–7, 77, 123, 157–9, 161, 163–6, 168–9, 319; –representative 160; –revelatory 173; –serving 45; –storying 166; –sufficiency 32; –sufficient 38, 313n2; –surveillance 230; –understanding 142 selfie/s 162, 232 sensory information 14 Serial 10, 104, 106 settlement 146, 285, 290, 310; Moore River Native Settlement 289, 291; white– 296; European 8, 297 settler/s 148, 154, 195, 200–1, 269, 284–6, 288–9, 296, 300, 308, 310 sexual assault 13, 36, 54, 77, 79, 82, 84–5, 88–9n6, 303 Sherman’s March (1985) 123–5, 133 Shirley, Goodness and Mercy (2004) 270, 276 Short Cuts (2012) 111 silence/s/d 2, 8, 13, 21, 78–9, 87, 105, 150, 151, 153, 201, 273, 284, 286–9, 296, 300, 306, 317–18 Sims, Norman 105–6, 192–3, 199 simultaneous narration 100, 211 Slater, Lauren 143 Smith, Sidonie 85, 142, 159, 290 Snapchat 7, 157–60, 164–70n1 Snyder, Philip 142 social media 5, 38, 79, 87, 118n1, 134, 157–65, 167–70n4, 175, 185n2, 334 Sontag, Susan 254–5 South Africa 8, 269–71, 273, 275–6, 280, 330 South West Australian Floristic Region (SWAFR) 141 Spark (2007; 2015) 112 Stanley, Liz 256, 258, 260, 262 Stanner, William Edward Hanley 151 Steger, Manfred 31 Steingraber, Sandra 143 Stephens, Tony 291 Stevens, Mark 78–81

342 Index Stocker, Michael 255 Stolen Generations 289, 291–2, 294 stories 1–2, 7, 13, 21, 24–5, 31–2, 35, 40, 44, 48–9, 52–3, 56, 61, 64, 107, 109, 111, 113, 118, 135, 142, 148, 153, 157–61, 163–4, 167–9, 170n1, 170n2, 180, 185, 192–3, 202, 210, 217, 219n3, 221–4, 226–30, 232–4, 234n10, 237, 239, 244, 253, 261–3, 269–71, 274, 277, 281, 286–7, 290, 295–6, 304, 307–9, 311, 317, 322, 332–3 story 1–2, 4–8, 16, 20, 23–4, 31, 33–5, 37, 39, 40, 44–54, 60, 64, 83, 88, 92, 94, 97, 99–101, 106–12, 114–18, 123–6, 128, 130, 135, 142, 152–4, 157–61, 163, 167–8, 176, 185, 193, 200–1, 207–10, 213–16, 218–19, 221–3, 225, 227, 230, 232–4, 234n17, 238, 240–8, 252, 254–6, 262–4, 269–71, 273–5, 277–80, 286, 288–9, 294, 304–5, 310, 321, 323–4 Strangers (2014) 112–15, 118 strategic authenticity 65 strategic essentialism 65 Strayed, Cheryl 40 streaks 164, 167 Street, Seán 109–10 Stubbs, Ben 192 Styler, Rebecca 257 Suarez, Eliana 290 subaltern 317 subjectivities 59, 131–2, 208, 213, 228, 317 subjectivity 6, 59, 61, 65, 68–9, 93, 101, 106, 123–4, 126–8, 130, 132, 144–5, 159, 215, 219n3, 269 success 7, 17, 25, 32, 35, 43, 49–51, 53, 67, 88, 104, 182–3, 197, 207–8, 212, 215, 219, 232, 245, 271, 286–7, 296, 305 suffering 21, 30, 38–9, 86, 141, 167, 212, 214, 222, 231, 269–70, 277, 288–90, 292, 302, 307, 317 Summers, Anne 222, 228–9, 300 survivalism 275 Sydney Morning Herald 221, 239, 295, 330–4 social capital 169

Tate, Sharon 80 Tender Fictions (1996) 123, 127–8, 130–1, 133 Tespih Taneleri (2006) 315, 321–2 testimony 2, 6, 37, 39, 52, 129, 151, 174, 222, 284–5, 317 The Book Club (2014) 286 The Catcher in the Rye (1951) 93 The Cure (1983) 92–6, 99–100 The Heart (2016) 112 The Moth (2008) 112 The Treatment (1980) 92–7, 99–101 the unconscious 21, 61, 63–4, 240 The Wire and the Wall 91–2, 98, 100–1 The Writer’s Reader (2007) 92, 332 theft 150, 239, 246–7, 286 therapy 1–2, 62, 67–8, 179, 231, 234n3, 246, 303 third person 20, 59, 60, 93–94, 97, 100 This American Life (1995) 104, 109, 111, 115–17 Toma, Georgiana 7, 173–4, 182, 185 Tougaw, Jason 3, 209, 211 trans-genre 192–3, 202 trauma 1–3, 6, 8, 20–1, 23–4, 32, 34–6, 69, 99, 101, 112, 177, 209, 211, 228, 256, 284–92, 294, 296, 300, 303, 323, 329–31, 333; PostTraumatic Stress Disorder 110, 306 trauma memoir 2, 6; podcast 112 traumatic memory 321 travel writing 192–4, 197, 199, 201–2 Tredinnick, Mark 143 trigger warnings 34, 36 Trump, Donald 31, 43, 49–50, 56 truth 2–3, 7, 16, 23, 25–6, 35, 38–40, 46, 49–50, 53, 63, 92, 97, 102, 105, 124, 127, 129–30, 132, 159, 163, 213–17, 221, 239, 240–1, 243, 256, 262–3, 285–7, 293, 324; Post– 38 truthfulness 183, 285 Turkey 8, 315–20, 322, 325–6, 331 Turkification 315, 318, 322, 325 Turkishness 324–5 Turner, Brock 77, 79, 81, 83–6, 88–9 Turner, Lydia 63 Twain, Mark 7, 192–7, 199–200, 202 Twenty-first century 315

Tarrago, Isabel 287 Tate, Doris 80–1

United Nations 81 Uslu, Mehmet Fatih 326n2

Index  343 Van Wyk, Chris 270, 276–7, 281 victim impact statement 5–6, 9, 77, 79–80, 89n11; VIS 5, 7, 10, 12, 13, 77–82, 84–5, 87–9n2 Victims’ Bill of Rights 80 victory 296, 307 Vidal, Fernando 24 violence 284, 288, 290, 319, 325; domestic 232, 312; gun 29 visual storytelling 157 vulnerability 16, 31, 34, 36, 39, 41, 46, 83, 114, 226, 242, 252, 293 vulnerable subject 8, 253–5, 264 Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing 251, 253, 255 Waites, Kathleen 6, 123 Walsh, David 51, Ward, Jesmyn 34–5, 41 Ward, Russel 301 Watson, Don 7, 192, 199, 202 Watson, Julia 142, 159 We Walk Straight So You Better Get Out the Way 272–3

weird melancholy 146 Western Australia 144, 147–9, 289–90, 301, 309, 334; herbarium 141; University 141 Westfield Dreaming 294 White Australian 198, 294–5 White, Jessica 6, 141, 334 White, Richard 193–5, 197, 199, 202, 300 Whitlock, Gillian 87–8, 149, 269, 303–4, 316–17, 330 Williams, Terry Tempest 142 Winter, Jay 317 Winton, Tim 6, 141, 143–9, 151–2, 154 witness literature 315 Witschge, Tamara 105 Yagoda, Ben 43–7, 195, 199, 202, 239 Yates, Richard 100 youth 45, 165, 169, 215, 270, 276, 329, 330, 332 YouTube 79, 81, 89n13