Kneading You: Performative Meta-Auto/Biography in Perfect Pie

Abstract

In the last two decades, it has become an accepted principle in psychology that the sense of self depends on autobiography. Without the ability to organize experience through narration, arguably one cannot have a coherent self. If one’s self is indeed dependent on autobiography, then that same narratively constituted fictive self is especially susceptible to erosion and erasure through memory loss and narrative disability. In Judith Thompson’s Perfect Pie, Patsy is such a character, suffering from trauma-related amnesia that inhibits the realization of a full extended self. Although on the one hand, Patsy’s status as a fictive character leaves her vulnerable to the power of words to undermine the stability of a narratively generated self, on the other hand, her ontological situation as a character born in words also grants her significant power to wield that same performative power to write her self. This article will examine the dialogic self-authoring strategy that Patsy adopts to generate multi-vocal autobiography, weaving thematically associated stories across disparate nested fictional worlds. Ultimately, Patsy’s potential cure lies not in the revelation of an objectively-verifiable historical truth but rather in the pie-making, theatre-making, self-making process of continued reiterative performance.