Salvadora Medina Onrubia’s Mil claveles colorados (2019 [written late 1960s]) narrates her experience of twentieth-century Argentine anarchism, while Patrícia Galvão’s Autobiografia precoce (2005 [written 1940]), recounts her involvement in twentieth-century Brazilian Communism. This article seeks to redress the genre- and gender-based limitations of reading both texts strictly as autobiography, instead situating them within the broader field of life writing. It argues that life writing functions as a survival tactic through which both authors articulate trauma, employing graphic testimony (Galvão) and humour (Onrubia). In doing so, they exploit hybrid, relational and non-canonical modes of self-writing that autobiography alone cannot account for.

ABSTRACT There is a growing body of interdisciplinary literature on the cultural representation of ageing and its impact on older women’s lived experiences; however, there is a lack of research exploring how older women engage in restorying these representations through creative life writing. In doing so, this article contributes to life-writing studies, age studies, and social gerontology. It draws on focus group discussions, follow-up interviews, and creative writing outputs generated during a project conducted in collaboration with the Irish NGO Age and Opportunity, involving seven women aged between 50 and 80. It discusses the thematic findings, interpreted with reference to literature on ageing, gender, and life writing. The analysis identifies four primary themes: age as a construct; visibility, invisibility, and representation; agency, freedom, and self-authorship; and body, sexuality, and the Irish context. It highlights how non-traditional forms of life writing, such as letters, short reflections, and poems, are particularly well suited to challenging dominant narratives of ageing as decline, and demonstrates the transformative potential of restorying as both research method and lived practice. The findings also point to the significance of specifically Irish cultural and historical legacies as a force in older women's experiences of ageing.

This study examines the life narratives of Kamala Das and A. Revathi, through a psychosocial lens, to understand how life-writing serves as a mechanism for psychosexual well-being and identity affirmation in stigmatized scenarios. Employing queer theory, intersectionality, and narrative identity frameworks, this research analyzes how both authors negotiate the complex interplay of biological sex, psychological desire, and sociocultural constraints within the Indian context. Kamala Das’s candid exploration of female sexuality and extramarital desire challenged patriarchal norms of the 1970s, while Revathi’s transgender narrative confronts the marginalization of Hijra identity in contemporary India. Through a close textual analysis, this article demonstrates that life writings, especially autobiographies function as both testimony and a reclamation of agency over one’s psychosexual narrative in societies that condemn non-normative sexualities. The comparative analysis reveals how both authors navigate shame, stigma, and social ostracism, while constructing resilient sexual identities through the narratives of self-fashioning. This research contributes to understanding autobiography as a literary discourse for psychosexual subjectivities, significantly for marginalized voices excluded from homogenized frameworks. The findings underscore the necessity of integrating life narratives into consideration to develop culturally sensitive, biopsychosocial approaches in diverse social milieus.

ABSTRACT Hester Thrale Piozzi’s annotated copies of Anecdotes (1786), Letters (1788), and other Johnsoniana, prepared in the nineteenth century for her literary executor, Sir James Fellowes, constitute a distinctive form of life writing. These previously unexamined marginalia offer a recursive mode of life writing in which Piozzi defends her contested biographical authority and reframes her relationship with Samuel Johnson to assert her own literary-intellectual identity. Rather than simply correcting or supplementing earlier biographies of Johnson, her annotations reconceive biography as an open-ended, evolving project shaped by memory, sociability, and continued interpretation. This essay situates Piozzi’s annotated books within a late-Georgian culture of readerly self-fashioning and shifting biographical norms, which increasingly valued subjectivity and personal experience. Her marginalia resist biographical closure and challenge dominant, patriarchal models of authority, offering instead an experimental, dialogic vision of life writing.

ABSTRACT This study is grounded in the existential framework of Viktor Frankl, particularly his theory emphasizing the pursuit of meaning in life as a fundamental human drive, even in the face of adversity and catastrophic circumstances. The research examines the relationship between psychological coping mechanisms—specifically regarding caring for others: problem-focused coping, emotion-focused coping, and mindfulness—and their role in fostering a sense of meaning in life. The research is based on primary sources, including autobiographies, memoirs, personal letters, testimonies, and archival documents. These materials are drawn from the life writings of fourteen educators, spanning three key periods: the Holocaust, the postwar transition and immigration to Israel, and the first decade after Israel’s establishment (1948 to mid-1960s). The findings indicate that over the course of these three time periods, problem solving was the primary strategy for aiding others, with less reliance on emotion-focused strategies. Mindfulness, especially in the context of helping others, was mostly reported during the Holocaust. As hypothesized, these coping strategies were linked to finding meaning in life. We identified two key conclusions. Professionally, the study revealed that educators employed coping mechanisms to aid others, going beyond simple empathy. Regarding the nature of the events during and after the Holocaust, these coping strategies played a crucial role in enabling individuals to find meaning in their lived experiences.

ABSTRACT This article examines Indian autobiographical writings by women and transwomen as counter-narratives to dominant maternal ideologies. It situates these life writings as theoretical archives that not only document personal experiences but also foreground the socio-economic and cultural contingencies that shape maternal lives, often overlooked in mainstream feminist frameworks. Challenging the myth of the ideal, self-sacrificing mother, these texts highlight the tensions between lived maternal experiences and normative expectations shaped by patriarchy, caste, class, and gender. Employing feminist literary criticism and autobiography theory, the study investigates how self-writing becomes a mode of resistance and redefinition. Through close, comparative readings of 19th-century and contemporary women’s autobiographies by Rassundari Devi, Haimabati Sen, Lakshmibai Tilak, Nalini Jameela, A. Revathi, and Prabha Khaitan, it argues that maternal identity is variously negotiated, refused, or reimagined across time. These narratives expand the possibilities of maternal subjectivity, enabling women and gender-diverse authors to reclaim agency beyond conventional motherhood.

ABSTRACT Postpartum psychosis (PP) is a psychiatric emergency developing shortly after childbirth. Its symptoms oscillate between insomnia, mania, delusions, and audiovisual hallucinations. Among other intrusive cognitions, PP can produce distressing beliefs that one’s baby has died, or that the person experiencing PP is dead themselves. Despite a low risk of infanticide, owing to certain historical thought-worlds, PP retains a stigmatising association with death. Its very nature challenges autobiographical frameworks of articulation, so life writing about PP spans a wide gamut—from less formalised online narratives like Naomi Knoles’s, to Catherine Cho’s memoir Inferno (2020), and Elizabeth Sankey’s documentary Witches (2024). These texts speak to both the limitations and indispensability of life writing which brings birth/birthing into contact with death across three different registers—actual, delusional, and metaphorical—in the context of maternal mental health. For Alice Flaherty, writing illuminated the shadowy recesses between birth and death, body and thought after her twin sons died at birth, creating a textual ‘charnel house’ to their memory (2015). This essay reaches for the edges of life in PP autobiography to curate the beginnings of a ‘charnel house’ to similar strands in this life writing, which may otherwise elude critical literary attention.

An autobiography focuses on individual life while being firmly located in social experiences. The socio-cultural realities of the time aptly find an expression in the autobiographies written by women. Based on memory, experience and identity, women narrators reproduce the cultural modes of self-narration. Autobiographies play a significant role in bringing out cultural criticism and social change; a change in which women find their individual identity. The feminine sensibility arising due to the depiction of these memories is remarkable, presenting Indian ethos, values, and cultural background. Rapid developments in the fields of science, technology, economics and urbanization have affected modern societies immensely, both positively and negatively. Portrayal of Indian tradition, heritage, conventions, customs and festivals form an integral part of the two autobiographies written by Nayantara Sahgal: Prison and Chocolate Cake and From Fear Set Free. This depiction becomes a symbol through which the reader comes to know about her pride in the Indian ethos and respect for Indian culture. The present paper tries to prob how Sahgal’s two remarkable autobiographies invoke posterities to feel dignity and delight in age old Indian ethos and how Sahgal commemorates Indian heritage.

Dominant discourses have often projected disability as a state of corporeal lack or a sentimental spectacle in desperate need of cure or at least, concealment. It is actually founded on certain social dichotomies which try to negate the scope of any enigmatic diversion of the body. The subcontinent’s literary and imaginative archive had frequently framed physical deformities as easy metaphors to exhibit moral frailty, karmic fate or romanticized inspiration, rather than as a lived reality and a political identity. However, recent developments in the field of life writings have paved broader avenues for disabled Indians to portray their unique selfhoods along with sustained attention on issues of infrastructural barriers, attitudinal biases and legal rights. This paper will critically examine two such significant contemporary productions, namely One Little Finger (2011) by Malini Chib and The Other Senses (2012) by Preeti Monga. The authors not only diversify the paradigms of modern, neoliberal lives but also place disability in cultural alignment with other marginalized identities on analogous grounds of vulnerability and dependency- the most crucial being with femininity. They neither euphemistically deny the material pain of disabled people, nor resort to the overly deterministic techniques to represent them as heroic super-crips. This paper will attempt to place the prevalent models of disability studies within the Indian cultural context and assess how the aforesaid narratives navigate through the connected facets between gender and disability, promoting inclusivity and offering revaluation without collapsing into policy pamphlets.

Abstract This article examines the systemic and attitudinal barriers faced by students with dyslexia and their caregivers in the formal Indian education system through a textual analysis of two disability life writings: Homeless: Growing Up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India by K. Vaishali and This Kind of Child: The ‘Disability’ Story by K. Srilata. The Indian education system is primarily designed for a homogeneous group of students, often excluding those with specific learning disabilities (SLD) like dyslexia. Both curriculum and assessment practices frequently lack inclusivity, failing to accommodate the diverse cognitive abilities of different students. As a result, students with disabilities often struggle to meet standard performance expectations, which can significantly affect their well‐being. This struggle extends to their caregivers, who navigate these challenges alongside them. Using a thematic approach, the study explores key issues, such as societal attitudes, systemic exclusionary practices, testing and assessment issues, and students' and caregivers' emotional and functional resilience. The article identifies structural and attitudinal barriers encountered by students and their caregivers and discusses the actionable recommendations for inclusivity proposed in the texts. This article offers insight into the effect of educational discrimination on students and caregivers and evaluates students' learning experiences in different settings. Ultimately, this analysis contributes to the existing discourse on disability and education by emphasising the role of personal narratives in shaping more humanised and equitable policy discussions.

This special issue proceeds from the premise that, for a certain kind of dedicated television viewer, the scene of encounter with the medium’s domestic sitcoms, dramas, and dramedies is one in which four “houses” interact complexly and multivalently: the actual house in which the viewer lives and watches television; the idea, fantasy, or self-mythologizing of one’s actual house; the magnetically attractive house featured prominently onscreen in a given series, to which one fastens with curiosity and even devotion; and the sense—whether based on knowledge of location shooting or conjecturally hypothesized—of how that television house exists beyond the screen, emplaced in the “real world.” Examining a range of case studies, the contributors to the issue work with, against, and beyond this conceptual premise as they develop a collective sense of how television houses mean and why they matter.

Monica Soeting co-founded the European Journal of Life Writing, and the European section of the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA). As a life writing scholar, her research explores the construction of individual, cultural and political identities through life writing. She was journal manager of the European Journal of Life Writing from 2011 to 2019, and before that she worked as an editor on the Dutch Biografie Bulletin, a journal of biography studies. Monica has also written the biography of Dutch author Cissy van Marxveldt and is currently working on a biography of queen Emma, who was queen regent of the Netherlands from 1890 to 1898. She co-edited, together with Marijke Huisman, Anneke Ribberink, and Alfred Hornung, the seminal edited volume Life Writing Matters in Europe.

ABSTRACT This article investigates transmedial autobiographical writing practices by women ill with metastatic cancer. Their multi-platformed and mediated life writing normalises the writing about and commercialising of grief and dying. I draw examples from two popular cancer life writers: Canadian Nalie Agustin and British Dame Deborah James, who inscribed their lives and selves on digital platforms until death. I look for their performances and omissions of what I have named the grief of the dying; a particular form of grieving that impacts those living with incurable illness and a heightened sense of death’s nearness. Examining the limits and possibilities that transmedial life writing affords, I trace the transmutations of hope and healing in the autobiographical construction of metastatic cancer. Inscriptions of selves/lives take place in a transmedial network and are informed by the cultural landscapes of intersecting differences. I propose that a highly public life writing practice addressing illness and dying re-inscribes norms of acceptable ill selves and lives, while at the same time exposing illness cultures to critical examination. For the dying life writers, what I describe may ultimately be a hindrance – an ambivalent space when it comes to grieving.

One result of early work on The Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, contracted by Oxford University Press in 2023, this article considers the role of large-scale critical editions in modern scholarship in both general and more focused ways. What contextual and critical drivers are involved when a decision is made to publish a Complete Works and what are the decisions facing editorial teams about how best to structure and approach the task? With a particular focus on Ford’s letters the article also addresses life writing as key to conception and development of his Complete Works. It demonstrates the learnings from attending to Ford’s letters as material objects and biographical markers, both of life events and his distinct epistolary nature, along with their contribution to Ford scholarship and that of twentieth-century literary studies.

This article examines the life writing of Elena Poniatowska from a sociocritical perspective, with particular focus on the chronicles compiled in Fuerte es el silencio (1980) and the novel El amante polaco (2019, 2021). While these works appear to exhibit thematic discontinuity and ideological divergence, given that the social commitment embedded in the chronicles seems to contrast sharply with the homage paid to the last king of Poland in the author’s most recent novel, ostensibly aligned with the tradition of canonical biography—both ultimately articulate “politics of recognizability” (Butler, 2009) and a reconfiguration of the “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière, 2010). The analysed life-writing enables a critical interrogation of hierarchies and social norms as well as transformation of the hegemonic discursive order (Cros, 2002; Malcuzynski, 2006, 2009), while also probing the boundaries and possibilities of testimonial and auto/biographical literature (Anderson, 2011; Arfuch, 2002, 2018).

Women’s disability autobiographies occupy unique position within resistance literature, challenging the restrictive paradigms of gender and ability, addressing the double marginalization faced by women who are disabled. This article examines women's disability autobiographies as potent sites of counter-discourse that challenge intersecting oppressions of ableism and patriarchy. The study aims to analyse texts by Malini Chib, Rebekah Taussig, and Shivani Gupta through an intersectional feminist disability studies framework. The analysis reveals how these authors try to deconstruct normative ideals of femininity and how they reclaim agency through their narratives. The study argues that these life writings are not merely personal testimonials but are acts of political resistance that redefine concepts of normalcy, forge collective identity, and contribute significantly to feminist and disability scholarship.

Abstract This article examines the autobiographical writings of Sarah Bernhardt and Fatima Rushdi as strategic acts of self-fashioning that articulate transnational modes of fin-de-siècle New Womanhood. Through a comparative analysis of Bernhardt’s Ma Double Vie and Rushdi’s memoirs, particularly Fatima Rushdi bayn al-Hubb wal-Fann, the study explores how theatrical women performers employed life writing to craft public identities that challenged prevailing gender norms. Drawing on feminist theory, autobiography studies, and performance theory, the article argues that both figures used narrative self-construction to assert artistic agency and resist patriarchal constraints. Bernhardt’s flamboyant cosmopolitanism contrasts with Rushdi’s grounded nationalism, yet both converge in their symbolic use of cross-gender theatrical roles – Hamlet and Napoleon II – as vehicles of gender transgression. Positioned within the broader framework of celebrity culture and transnational feminism, their autobiographical narratives highlight how local and global discourses of modernity, resistance, and cultural reform intersect in women’s self-representations. By examining their life writings as performative acts, the article redefines autobiography not merely as personal recollection, but as a political medium for constructing feminist selves across borders. Ultimately, the study contributes to rethinking the New Woman archetype beyond Eurocentric paradigms, emphasizing how autobiographical performance enabled women like Bernhardt and Rushdi to renegotiate womanhood on their own terms.

ABSTRACT With eighty years having passed since the atomic bombings, one pressing issue in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is how the survivors’ lived memories can be transferred to younger generations, as well as how to raise awareness so that the atomic tragedy will never be repeated. This study focuses on the Hiroshima body mapping project, where youth and survivors co-created the survivors’ body maps to transfer their memories. Body mapping involves depicting life details in words and images around a life-sized body outline. The project aimed to build cross-generational rapport and facilitate memory transference, helping youth become future peacebuilders. This study analyses the representation of life stories and memories of two body maps, illustrating the differences in survivors’ experiences and the mapping process. The analysis indicates that the cross-generational collaborative body mapping activity indirectly represents trauma embedded in the survivor’s life map while engaging younger generations to build rapport with the survivors and relate to their lifeworld. The Hiroshima body mapping project offers a unique approach to transferring the memories of atomic bomb survivors and fostering a commitment amongst youth to a nuclear-weapon-free future.

Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing. By Ina Linge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2023. 268 pages. $70.00 hardcover, $24.95 paperback, open access eBook. Laws and medicine have shaped non-normative gender and sexuality in criminal and pathological ways, so the

In this interview, I discuss, with Argentine writer-director Nicolás Teté, his latest film What We Wrote Together (2024). Centred on the experiences of a young couple (Ezequiel Esteban Martinez and Santiago Magariños), the film follows their transition from the city to the country: it examines how Juan (Martinez) juggles between writing and promoting his (autobiographical) fiction, while his partner Mariano (Magariños) shifts careers from that of a graphic designer to those of a garden centre’s proprietor and a future potter. Teté is the producer, director, and writer of the fictional films Last Family Holidays (2013), Onyx (2015), and A Skeleton in the Closet (2020); and he is the co-director of the documentary Shineless (2018). These films have appeared in festivals including BAFICI, Mar del Plata, Punta del Este, San Diego Latino, and San Pablo Latino. Teté is also the author of the short story collections Nada nos puede pasar (2021) and Aplausos (2025). This interview advances scholarship by looking at a film all about the life of writing, by exploring Teté’s own meditations on writing today via his imaginative project, and by lending an international perspective to the creative process.