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

Introduction

Grief memoir is an extremely popular genre and one of the most visible and accessible forms of grief narrative. As Ann Jurecic explains, we may turn to grief memoirs to “contemplate the events that give life meaning and to create new possibilities of our own.”¹ While we might house grief memoirs on our bookshelves, there’s another way we chronicle and explore grief: personal archives, collections of “stuff”—objects and documents we keep—that tell our stories of loss. Personal archives are something that many people create and curate, with the objects and documents inside acting as containers of memory and conduits of energy. Memoirists thus mine such archives for information while writing. Various scholars have noted the investigative nature of this methodology: Thomas Couser describes “leafing through old documents like a sleuth,”² Sam Meekings calls it “detective work,”³ and Jeremy Popkin compares memoirists to archaeologists searching through “a midden of hoarded personal detritus.”⁴ It isn’t only the process of scouring archives while writing; once memoirs are complete (and really, even when they’re in progress) they become a sort of archive, one which helps collate, commemorate, and investigate the experience of loss.

Anna Poletti notes “the act of collecting” items into a box “brings them into a relation.”⁵ Collating objects and documents within the genre of grief memoir create new meanings and associations for the objects as well as narrating the writer’s story of loss. I use the term “material grief memoirs” to refer to such memoirs where the narrative structure is built around and through objects or documents. This includes memoirs that use objects as the driving force of the narrative through in-depth prose descriptions, scans, and images, and which grapple with themes of grief and loss. Despite the occasionally grim subject matter of these memoirs—death, grief, estrangement, displacement, trauma—material grief memoirs can be playful, inventive, and imaginative. In this essay, I argue that material grief memoirs not only draw from or resemble personal archives but act as archives of grief. In reading these texts as curated collections we can consider the ways memoirists communicate the relationship between materiality and loss, and represent the complex, layered, individual nature of mourning through narrative form and structure.

I open this discussion on the much-argued concept of “theoretical archives” and consider why some traditionalist archivists are unhappy at the prospect of “alternative” archives. I then argue the strength of alternative archives through three case studies of imaginative archives in the form of grief memoir: The Museum of Words (2017) by Georgia Blain as “museum,” Words for Lucy (2022) by Marion Halligan as “inventory,” and Small: on motherhoods (2021) by Claire Lynch as “alternative medical record.” To read these material grief memoirs as archives I consider the particular items within, and their relationships to each other. I ask, when grief memoirists bring artifacts together, what new readings of these artifacts can be made? What are the memoirists’ intentions for the practice of collating objects? In my consideration of these points, I also consider ideas of truth, memory, identity, and continued conversations with lost loved ones.

Mary Fulbrook and Ulinka Rublack state that we can read life narrative in new ways to “see as far as possible how people worked their way through dimensions of norms and relationships, through conflicting demands, ambivalent fears and other emotions.”⁶ My intention with this research is therefore to see how grief memoirists use materiality and the archival form to interrogate the life and identity-altering experience of loss. I aim to think beyond, and outside, of the box, while also remembering the original form of the box and what it means to hold artifacts of grief together in one space.

Cliché or Collaborative? In Defense of the Alternative Archive

In the book Memory Boxes, several scholars argue for a broader definition of memory boxes and archives, positing that historical objects with the potential to become “culturally shared” and “public” can act as archives.⁷ They therefore assert that books themselves have always had archival potential.⁸ Life writing practitioners and theorists alike are increasingly inviting audiences to read their works archivally. For example, Poletti suggests her readers engage with her academic book Stories of the Self like an “exhibition” by imagining that it is “made up of a series of rooms”⁹ where one might walk through and inspect her ideas as if they are artifacts. This archivally structural approach is something I have also enacted in my own grief writing in an attempt to encourage readers to consider materiality and artefactual analysis from the outset. Thinking, and writing, with materialism and archival practices in mind is a common practice in life narratives, and one which may be heightened by the archival turn.

Jeanette A. Bastian explains that varied disciplines conceptualize “the archive” or “archival turn” in slightly different ways although there are “sufficient commonalities” to suggest “a general understanding that ‘the archive’—in both the digital and analogue realms—is recognized as an essential knowledge space to be approached, constructed and even confronted in numerous ways and from many perspectives.”¹⁰ She continues, “While archivists often see a physical or virtual space populated with records, papers, manuscripts, scholars envision a wider sweeping space of knowledge, a potential for knowledge that may be found in a variety of materials including those that are yet undiscovered.”¹¹ Additionally, Bastian states, “the ‘archival turn’ could also be seen as a turn towards expanding that which can be considered archival.”¹² Archives are an appealing form to co-opt—they gather and organize ideas in ways, which can be haphazard, extremely well planned, or a paradoxical combination of the two. They capture a moment, or many moments, in time and signify their collective importance by grouping them. They testify to the materiality of life, and the fragments of self we leave behind in objects and documents. It therefore makes sense to use archives as a theoretical framework with which to understand other grouped things, objects that can be brought into conversation with one another.

Personal archives—undeniably related to larger-scale archives in their materiality—are not given the same attention as traditional archives by disciplines like archival studies and museum studies. But it is not a lack of attention that plagues theoretical archives it is a rejection of the premise of their legitimacy as archives. Not all scholars are thrilled about a turn from physical, tangible, archives to more abstract ones like memoir. Conceptual and theoretical archives, which transgress the bounds of materiality, are in the firing line. Such alternative archives are accused of taking the spotlight (and thus potentially funding) from traditional archives and being overtheorized for the sake of trendiness rather than rigor. For example, Bastian observes “Archivists often seem reluctant to stray too far beyond their comfort zones, frequently emphasizing the differences between ‘the archive’ as conceptualized by non-archivists, and ‘real’ archival practice.”¹³ She provides an anonymized tweet from an archivist conference-goer, which reads: “The ‘archive’ is overtheorized; ‘archives’ (where labor of record keeping takes place) are undertheorized & underfunded.”¹⁴ While this tweeter is right that a different kind of “maintenance” or treatment is required for theoretical archives than material ones, they have neglected to note the potential for different types of archives to speak to one another or work in tandem. They present a false dichotomy—us or them. This neglects the potential for materiality, immateriality, and imagination to intersect. As grief influences all of these, ignoring theoretical archives in matters of material grief memoir would be folly.

Bastian calls for an embrace of commonalities between varied archival research forms, explaining that it “could open valuable pathways towards a more inclusive and all-encompassing understanding of the variety of records.”¹⁵ This is something that Julietta Singh works toward in her work of blended memoir and theory, No Archive Will Restore You (2018). Singh works within the textual archival form (through hybrid scholarly memoir) but also raises questions about the validity, or perhaps potency, of the concept of alternative archives. As she states of her time as a student, “The archive was an elusive hope of our individual salvation. If we could find the right archive, the right stash of materials that was sexy enough to sell ourselves, we could be spared the depression, the anxiety attacks, the pre-mid-life crises that would come when, one by one, we realized we were not going to be chosen.”¹⁶ Despite Singh’s initial doubts, No Archive Will Restore You exemplifies the potential for literature to act effectively as archive. She draws attention to relationships between memories, objects, and bodies, in reality and in writing. For example, when recalling an experience of being robbed by a group of boys—one of whom yells an apology as they leave—she writes, “In my memory of this scene, there are only objects and words, words as objects. The weapon and the apology—have they ever been discrete?”¹⁷ Singh thus implies the materiality of memory formation and recall, and signals that theoretical archives are inevitable, particularly within Life Writing discourse.

Bastian proposes that archivists might “reject” the stereotype of alternative archival theory as thin and “turn towards the middle, embracing the ‘archive’ and its adherents and engaging with those amorphous but dynamic knowledge spaces—not as the clerks or the keepers, but as the actors and collaborators.”¹⁸ I agree. Rather than limiting ourselves by dismissing alternative archives as cliché, we must instead consider the potential for playfulness and material exploration through collaboration. Reading material grief memoirs as archives is a generative practice whose potentialities far outweigh its limitations. Erik D. Goodwyn asserts that “death challenges the very structure of society and its understanding of suffering, and cultures respond with a restructuring of meaning.”¹⁹ We respond to the complex nature of grief through a search for understanding and negotiated meaning making. Reading grief memoirs as theoretical archives work toward these goals, broadening discussions of grief and the potential for interdisciplinary convergences. For the topic of grief—which traverses medicine, psychology, death studies, literature, and many other disciplines—striving to broaden literary tools of analysis is important. We must be open to new readings and meanings, even if they risk being cliché or overtheorized. Ultimately Bastian argues the same, suggesting that scholars and archivists alike might “utilize both archival theory and disciplinary ‘archive’ theory to reveal hidden collections and extend the walls of the archives” and to “re-conceptualize the meaning of ‘text’ and ‘record’.”²⁰ Extending the walls of personal archive and re-conceptualizing the meaning of records are therefore two of my aims as I unpack the imaginative ways that grief memoirs can act as archive.

Unreal and Imaginative Archives

Amy-Katerini Prodromou describes how we construct “deliberate fictions to get at the truth” and suggests that “‘imaginative truth telling’ grows out of memory’s inherent faulty nature.”²¹ I am engaged here with true non-fiction (rather than hybrid forms like autofiction) and texts, which represent reality to the best of the writers’ ability. However, due to the “faulty nature” of memory, particularly influenced by the destabilizing experience of grief, imagination will always play a role in life narrative construction. In material grief memoirs, collecting objects that could never be collected together in reality is one such act of imaginative truth telling. Writers can compile objects, which are lost or inaccessible, items that are too large or too abstract to be able to exist in a real room, and items (like tattoos) which are not able to be extricated from bodies. Material grief memoirs which include artifacts—both real and imagined—can therefore act as liminal archives, taking up space in the shared imaginations of the writer and reader and expanding the ways we collect materials of loss. This is a combination of grief’s potential to rupture linearity and materiality—the things we thought were true and real are complicated by loss—and storytelling’s potential to traverse reality and unreality.

Consider it this way: if you were to put a flower or a piece of fruit in a box, the flower would eventually wilt, and the fruit would rot. However, in the liminal archival space of grief memoir, perishable or intangible “items” like food, body parts, songs, smells, and medical events are rendered material-like through language. Margaret Gibson argues that there are “less tangible though no less memorable and affective” things which we want to collect and remember as if they were material artefacts.²² These “items” of memory can be collected in grief memoir alongside material objects like photographs and documents—indicating the ways that we strive to collect memories of loss in coherent ways. We freeze them in time and conserve them in archival literary forms.

Here I turn back to Poletti, who states that reading autobiography is a practice of “relational materiality” which “invites us to read both with and against the case logic and ontology and epistemology which underpin acts of self-life-inscription that treat the truth, or significance, of a lived experience as out there.”²³ Reading grief memoirs as unreal and imaginative archives require this kind of reading against and with logic. Truth is a fraught concept but is also something memoirists strive for. Perhaps paradoxically, imagined objects can help bring us closer to the truth of grief as they help us consider the limitations of the material world, and the ways loss forces us to mediate between life and death, reality, and imagination. Similarly, Hilarie Ashton notes that engaging with autobiography can be the beginning for further modes of enquiry, using “ourselves as a prism’ in order to ‘move from the familiar into the unfamiliar, and draw connections where perhaps at first we didn’t think any existed.”²⁴ Both Poletti and Ashton call for investigatory practices in reading and writing life narratives—approaching grief memoir, as unreal or imaginative archive is a way to do so.

We must read with and against logic, in order to leap into the unfamiliar and draw new connections between grief and materiality. We must acknowledge the liminality and un-realness of such texts and embrace a necessary shared suspension of disbelief between writer and reader. This can be an immersive, engaging, and expansive process of analysis, exemplified in my reading of the following case studies.

Grief Memoir as Museum

Georgia Blain’s autothanatological memoir The Museum of Words: a memoir of language, writing, and mortality (2017), acts as a museum of loss and grief. In this work Blain examines the beginning of her relationship to words and books as she reaches the end of it; she has a brain tumor which is increasingly eroding her capacity to think and communicate. Traditional museums exist as specific spaces to advance knowledge²⁵ and conserve the past through “ordinary objects and the highest artistic endeavors.”²⁶ Blain’s museum is one made up of knowledge-based artifacts—books and words—as ordinary objects and as the tools of her life-defining artistic endeavors. It is not only her words, which she collects and inspects, however. Blain also speaks of her mother’s declining health due to Alzheimer’s, and the tragedy of her dearest friend Rosie being diagnosed with the same brain tumor as Blain herself. By including these narratives within and alongside her own, Blain creates a gallery of loss encompassing not a singular life or relationship to words but several interconnected ones.

“I always wanted to be a writer. I cannot remember a time when I didn’t,”²⁷ Blain reflects at the beginning of The Museum of Words. Readers are then presented with a two-page spread with an image of Blain surrounded by books and a scan of her first writings. Books throughout are objects of inspiration and identity. They are posited as the things, which have solidified a love for words, and as objects that take up space in Blain’s and her loved ones’ worlds. She describes a childhood brimming with books, even ones her mother disapproved of such as Enid Blyton. Books are, in a meta way, presented as containers of knowledge. As her mother Anne’s health declines, readers see a particularly striking photo of empty floor-to-ceiling bookshelves after they cleared out Anne’s house. The focus on the absence of these books signifies not only a loss of material items but also of identity and shared interest. Later in the memoir Blain also describes letting go of her own books:

Every few months or so, I do a sweep of those shelves, giving some to friends, some going straight to the recycling. These days when I buy a new book, it is rare that I keep it. Usually, I just read it and pass it on. This is partly a product of my acute awareness of my mortality, but prior to the news of my tumour, I had started to toss books anyway—something that I would have found inconceivable in my youth. Sometimes, I wake in the middle of the night and remember a book that Anne had owned, and wonder whether Josh, or the new Anne, or any of her friends saved it.²⁸

Here, as Blain states, artifacts and mortality tangle with connections to loved ones. When objects enter our homes, their value and status shift, and they become artifacts with not only market value but sentimental and personal value too.²⁹ When in the home, books are a symbol of a rich reading life and sharing love of stories; when those same books are discarded, they symbolize a loss of these things. The material grief memoir form allows books to be at once present and absent, and thus identities built on stories are simultaneously preserved and relinquished.

In Blain’s work, books are not the only symbol of identity; words themselves also become tangible objects of the self, things that can be found and lost, with devastating implications for their owners. For example, when Blain and her family clear out Anne’s home, they come across her notebooks. There is a scanned page where Anne writes shakily, “Already words are disappearing like confetti, names vanish overnight.”³⁰ This is a fragmented vision of Blain’s own future. Paul John Eakin states that adult amnesias “bring us face to face with the end of an identity’s story, the collapse of the extended self when the memory and narrative skills that support this self fail.”³¹ The loss of storytelling—through books and words alike—indicates the breakdown of self that Blain and her loved ones are experiencing. This idea is illustrated saliently when Blain watches her friend Rosie lose her capacity to speak. Rosie’s husband Danny tells Blain “It was her nouns” she had “the most difficulty with.”³² Blain reflects on the form of the noun and what it might mean to lose it; “The building blocks. The first words we often express when we learn a language. The things we need or desire, the objects we want to alert one another to… If the nouns are gone, it’s impossible. These are the words on which we hang all other words.”³³ Blain recognizes that not only are words artifacts, things, which tether us to the world, but that different words function differently. Nouns are grounding, part of how we learn to understand and build a story. For Blain, Anne, and Rosie, who are natural storytellers, losing such precious artifacts is like losing the self.

Interestingly Blain is able to render this narrative so clearly while losing the tool with which to do so. Sherry Turkle suggests that museums present “meticulous” and “ordered” front rooms for visitors, but “untidy, chaotic spaces” can be found in museum back rooms.³⁴ I read Blain’s work similarly—the memoir is the polished front room where readers are visitors, but we get the feeling there is a private back room which is not shown, not entirely, as Blain’s health declines. Such analysis suggests the capacity for material grief memoirs to both reveal and conceal, to construct loss as neat and cohesive, despite grief’s shattering and scattering nature.

Jennifer Douglas, et al. argue that “Archives are—at some basic level—predicated upon the deaths of their creators.”³⁵ While Blain wrote the words of the memoir herself, a note at the beginning of the story lets readers know that her partner Andrew (along with their child Odessa and Blain’s editor) added images to her book during the editing process. They enacted these changes as Blain’s health declined and after her death. My final thoughts on The Museum of Words are thus about other parties as curators of Blain’s Museum of loss.

Gibson notes that despite “rational” Western ideations, “photographs are treated as if something of the person in the picture is there, not just as an image but as part of the material object.”³⁶ It may, therefore, be an attempt at continued bonds with lost loved ones. The idea of continued bonds is an established thanatological theory, sometimes also referred to as continued or continuing connections. It can be a suggested therapeutic intervention for complex or pervasive grief, as well as an act which the bereaved engage organically.³⁷ Maïté Snauwaert describes how writers of grief memoir “unknowingly abide by the recommended practice of continuing bonds put forward by clinicians” and that through their narratives of loss memoirists “powerfully model grief as another episode of love.”³⁸ This may be true also for Andrew, Odessa, and Blain’s editor collaborating on the completion of Blain’s work as a form of continued bonds with Blain herself. The edits or interventions become a sort of conversation. Indeed, although Blain is usually the focus of the included images, relationality is evoked in the perspective of the images; they often depict facets of Blain’s illness from a similar but also entirely different perspective than that of the person who is sick. Some are taken by Blain; many are taken by Andrew. Most striking to me is an image of a hospital hallway, flooded with light.³⁹ It is inserted on a page mid-sentence and interrupts Blain’s discussions on MRI scanning and stress. It adds further context to Blain’s words, not only through its image form but also through the fact that it was Andrew’s choice to include it, and it is Andrew’s perspective. We are reminded that, even when illness is occurring in a singular body, grief surrounding that illness is shared and communal. Another pertinent example is an image included after a passage where Blain describes the “excruciating” process of publicizing her autobiographical essay collection Births Deaths Marriages (2018). Blain recounts a particularly embarrassing encounter with a sound-recorder who questioned the difficult story of losing her virginity. After this snippet of memory, Andrew (and/or other curators) inserts a completely unrelated image of Blain walking on a beach. In the image, her dog Sunday is in tow, and their reflections are visible in firm, wet sand.⁴⁰ Would Blain have chosen that image, at that moment?

It is not clear whether Blain gave her explicit blessing to include these images or if, like many museums, objects and stories are given new curational meaning beyond their original creator. Through these images and more in The Museum of Words, I am reminded of museum practices where art or artifacts are displayed by one creator but new meanings—not always congruent meanings—are added through curational organization. However, whether or not Blain would have approved of the images, the archive she creates with words alone is effective in and of itself. Blain ends her memoir by saying, “This miniature is my life in words, and I have been so grateful for every minute of it.”⁴¹ She is conscious of the record she has created—a “miniature” which is precise in its construction, and which invites observation. While Blain knows her death is imminent, she is determined to share her narrative of love and loss, to know that she will continue to pass on knowledge, even when she is gone.

Grief Memoir as Inventory

Halligan opens her memoir Words for Lucy: A story of love, loss and the celebration of life (2022) by stating “My business is words. I put these together, my words, hers, other people’s, in celebration of her life and of our grief for her loss of it, and ours of her. Not all the words are about her, but they are all for her.”⁴² “Her” is Halligan’s daughter, Lucy, who died unexpectedly in her thirties. Through the memoir, Halligan acts as an “essayistic mourner,”⁴³ creating an inventory of her daughter Lucy’s life through the material memoir form. From childhood toys and clothes to gifts and talismans of adulthood, Halligan chronicles Lucy’s life in material ways. She “collects” items from Lucy’s childhood (and childhood illnesses), her adulthood, and after her death. In doing so she takes stock of her lost child’s life and considers what remains when her daughter is gone.

The authors of Memory Boxes suggest “the human brain is like a box of memories, a fragile chest that can be emptied by a sudden shock.”⁴⁴ The shock of Lucy’s death seems to have emptied Halligan’s memories, like trinkets from a shoebox, into the pages of her memoir. She organizes memories as if they are artifacts by breaking the book into sections such as “Milestones,” “Pretty comforts,” “Legacy,” “Words and memories,” and “Ceremonies”. Within each of these sections, vignettes are titled individually: “First operation,” “Emails from Lucy,” “Lament,” “Little sister,” “My words,” “Postcards,” and more. At one stage Halligan describes medical memories as being part of a “folio,” stating, “I have a huge folio of memories of us in different hospitals, clinics, surgeries, waiting, always waiting, dreary, hopeful, hopeless, our chests heavy, holding hands sometimes.”⁴⁵ At another she describes happy family memories, as being material; “Those are perfect memories, I can take them out whenever I like and run their cool and sparkling shapes through my fingers, look at their brilliant colors, the light refracting through them.”⁴⁶ Halligan’s efforts to itemize, quantify, and organize memories as if they are material are about interacting with memory in different ways. When we view memories as artifacts we can inspect them more closely and run our hands over them just as one might do in personal object-based learning.⁴⁷ This may mean paying close attention to dreaming or daydreaming, meditating on memories, and speaking about memories with others in order to make them more material. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson assert, “Archives are stored not only in boxes, on bookshelves, on social media platforms, and in the cloud, but in the synapses of memory, as our bodies store a reservoir of memories and felt experience from which autobiographical acts can be drawn.”⁴⁸ In drawing on our synapses of memory in the pursuit of grief storytelling, boundaries between that which is “real” and “unreal” are blurred and we can interrogate our own experiences of grief more closely.

While Halligan is content to shape memories as objects, there is a form of objectification, which she laments within the text. She writes of a doctor who saw ill children as “objects on which to deploy his skill,” adding that, “He was kind and courteous, but remote.”⁴⁹ Halligan thus avoids objectifying the body of her sick, young daughter as medical professionals did and instead archives melancholic childhood items to demonstrate Lucy’s previous “aliveness” and interactions with the world. Halligan describes artifacts like stuffed animals from the Melbourne Show (an annual fair with games, rides, food, livestock competitions, and entertainment)⁵⁰ and a seashell talisman gifted by a counsellor.⁵¹ She also describes Lucy’s clothes frequently, lavishly reimagining exactly what Lucy wore for events like weddings or while in hospital. For example, she writes of “a navy-blue voile dress with white daisies on it, with little red centers, white crunch lace stockings and red shoes,” and reflects, “[Lucy] always looked good in dark colors.”⁵² Gibson states that children’s clothes symbolize different things for parents at different stages of growth and grief. She argues that “At the beginning of a life clothing is expectant: it represents an absence that is yet to become a presence. At the end of a life, the reverse effect is experienced: clothing represents an absence that will never again be present.”⁵³ Halligan’s inclusion of childhood artifacts acts this way, outlining the shape of Lucy throughout her life’s stages, and reminding us of her absence through death.

After Halligan introduces artifacts from Lucy’s childhood, she moves into descriptions of adulthood through a section aptly titled “Inventory.”⁵⁴ This section begins with a literal list of objects. Reading it feels as if you are stepping inside the Halligan house, inside Lucy’s room, inspecting the materials left in her wake. In the introductory musings to this section, Halligan writes, “Lucy was very fond of things, and I was pleased by her pleasure in them because she did not have very much else. She was a wonderful giver of presents; she thought hard and chose carefully and came up with a host of gifts. And she took an interest in other people’s things.”⁵⁵ Not only does Halligan see Lucy as having a relationship to particular items, but with the idea of “things” broadly. In this way all items have the potential to be associated with Lucy’s loss, and all things have the potential to become treasured items associated with Lucy. Halligan writes of “A Bev Hogg strange angel” and “A cat, also winged, gauzy blue pottery wings, with a fierce smile and a sunburst on her head” as “Gifts from Lucy.”⁵⁶ She describes another gift that become a treasured talisman:

Once I was feeling rather out of sorts… Lucy was going shopping, and called at the garden centre and bought me a small bronze turtle. It fits neatly in the palm of my hand. She said… I should hold it in my hand and I would feel better… I do pick it up and hold it sometimes, and Lucy was right. I feel good when I hold it… because it was given with love.⁵⁷

This object, meant to make Halligan “feel better,” acts as a link between Lucy and her mother, even beyond the grave. Halligan also writes of a magazine subscription Lucy ordered for her before her death. The magazines are items which Lucy never touched but which are imbued with importance in their status as a “gift.” They represent Lucy’s thoughtfulness and act as a form of continuing love. Halligan writes, “Now when I go out to the letterbox and see a new one wrapped in plastic I cry a bit, because there it is, an emblem of Lucy’s love. I read it slowly, rationing it.”⁵⁸ As Halligan herself signals in her introduction to the Inventory section, gifts are important artifacts due to their symbolic nature of continued bonds. While Halligan “rations” Lucy’s gifts in real life, in the imaginative archive of memoir she collects artifacts of Lucy’s life as if to preserve them.

Words for Lucy as an inventory of loss illustrates a full and loving shared life, and devastating loss, occurring simultaneously through carefully curated artifacts. Halligan’s meticulous tracking and memorializing of Lucy’s life through objects—from childhood and into adulthood—reminds me of a checklist parents might roll through before leaving the house: Have you got your coat? Did you bring your lunchbox? Is your favorite soft toy packed too? Perhaps this is what Halligan is doing subconsciously, keeping an inventory of the items her daughter once had—material things which she interacted with, which held significance—and using this unreal archive to continue mothering beyond the limitations of death.

Grief Memoir as Alternative Medical Record

“There is no privacy when you make your baby by committee,” writes Lynch in her memoir Small: on motherhoods (2021), “Doctors, nurses, lab technicians. One donor. Two mothers.”⁵⁹ Small describes the experience of Lynch and her partner Beth becoming parents “by committee,” and the experience of having physically “small,” ill, babies. Grief and loss are woven through their story as part of the complex landscape of motherhood. By threading love and loss side-by-side via medical objects and non-medical objects alike, Lynch creates an archive, which acts as an alternative medical record.

In their article “From the sidelines to the center: reconsidering the potential of the personal in archives,” Jennifer Douglas and Allison Mills state that “Bureaucratic records, written from a particular viewpoint, for a particular purpose, and in specialized language, are full of silences, places where we know there is more to the story.”⁶⁰ In this article Douglas specifically describes how medical documents regarding her own daughter’s death contained “specialized vocabulary and profession-specific record making and recordkeeping policies and procedures,” and that this caused her to feel “alienation” and “distance.”⁶¹ Small offers a different way of recording, collecting, and tracking than those of official medical documents and therefore has the potential to narrow that distance and combat alienation. Lynch’s narrative is about far more than medicine, and the imaginative archive of her memoir holds more than official records ever could.⁶²

Small is divided into headings such as “print,” “voice,” “people,” “mouthfuls,” and “parts”. Lynch’s writing is poetic and fragmented, told through vignettes and threads of prose, loosely grouped. Under these headings, we are introduced to all manner of objects, both medical and not. For example, she describes self-tracking documents, stating “We kept the drugs schedule on the fridge, columns for injections, tablets, vitamins, suppositories. Rows for dates, scans, procedures. A little heart doodled next to the test date.”⁶³ When the babies are born, the artifacts Lynch focuses on the shift from being about her and Beth to being about the babies. These items are often related to their smallness and illness. One of the artifacts that most interest me in Lynch’s archives is a parking permit. She writes, “Nobody at the hospital wants to tell us how long the babies might have to stay, but we infer the worst when they put us on the list of people who no longer have to pay for their carpark. Each day I walk to the main entrance to collect a special permit, officially stamped with the receptionist’s pity.”⁶⁴ This object interests me in its simultaneous mundanity and importance. It illustrates how traumatic life experiences can touch material artifacts and imbue them with new, sometimes heartbreaking, meaning. Such objects can be “stamped” with emotions like “pity.” Less mundane, but still clinical, and still of interest are the objects Lynch uses to tell her daughters apart. She writes:

Twin II has a tube stuck to her face with ovals of tape, the wires to her heart monitor are yellow, and the bedding the nurses have placed her on are printed with teddies. Twin I seems smaller… She has a splint on her arm, more hair, and her oxygen tubes are stuck down with tape squares.⁶⁵

Small objects thus mark the identities of their small twins from birth. However, all objects are altered by the twins’ arrival. When Lynch arrives home from the hospital without Beth or the twins (who are still inpatients), she looks at the contents of their home and reflects, “Our house has become a museum of a different life.”⁶⁶ Later Lynch writes of a health professional visiting: “She asks about their feeds and the contents of their nappies. Pressing for detailed descriptions of the color and texture of their shit in this brave new world where new rules of polite conversation apply.—The yellow of that cushion or the yellow of that book cover? she asks. And I make a mental note to throw both away.”⁶⁷

Amongst material ruminations on the early days of the twins’ lives, Lynch also reflects on loss. She introduces this loss by writing about a particularly powerful object—a pregnancy test. She states wryly, “A positive test is a happy ending. A positive test to erase it all, all the years of failure, forgotten, because there was success in the end.”⁶⁸ Lynch then goes on to describe the experience of miscarrying. People may keep “unhappy” objects—things they would normally discard due to negative associations—in order to track grief and provide evidence. This is especially true of medical files, which serve a practical purpose and are therefore likely harder to discard, despite also being emotionally charged. Lynch discards the medical documents, which tracked her lost pregnancy:

Moving was the perfect opportunity to destroy the evidence. The reams of prescriptions. Dates for scan appointments, blood test results. Lists of injections and schedules and well-laid plans. I threw out the letters from the doctor wishing us well. Better luck next time. The invoices for all that hope.⁶⁹

She acknowledges that these artifacts held emotions—namely hope—and memories that she can no longer hold. By shredding these documents Lynch rejects the notion that we must keep unhappy objects, even if they do function as evidence or testimony. By writing about them in this way she dually demonstrates that such documents can still be compiled in archival ways without being physically present. Additionally, while she discards medical documents in the face of loss, she welcomes new objects and object relationships into her life as her children grow instead. She writes:

I am exhausted by the chaos of the toys, the avalanches of Lego bricks that settle on the carpet, the gruesome tangle of fake hair and plastic limbs when I open the cupboard door. So, periodically, I threaten to throw them all away… As if they did not have my children’s souls poured into them.⁷⁰

Lynch writes that it is not just plastic toys, which hold her children’s souls, but also “small things” they encounter when they are out in the world. These are items, which expand Lynch’s understanding of the material world motherhood, and kinship. In fragments of prose strewn across the paper, she reflects on the revelation that her children have provided her regarding materiality:

All the things I have been overlooking for years. Pigeon feathers, twigs, plastic horses, keyholes. The best small things are the small things you find under a tree, on the beach, or on the pavement. Things small enough to keep in your pocket, or hold tight in a fist… Gather the small things close. Curate them on the windowsill or under your pillow. Look carefully. Notice. All the small things that matter most.⁷¹

Perhaps shredding those documents and relinquishing the materials of loss allowed room for these new objects, and meanings, to enter Lynch’s life. In gathering the “small things” that “matter most” alongside medical artifacts, everyday debris, and even previously discarded items, Lynch creates a new archive. This archive is an alternative to traditional medical records, which may be narrow or contain gaps, and instead Small speaks to the complexity of the loves and losses present in Lynch’s experience of motherhood.

Transformative Archives

Archivist Jennifer Douglas testifies, “Grief transformed me; now, I want it to transform how we think about archives, our roles as archivists, and the archival work that we perform.”⁷² Like Douglas, I am concerned with sparking generative discussion on the links between archival narrative practice and loss. As Janet Hoskins asserts, “a life history is not only a recital of events but also an organization of experience.”⁷³ In this essay I have examined how grief memoirists might organize their life experiences in archival ways and the impacts of doing so. While theoretical archives might be contested, and at times duly so, reading grief memoir as archive can open pathways of literary analysis which we cannot ignore in conversations of materiality and loss. Material grief memoirs act as a liminal and imaginative archival space, shared between writer and reader. This allows for expansive and layered literary explorations of grief to occur. It is clear that reading material grief memoirs as archives also allows us to expand our understanding of grief and materiality and consider not only the process of writing such works but the impact of sharing them with others. We can read material grief memoirs as personal archives made public; they are museums of loss which help share knowledge and invite inspection and introspection from writer and reader alike. We can consider them an inventory of grief, a way of taking stock of the materiality of a loved one’s existence, and a way of negotiating their absence after their loss. We can also create new documentation of medical experiences, and use it to tell stories of illness, loss, and life reclaimed. Reading these works archivally helps us explore tensions between mortality and materiality and paves the way for further discussions on the role of grief archives when narrativizing loss.

Disclosure Statement

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

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.

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.