Ivan Doig's “Geography of Risk” and Legacies of Selfhood in Contemporary White Western Men's Memoir

Abstract

Focusing on his second memoir, Heart Earth (1993), and selected autobiographically-based writing by his White male contemporaries, this chapter argues that Western American writer Ivan Doig contributes to a contemporary vision of masculinity defined by emotional risk-taking and foregrounded intimacy. Doig’s feminist constructions of masculinity anticipate later critiques of the toxic versions of masculinity and white supremacy that were dominant in the writing of his peers. Implicitly echoing Western historian and writer Wallace Stegner’s famous phrase, “geography of hope,” Doig uses the term “geography of risk” to describe the challenges inherent in remembering his mother’s life and crediting her as the origin of his dedication to writing. “Geography of risk” ideally captures the daring of recreating the past in memoir, peering into that past, and recognizing there the weight and duration of one’s losses.