Navigating Loss in Women’s Contemporary Memoir

Amy-Katerini Prodromou’s Navigating Loss in Women’s Contemporary Memoir focuses on grief memoirs, specifically a subgenre that she calls “memoirs of textured recovery” (4). Prodromou identifies a tendency in certain women’s grief memoirs published from the 1990s to the present to “resist an explicit healing agenda” (7). Her theory of recovery as “textured,” borrowed from Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica , complicates formulaic narratives of healing. Through close readings of memoirs by Lucy Grealey, Mary Gordon, Jenny Diski, Inga Clendinnen, Kim Mahood, Judith Barrington, and Hilary Mantel, Prodromou reveals how the experience of grief exceeds the prescriptive narratives of overcoming generated in popular psychology: The study in these women’s memoirs, recovery appears ambiguous, elusive, and recursive. The memoirists’ attempts to use writing for recuperation are vexed because the work of remembering and composing lost lives raises disquieting epistemological questions about identity, relationality, and memory. Prodromou emphasizes that grieving people may feel as if no one else is acknowledging death in an honest way, and she connects this to the way that modern industrial societies deny death. Thus, the study regards memoirs of textured recovery, in their explorations of grief as uncharted and deeply unsettling to the self, as performing a critical cultural function. Certainly, the ambiguities that Prodromou observes may be found in earlier texts, but she persuasively frames these recent memoirs as an intervention in contemporary psychological theories that posit mourning as an incorporation of loss rather than a recovery from it and as a learning process without a definite endpoint

Aesthetics · Art · Grief · Identity (music · Literature · Memoir · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Sociology · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Gender Studies · History

• Remembering Forgetting

  Kathleen Venema•a/b Auto/Biography Studies•2018

  Add to list