‘That Weeping Constellation’: Navigating Loss in ‘Memoirs of Textured Recovery’

Abstract

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion laments the absence of any significant body of literature that will help her through her grief. I propose that the grief memoir fills this gap left by professional literature of bereavement and itself contributes to a community of mourners missing from contemporary grief practices as identified by Sandra Gilbert and Darian Leader. This genre, new to literary analysis, provides a fertile ground for the discussion of recent literary and psychoanalytic analyses of mourning that have resisted the neat split Freud draws between normal and pathological grief. My chosen texts deliberately complicate ‘packaged and frozen’ (Ellmann qtd. in Payne, Horn and Relf 78) notions of recovery while honouring what Jenny Diski calls the ‘texture of experience.’ As such, I am essentially identifying a sub-genre of the grief memoir, which I call ‘memoirs of textured recovery.’ What sets them apart is the performance of complex ‘recovered’ selves that show how ‘recovery,’ ambiguous and shifting in nature, calls for more complicated theories of mourning able to accommodate an understanding of grief not in terms of Freud's absolute recovery nor Tennyson's ‘loss forever new’ (Laura Tanner), but rather a space located somewhere in between.