Outside the Box: Reading Material Grief Memoir as Grief Archive

Abstract

Personal archives are useful writing fodder, but grief memoirs that incorporate objects (“material grief memoirs”) also act as grief archives. In this essay, I posit that material grief memoirs are imaginative archives, which bring artifacts of loss into conversation. I acknowledge arguments against theoretical archives but ultimately assert the material grief memoir form’s generative potential. I examine three grief memoirs: The Museum of Words (2017) by Georgia Blain, Words for Lucy (2022) by Marion Halligan, and Small (2021) by Claire Lynch, to argue that reading grief memoir as grief archive facilitates deeper discussions on convergences of identity, loss, and materiality.

Keywords:

• Personal archives
• grief
• object-based writing
• materiality

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 Jurecic, “No Protocol for Grief,” 849.

2 Couser, “The Box in the Attic,” 249.

3 Meekings, “Writing through Loss,” 420.

4 Popkin, “Family Memoir and Self-Discovery,” 132.

5 Poletti, Stories of the Self, 54.

6 Fulbrook and Rublack, “In Relation,” 271.

7 Rogge and Salmi, “Memory Boxes,” 152.

8 Ibid., 156.

9 Poletti, Stories of the Self, 8.

10 Bastian, “Moving the Margins…,” 3.

11 Ibid., 8.

12 Ibid., 11.

13 Ibid., 3.

14 Ibid., 13.

15 Ibid., 3–4.

16 Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, 22.

17 Ibid., 107.

18 Bastian, “Moving the Margins…,” 17.

19 Goodwyn, Healing Symbols…, n.p.

20 Bastian, “Moving the Margins…,” 14.

21 Prodromou, Navigating Loss…, 44.

22 Gibson, Objects of the Dead, n.p.

23 Poletti, Stories of the Self, 78.

24 Ashton, “Shaping the Body of Grief,” 26.

25 Dubuc, “Museum and University Mutations,” 504.

26 Ibid., 502.

27 Blain, The Museum of Words, 13.

28 Ibid., 119–120.

29 Gibson, Objects of the Dead, n.p.

30 Blain, The Museum of Words, 74.

31 Eakin, “Breaking Rules,” 123.

32 Blain, The Museum of Words, 149.

33 Ibid.

34 Turkle, “What Makes an Object Evocative?,” 321.

35 Douglas et al., “Treat Them with the Reverence…,” 87.

36 Gibson Objects of the Dead, n.p.

37 Martin, “Designing Personal Grief Rituals,” 89; Goldstein et al., “Transitional Objects of Grief,” 2.

38 Snauwaert, “Grief Memoirs and the Reordering of Life,” 869.

39 Blain, The Museum of Words, 27.

40 Ibid., 43.

41 Ibid., 157.

42 Halligan, Words for Lucy, 3.

43 Jurecic, “No Protocol for Grief,” 849.

44 Rogge and Salmi, “Memory Boxes,” 12.

45 Halligan, Words for Lucy, 20–21.

46 Ibid., 153.

47 See my essay “Show and Tell: The Risks and Rewards of Personal Object-Based Learning” for a more detailed discussion about personal object-based learning.

48 Smith and Watson, “The Afterlives of Those Who Write Themselves,” 10.

49 Halligan, Words for Lucy, 52.

50 Ibid., 56.

51 Ibid., 59.

52 Ibid., 32.

53 Gibson, Objects of the Dead, n.p.

54 Although this section was the inspiration for my comparison between this memoir and the inventory form, Words for Lucy engages the inventory form in its entirety, not only within this specific section.

55 Halligan, Words for Lucy, 77.

56 Ibid., 82.

57 Ibid., 81.

58 Ibid., 78.

59 Lynch, Small, 25.

60 Douglas and Mills, “From the Sidelines…,” 272.

61 Ibid., 266.

62 Jennifer Douglas’s testimony here on the coldness of medical documents in the wake of her daughter’s death is also relevant. As an archivist, Douglas autoethnographically explores the inadequacies of medical records. She orders copies of records and is disappointed when they arrive. She writes of “pain and anxiety” when “realizing that the coroner was describing parts of my daughter’s body that I did not ever get to see myself,” continuing, “I wondered, as I read the coroner’s assessment of her eyes as ‘normal’, what color they were.” Douglas and Mills, “From the Sidelines…,” 267. Douglas reflects, “As a trained records professional, I can rationalize the reasons why the file I received in the mail is inadequate to my needs as a bereaved parent. As a bereaved parent, however, I want to rail at the system that produced this cold, alienating and terribly disappointing file.” Douglas and Mills, “From the Sidelines…,” 267. Douglas works against these kinds of records in her research and Lynch works against them in Small by offering closer looks at the artifacts (both medical and not) associated with small babies and pregnancy loss.

63 Lynch, Small, 11.

64 Ibid., 92.

65 Ibid., 76.

66 Ibid., 78.

67 Ibid., 105.

68 Ibid., 133.

69 Ibid., 137.

70 Ibid., 164.

71 Ibid., 152.

72 Douglas et al., “Treat Them with the Reverence…,” 87.

73 Hoskins, “7/7 and Connective Memory,” 7.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marina Deller

Dr Marina Deller is a writer and researcher at Flinders University, South Australia. Their research concerns grief and trauma life narratives and material storytelling. They write about identity, bodies, grief, and public/private spheres. Marina also teaches Creative Writing and English Literature and is affiliated with the Flinders Life Narrative Lab.