The Narrative Messiness of Chronic Illness
Memoirs from Paul Kalanithi, Lucy Grealy, Jean-Dominique Bauby, and Porochista Khakpour teach us about turning the story of an ailing body into a work of art.
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Memoirs from Paul Kalanithi, Lucy Grealy, Jean-Dominique Bauby, and Porochista Khakpour teach us about turning the story of an ailing body into a work of art.
Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson, and Marie NDiaye destabilize categories like genre and color as a way of moving forward with exploring the disturbances found within personhood.
If young ladies should be seen and not heard, that goes double for young ladies with disabilities. When your body declares itself Other, your personhood fades behind it. So mine did, until I discovered disability poetics.
How to control the body is a constant theme in Washuta’s work.
Today’s nonfiction writers have at hand a number of forms other than the essay and the memoir. There’s the flash essay, of course, and literary journalism. Then there’s the catch-all form of nonfiction known as the lyric essay. So, what do they all mean?
In a sense, madness (to use an archaic but attractive term) is a problem of narrative. To put it plainly: mental illness makes it difficult to know just what the heck is going on, or to what extent one’s perceptions of events can be trusted.
One could argue that the work of Diane Schoemperlen is highly unusual even beyond its incredible strength: a more lyric prose managing publication through larger and more mainstream Canadian publishers. Given her work, I was curious to engage with her memoir, This Is Not My Life.
Catechism: A Love Story is not a romantic tale. It’s the story of the bride who ran away and the future bride who helped her. Author Julie Marie Wade, Lambda Literary Award winner for her memoir Without: Poems, doesn’t romanticize about finding love in this book-length lyric essay.
Elisabeth Jaquette is a prolific writer and translator of Arabic. Her translations have appeared in the Guardian, Asymptote, multiple anthologies, and other places. She holds an MA from Columbia University and was a CASA Fellow at the American University of Cairo.
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