Ambiguous Loss in Grief Memoirs: Meaning Making in Auster and Giralt Torrente Patriographies

Abstract

This article considers grief memoirs as a medium to create meaning amid the ambiguous loss that occurs when someone close is gone without any apparent reason. This experience may be resolved through a life narrative that holds and accepts all the different versions of that complex relationship; the presence/absence ambiguity of the person lost may be clarified by creating a narrative that encompasses all possible explorations. The article approaches Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (1982) and Marcos Giralt Torrente’s Tiempo de vida (2010) as “patriographies”—grief memoirs that achieve a meaning-making process through the different strategies they propose to deal with their fathers’ loss.

Keywords:

• Ambiguous loss
• grief memoir
• meaning making
• patriography

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Henke, Shattered Subjects, xi.

2 Savitri et al., “Expressive Writing,” 2–3.

3 Pennebaker and Smith, Opening Up by Writing It Down.

4 Baikie and Wilhelm, “Emotional and Physical Health,” 341.

5 Neimeyer, Klass, and Dennis, “A Social Constructionist Account of Grief,” 489.

6 Den Elzen, “Therapeutic Writing through the Lens of the Grief Memoir”, 218.

7 The concept of “ambiguous loss” was coined by Pauline Boss in her classical study Ambiguous Loss. Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief (1999) and developed to her last work The Myth of Closure. Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change (2021).

8 Couser, The Work of Life Writing, 94.

9 Benjamin, Like Subjects; Mitchell, Conceptos relacionales.

10 Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories, 69.

11 Porter, Bureau of Missing Persons, 11.

12 Worden, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy, 57–75.

13 Gottschalk et al., Guide to the Investigation, 42–56.

14 Boss, “Ambiguous Loss Theory,” 105.

15 Boss, Loss, Trauma, and Resilience, 120.

16 Boss, “Ambiguous Loss Theory,” 106.

17 Boss, “Ambiguous Loss Theory,” 107.

18 Boss, “Ambiguous Loss Theory,” 106–107.

19 Giralt Torrente, Tiempo de vida, 11.

20 Worden, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy, 69.

21 Giralt Torrente, Tiempo de vida, 39.

22 Giralt Torrente, Tiempo de vida, 26.

23 Giralt Torrente, Tiempo de vida, 9.

24 Boss, “Ambiguous Loss Theory,” 11.

25 Giralt Torrente, Tiempo de vida, 68.

26 Boss, “Ambiguous Loss Theory,” 106.

27 Giralt Torrente, Tiempo de vida, 95.

28 Giralt Torrente, Tiempo de vida, 96.

29 Auster, The Invention of Solitude, 27.

30 Auster, The Invention of Solitude, 59.

31 Auster, Winter Journal, 28.

32 Auster, Winter Journal, 168.

33 Hutchinsson, Conversations with Paul Auster, 42.

34 Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 72–73.

35 Auster, The Invention of Solitude, 21.

36 Auster, The Invention of Solitude, 49.

37 Auster, The Invention of Solitude, 28.

38 Hutchinsson, Conversations with Paul Auster, 7.

39 Hutchinsson, Conversations with Paul Auster, 25.

40 Hutchinsson, Conversations with Paul Auster, 24.

41 Auster, Winter Journal, 165.

42 Auster, The Invention of Solitude, 28.

43 Auster, The Invention of Solitude, 53–54.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sandra Pinasco

Head of Research Development at Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya—Lima, Peru. MB in Psychoanalytic Theory, currently pursuing her doctorate in Modern Languages: research in linguistics, literature, culture and translation in Universidad de Alcalá, in Spain. Her area of research is grief memoirs and the possibility of achieving meaning through personal writing, and the study of relational lives and the conformation of the self. Her last published works are Lo que no tiene nombre. An approach to two grief memoirs and Night, death and love in Pizarnik and Södergran poetics. She’s a member of the International Auto|Biography Association and has presented papers at many international conferences on the topic.