‘To Unearth the Layers of Forgetting’: Reading Boy, Lost as a Postmemoir

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article reads Kristina Olsson’s Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir (2013, St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.) as a postmemorial text. The memoir centres on the moment, six years before Olsson was born, when a thirteen-month-old baby was abducted from Olsson’s mother’s arms. The article relies on Marianne Hirsch’s (2012, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. ProQuest.) theory of postmemory to examine the way the memoir is motivated both by the confusion Olsson feels about the way her own life was shaped by this hidden, traumatic past and by the responsibility she feels to write towards a sense of justice for her mother. The article dwells on the ethical concerns that arise at the point of tension between the writer’s desire for recovery and the mother’s silences, and it examines the aesthetic strategies Olsson employs to negotiate this tension. The article also draws on Meera Atkinson’s (2017, The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Bloomsbury. ProQuest.) work to discuss the way Olsson situates her family’s trauma within the context of the cultural and social factors that precipitated it. The article argues that Boy, Lost offers a methodology for an ethical postmemorial project through the way it balances Olsson’s story with her mother’s and with the country’s.