Introduction: Disability and Life Writing

Abstract

The current cultural moment in the U. S. and the U. K. is particularly amenable to life writing. Indeed, it has been widely acknowledged by critics, reviewers, and writers that the last few decades in these two countries have witnessed a memoir boom. Granted, as Ben Yagoda has demonstrated in his recent book, Memoir: A History (2009), this is by no means the first memoir boom. But it is probably accurate to say that in the last two decades or so memoirs have been written, published (or self-published), reviewed, consumed, adapted into film, celebrated (and disparaged) as never before in literary history. I n April 2002, in a Washington Monthly review-essay called Almost Famous: The Rise of the 'Nobody Memoir,' Lorraine Adams distinguished between what she dubbed the somebody memoir and the nobody memoir. What determines the classification of a given narrative is simply whether its author was known before its publication or became known only through its publication. Thus, Hillary Clinton's Living History is a somebody memoir, while Lucy G realy's Autobiography of a Face is a nobody memoir. Th e last several decades have seen the spectacular rise of the nobody mem- oir. Some, like Angela's Ashes, Girl, Interrupted, and Eat, Pray, Love have been so successful as to have been made into feature films. Like the memoir boom, nobody memoirs are not unprecedented; some, like Frank Gilbreth's Cheaper by the Dozen (1948) and Jean Kerr's Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957), were very popular in the U. S. after WWII. But in the past, nobody memoirs tended to be upbeat narratives of life in intact families. This is no longer the case. Indeed, based on a sample of more than two hundred recent nobody memoirs, Lorraine Adams claimed that almost all fall into one of three types: The largest by far is the childhood memoir—incestuous, abusive, alcoholic, impov- erished, minority, normal, and the occasional privileged. The second largest type is the memoir of physical catastrophe—violence, quadriplegia, amputation, disease, death. The third is mental catastrophe—madness, addiction, alcoholism, anorexia, brain damage. (par. 8)