Autobiography

Given the culture of confession that infuses contemporary life in the United States, it may not come as a surprise that trauma memoirs have become remarkably popular with both autobiographers and audiences alike. Trauma memoirs often narrate state-sponsored and human rights violations, such as Elie Wiesel's Night (1960) and Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (2000), but they also often narrate acts of individual violence, such as rape, domestic violence, and incest, such as Mary Karr's The Liar's Club (1995) and Michael Ryan's Secret Life (1995). Autobiographies that attempt to narrate traumatic experiences, such as child abuse, rape, and war, are caught within a paradox: trauma is often understood to be defined by a radical unrepresentability, since it is that which shatters the self and makes language and narrative impossible. In this context, narrative, argues Arthur W. Frank in The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (1995), is an ethical as well as an aesthetic imperative, testifying to the narrator's continuing presence in the world in spite of injury, illness, and even imminent death. Indeed contemporary scholars of trauma autobiographies have become increasingly interested in the process and the politics of articulating pain and injury through life narrative. For example, Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997), Annette Kuhn's Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (1995), and Nancy Miller and Jason Tougaw's collection Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community (2002), explore the difficulty of representing trauma. Significantly Leigh Gilmore's The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony argues that trauma is a key site at which to deconstruct the generic boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, the imagined and the real. Many authors of trauma narratives, such as Mikal Gilmore, Dorothy Allison, and Jamaica Kincaid, strategically choose to turn away from the autobiographical label and instead to embrace fiction as a genre that can achieve the project of self-representation without putting the author in the position of being scrutinized and judged by readers and critics. As these theorists suggest, turning one's life into a story is laden with difficult representational and political choices concerning which stories to tell, which culturally available narratives to draw upon, and which generic categories to affix to the final product.