After the Words are Done: Publishing, Paratext and the Ethics of Reading Recent Australian Trauma Memoir

ABSTRACT

This article discusses two recent essays published by the memoirists Amani Haydar (The Mother Wound) and Lucia Crowley-Osborne (I Choose Elena; My Body Keeps Your Secrets) during 2020–2022. By conceptualising these essays as paratext, drawing on Gillian Whitlock’s consideration of the paratext as a critical apparatus in an ethics of reading memoir, this article argues that Haydar and Crowley-Osborne are amplifying a broader call for care from Australian authors who write about trauma, illness and disability in autobiographical genres. Negotiating with some of the formal, cultural and generic limits for memoir as social justice, these essays emphasise the cultural value of narrating life stories as well as potential personal and community benefits. In their essays, Haydar and Crowley-Osborne offer exegetical insights on process and craft, but they also draw attention to trauma memoirs’ afterlives: to the evolving impact of circulation, reception and promotion on autobiographical life writing and in the context of what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson name the unstable “futurity” of this genre. In doing so, these writers make visible ongoing wellbeing and other challenges for the author of trauma memoir after the work is published.

KEYWORDS:

• Life writing
• trauma
• literary culture
• paratext: autobiographical afterlives

Introduction

In the 21st century, memoir has been a popular and influential form through which individuals have spoken about and represented experiences of personal and collective trauma or distress. When we read this life writing, we are offering the writer the opportunity to be heard and recognised, and this recognition can be an important reparative act within contexts of institutional or social failure. In encouraging empathetic reading practices and bringing personal stories to bear on broader cultural and political contexts, memoirs of survivorship and trauma can lead to tangible outcomes, including the potential for “improvements in policies for prevention and response”.¹ But what happens to authors after the writing is done?

The narrative expression of traumatic and painful private experience has a documented therapeutic dimension, but authors who represent experiences in published memoir must also navigate “cultural scripts” and generic limits—set by the publishing industry and readerships—that affect the potential for healing or justice.² In their discussion of the rise of human rights discourse within life narrative, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith explain that while an emphasis on “human rights as the privileged mode of addressing human suffering and the rise in popularity of published life narratives” has emerged simultaneously in recent years, these texts must still negotiate being regarded as separate domains, as “politics and literature, respectively”.³ The author in this context is a survivor who bears witness and so is an advocate or representative, but they are also an artist like any other; in memoir, the value of a life story (and experience) is made available for judgement.

Leigh Gilmore has stated that the “memoir boom” is a significant cultural and historical moment that has created space for the emergence of testimony from a range of previously unheard or marginalised subjects.⁴ While autobiographical articulation is a form of empowerment (and can be an act of survival),⁵ there are also risks and challenges for subjects who testify in public through memoir and other auto/biographical forms. For instance, while Sam van Zweden draws attention to the fact that “some of the most powerful mental-health and trauma advocacy in recent years has come not from policy documents but from memoir”, she also observes that the work of narrating in public “honest, raw stories can be taxing to the mental health of those who write them. Sometimes that’s because they deal explicitly with mental health issues. Sometimes it’s because the most vulnerable people do the heaviest lifting in telling difficult stories”.⁶

This article discusses and contextualises the significance of recent trauma memoir within the Australian literary sphere, and it focuses on the authors of this memoir after the words are done. That is, it takes as a particular context the experience of the autobiographical author in relation to and reflecting on the work of memoir after publication: this is also about addressing and responding more directly to the fact and consequence of memoir as a commodity. While critical attention to trauma memoir has focused on a range of aspects within and outside of the text, including “effects and ways of coping from the perspective of the victim, either within individual or collective or historical frameworks”,⁷ relatively little scholarly research has explored the experience of authors in the context of post-publication. The exception is in the context of scandal.⁸

This discussion explores the post-publication landscape of memoir about trauma, the moment in which a personal story has also visibly become a commodity, and it is focused on the memoir author’s experience in relation to this. In Australia, there has recently been increasing public attention on and discussion of the material conditions for writers in the literary culture, and it is notable that the specific challenges faced by authors who write and represent memoir about personal trauma have been significant to this discourse.⁹ In this article, I contextualise the trauma memoir as a popular literary genre and I turn specifically to what two recent Australian memoirists say about their experiences of writing, but also publishing, in this genre. In reading and responding to these essays as integrated with memoir published elsewhere, I approach these essays as paratext to the memoir. In doing so, I draw from Gillian Whitlock, whose discussion of paratext attends to this as a critical apparatus in an ethics of reading memoir.¹⁰

Conventionally, paratext consists of the material elements of a text such as the cover, editor’s note or blurbs and forewords. As Whitlock argues, these elements also “mediate” the presence of memoir “in a global marketplace where there is a strong yet fickle market for exotic and traumatic life narrative, those ‘soft weapons’ of cultural diplomacy, humanitarian activism, and human rights discourse”.¹¹ But paratexts constitute points of potential disruption even as they present strategic ways of shoring up a preferred discourse. The essays I consider in this article are “epitextual” works: they constitute activity that surrounds or contextualises a published book rather than elements of the textual object itself. Gérard Genette, however (borrowing from Phillipe Lejeune), expansively describes paratext as a “fringe” and says: “Between the text and what lies outside it, is a zone not just of transition, but of transaction.” In this way, “the text invites readers, allows readers to recognise and be compelled by the text, and by which they will approach the activity of proceeding to reading”.¹² The essay—conceptualised as paratext—is also a useful strategy for addressing contemporary life writing as intimately constituted by and integrated to the digital literary sphere.¹³

So, in essays published online that also necessarily circulate as promotional media, Amani Haydar and Lucia Crowley-Obsorne direct attention to questions of ethics, care, privacy and safety in writing and publishing trauma. These questions are positioned as critical not only to the work of writing and publishing a manuscript—the craft of writing life writing—but also to the conditions of circulation, reception and interpretation that likewise constitute memoir as a genre. In reading these essays as paratext, then, I want to attend to the ways these authors seek to insist that readers better acknowledge (as a threshold) generic limits in relation to memoir’s form—for example, the dominance of narrative tropes of resilience and survival. Because broad, fast-shifting judgements concerning the value of narrating stories about private pain in public spaces emerge in the context of publication, it is also useful to consider how the paratext essay can work as a flexible form through which an author seeks to navigate the wake of publication or intervene in reception. This is true for writers in many contexts, but of interest in this discussion is how the authors of trauma memoir in particular negotiate unpredictable currents including weariness around trauma’s “ubiquity” or suspicion towards the genre’s proliferation in the literary market. As the paratext essays I discuss make explicit, this condition for memoir has consequences beyond the usual way value is accorded to a text as literary art through acts of judgement and reception. That is, life writing, particularly in the context of traumatic representation, is also a testimonial transaction that “summons” readers, enacting a witnessing that is deliberately “difficult”, and that demands specific kinds of ethical responses.¹⁴

In the following discussion, I explore and contextualise the significance of trauma memoir broadly within recent Australian life writing. I then turn to what I consider a recent shift in discourse about this writing: the emergence of a series of essays by the authors of trauma memoir who are asking for attention to, and offering insights into, what happens after they have been published. This post-publication context of writing about trauma in an autobiographical form, or the “afterlives” of the trauma memoir, emerges as my focus here. In their discussion of “autobiographical afterlives” in the context of the digital archive, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson use this term to describe how “a published ‘life’ enters into circulation as new reading publics access different versions of it over time; and it acquires an ‘afterlife’ that shifts its relationship to archival material and generates other versions of the subject”.¹⁵ As I will explore in this discussion, Haydar and Crowley-Osborne engage with this context explicitly: they offer exegetical insights into process and craft—into how the writing was done—but they also call for readers to consider the consequences and aftermath of publication: the memoir’s afterlives (as well as their own). This is a newer development.

So, I ask, what happens to authors after the words are done? How are the authors of trauma memoir called on to promote, explain and perform their identity or experience further in relation to a published autobiographical narrative? I am interested in how paratextual essays negotiate with the formal, cultural and generic limits of memoir as social justice by calling for attention to the cultural conditions that shape memoir as a commodity and how, in this formation, personal stories of trauma have been central.

“Popular Texts” of “Unhappy Lives”

Trauma memoir is one of the most popular forms of life narrative in the 21st century, and it is a locus for thinking through the complex relationship between authors, text and market that characterises the literary field. A good deal of scholarship now exists to frame and consider ethical questions in relation to who owns a life story, the right to tell, or who gets to speak—and life writers are increasingly trained in how to negotiate and navigate these issues.¹⁶ But less attention has been paid to what happens to authors once they publish a work of life writing. There are a range of factors to consider when contextualising what happens at a specific moment for the writer in the publishing life cycle—one that might demand further attention and consideration. For memoirists, as one example, the cathartic benefit of writing about an experience of trauma (the benefit of doing so) is often seen as simply implicit, but Meera Atkinson argues that “writing and resilience are a two-way street. It is possible to write yourself into increased resilience. But often enough, we need that resilience in place before we can face writing a challenging work, especially when it mines painful personal experience”.¹⁷

One of the key challenges for writers, then, is how to negotiate the healing or reparative potential of life writing with the literary function of the genre as a commodity. Roxane Gay, for instance, has argued that catharsis cannot be the primary goal for writing trauma, even if it may be a potential benefit.¹⁸ In navigating the fact of memoir as literary form, autobiographical authors mediate with the healing potential of personal narrative expression but they must also negotiate with the potential for scrutiny and doubt. So, for instance, “popular” texts about “unhappy lives” are a staple of memoir publishing that have also been regarded as distasteful by the literary establishment.¹⁹ Beejay Silcox, tracing the rise of “mis-lit”—“a furtive literary sub-genre” of late 1990s confessional life writing that was a publishing goldmine—observes: “But there was always a whiff of ambulance-chasing about it, the stink of lucrative embarrassment, of voyeurism.”²⁰ Plagued by hoax and imposture, the genre was understood as a fad, a “grotty little phase of laundry-airing” that would soon end.²¹ In her work, Gilmore has likewise argued persuasively that the potential for scandal is “an integrated feature of how memoirs are currently consumed”.²²

Life writers who publish texts about trauma navigate a complex and complicated literary culture in which trauma and the narration of traumatic experience have become both spectacular and ubiquitous. What does it cost writers who do this work? In her 2017 discussion of recent Australian trauma memoir, Donna Lee Brien confirms that despite ongoing disparaging characterisations of the genre, “misery memoir” has remained popular with many readers even through a concurrent rise in the scrutiny of authors who write about trauma. Judgements on the authenticity or value of these narratives is also in tension with what writers themselves gain from narrating and telling these stories. For Brien, recent memoirs such as Rosie Waterland’s The Anti-Cool Girl or Richard Glover’s Flesh Wounds frame acts of remembrance in relation to traumatic pasts as not only “courageous” but also crucial for the author’s development as a writer, aligning to research that suggests “resilience gained from overcoming trauma can feed into talent development”.²³ Through tapping into theories and understanding of traumatic recovery and healing, even when “formulaic” these memoirs have been appreciated by readers for representing “the power of the individual human spirit to meet and overcome adversity”, and for revealing “that the narrative contemplation of the self does not have to be self-indulgent or narcissistic on the part of writers, or voyeuristic and prurient on the part of readers”.²⁴

Brien offers a much-needed positive take, but writers who write about trauma in published memoir negotiate with the genre as a cultural formation, and accusations of narcissism or self-indulgence are commonplace. So, when sharing private or personal experiences, even as these also reveal or witness to broader social issues or injustice, authors are perceived as “asking” for attention and may be judged accordingly. For example, in an essay published for the Guardian after the publication of a 2020 memoir of surviving sexual abuse, Gemma Carey articulates tension as inherent to the genre: “I have been asking myself a lot of questions, questions such as, how much can I complain about people overstepping my boundaries when they want more information? What rights to privacy have I given up? To what extent is my consent being ignored, re-enacting the very abuse I wrote about when I am interviewed about the book?” Carey’s essay retraces and returns again and again to a central, seemingly unreconcilable complexity: “I wrote a memoir about childhood sexual abuse, so I asked for this.”²⁵

For writers of trauma memoir, a range of personal, community and social issues come into play, and these are amplified in the transit from private story to published memoir. In this complex interplay, ethics remains a foundational concern. In his influential study, G. Thomas Couser has argued that life writing is essentially relational: it always involves the representation of others in relation to the auto/biographical author.²⁶ Because of this relational dimension, Couser is especially concerned “with the representation of subjects who are vulnerable to misrepresentation or betrayal because of some disadvantageous condition, particularly certain kinds of disability”.²⁷ As the author, the writer seems to bear the most ethical responsibility in Couser’s formulation. Recent work on ethics, however, including work by Whitlock or by Astrid Rasch, has turned attention to an ethics of reading.²⁸ How might a discussion of ethics also begin to consider the relationship between life writers and the literary culture, to the industry within which autobiographical narrative work is produced, distributed, marketed and sold? Throughout my discussion here, I recognise and foreground the fact and consequence of an autobiographical text’s “afterlives”. In the essays I turn to in the next section, two authors of recent memoir, Lucia Crowley-Osborne and Amani Haydar, draw attention to both the writing and the aftermath of doing so. While concerns over craft and aesthetics remain vital in considering trauma memoir, my discussion primarily seeks to respond to the experiences of authors in relation to the promoting, marketing and discussing that is also impelled through the circulation of a memoir once it is published. Here, the idea of memoir’s “afterlives” allows us to recognise the “futurity” of diverse reading publics and contexts for autobiographical narration, and this as something that authors will continue to navigate after publication.²⁹

How do we recognise the broader social and cultural value of writing about and representing personal trauma, and how can we better understand what it costs authors (and others) to do this work in order to sustain such a practice?³⁰ Carey’s sense that she has given up her “right” to assert boundaries around her private life is an indicative challenge. As paratext to trauma memoir, these are essays that explicitly ask readers to “halt” and self-consciously “account” for how they read an autobiographical narrative and its author.³¹ In this context, questions of recognition or responsibility in relation to those who do the “heaviest lifting” are recognised as a threshold for ethical reading in this genre.³²

Amani Haydar: “Writing from and through Trauma”

I kept a sticky note on my desk to help me overcome the anxieties associated with these risks; “Who are you writing for? Who does your work serve?”³³

When Amani Haydar’s mother was murdered in an act of domestic violence, writing helped her process and reflect on what happened. At first, she did this in private by writing in a diary. Later, “the act of writing a Victim Impact Statement gave [her] a sense of agency and involvement in the proceedings which were otherwise disorienting and retraumatising”.³⁴ In her essay “Writing from and through Trauma” for the online literary journal Sydney Review of Books, Haydar explains that writing for the trial “radicalised” her sense of what personal writing could do, giving her a sense of purpose.³⁵ She was inspired by the memoirs of other trauma survivors and articulates a personal conviction that “survivor testimony was being taken seriously as a form of resistance and as a tool for informing policy”.³⁶ When she turned to memoir, she identified a form of representation that she felt could allow her to adequately engage with the complexity of telling her story: “There were considerations around mitigating harm without compromising truth, contextualising personal struggles within political realities, and understanding where my work sat within broader conversations about gender-based violence, #metoo and domestic abuse in Australia.”³⁷ Critically, while her private writing was cathartic, the memoir was crafted to address a public, and this process required a different method. In either case—writing for herself or for her audience—Haydar has taken a trauma-informed approach: “Understanding the effects of trauma and building a trauma-informed approach into my writing practice has allowed me to navigate some of these risks and foster a writing practice that facilitates personal healing despite the risk of re-traumatisation.”³⁸ When it came time to promote the book, she specifically addressed her fears by working with a “coach and counsellor”.³⁹

In her essay, Haydar identifies the benefit of accessing counselling and therapy in writing memoir: this is writing that testifies to an urgent social issue and that offers opportunities for recognition or understanding but which she understands can exact a keen personal toll. Notably, Haydar draws on her own resources to support herself while writing, and later when she seeks to promote the work by accessing therapy and counselling. Van Zweden points out there is a social perception that the wellbeing of the writer is an individual responsibility, and Haydar’s experience seems to confirm this expectation: “Freelance writers live with many things that can compromise health and wellbeing … insecure work and income, an inability to access expensive or exclusive treatment, isolated working conditions, a lack of benefits including sick leave and holiday pay, and a culture that often encourages burnout.”⁴⁰ There is a need to address systemic and other kinds of inequality beyond individual capacity and responsibility, and so there are “crucial, missing steps that involve seriously (re)considering what happens to and for writers during and after writing their trauma and mental ill-health stories for publication”.⁴¹ Moreover, for writers from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds or who are navigating disability or illness, some risks of writing memoir are amplified. Haydar, for instance, faced a double bind: Muslim women are often “hyper-visible” yet “rarely given the opportunity to speak on their own terms”. Her essay traces just some of the “risks” that attend to “every stage” of the writing process and offers a range of strategies.⁴² But the work of representing trauma carries extra weight when the writer is from a marginalised or racialised community, and this reality plays out in a memoir’s afterlives in ways the author is often left to navigate alone.⁴³

The relationship of memoir to truth-telling and bearing witness has been celebrated, but the genre’s popularity constitutes a “narrow gate” that exerts pressure on the kind of life stories and life narrators that circulate and are valued.⁴⁴ As she explains in her essay, Haydar self-consciously negotiates the responsibility of telling a private story that has the potential to offer enormous public and political benefits—an important rupture to the silencing discourse of domestic violence—with the consequences of drawing further attention to a community that has been heavily stereotyped. Haydar explains: “Writing in (but not for) the white gaze, as a visibly Muslim woman, about gender-based violence carries the risk of backlash by both Muslim and non-Muslim audiences who might struggle to prevent their pre-existing assumptions from colouring their reading of my work.”⁴⁵ Promoting her memoir, The Mother Wound, was something she prepared for extensively and that she developed strategies for sustaining: “When it comes to guilt or fatigue from speaking publicly about my work, I have learned to mention something about who Mum was as a person, her interests and achievements. Victims of crime are often remembered by reference to their victimhood only, but it is important to be able to remember their agency and happiness too.”⁴⁶ For Haydar, writing memoir is a call for recognition and a work of testimony imbricated with social justice. But there are “practical strategies that make [her] work sustainable”. In particular, her ability to access ongoing psychological counselling and trauma-informed care, not only the honing of writing craft or producing the writing itself, is critical.⁴⁷ Memoir is an artefact of experience, but ethical reading cannot be only about witnessing as engagement with the text; it must also be about contextualising the literary culture and, perhaps counterintuitively, better recognition of the author’s lived identity outside and beyond the text that also represents it.

Haydar’s essay on writing her memoir is part of a series curated by the Sydney Review of Books that “repeatedly” asks: “What happens when trauma is the conduit to writing in the public sphere? What new kinds of violence can occur when trauma is mobilised through writing for public consumption?”⁴⁸ As paratext, this essay is also a threshold for the published memoir, participating in shaping the text’s significance and its afterlives in the literary culture. Importantly, in Whitlock’s reading of Behrouz Boochani’s 2018 memoir, No Friend but the Mountains, paratext is also an interruption to preferred or default ways of reading, and this is critical: “They bring us to a halt, call us to account, question what we can see, hear, and know.”⁴⁹ Haydar, in her essay, reminds us that some transits or limits of the memoir as literary text might need to be alleviated through care of the author after publication. When Haydar makes visible the complex contradictions that attend to speaking by “Muslim women survivors and activists”, she reminds us that the “body” behind her text is a Muslim woman’s body. This is the body she presents when promoting or sharing her published work; this is the person at risk when the agency and control conferred by writing loses stability or becomes re-traumatising.⁵⁰ Haydar’s paratextual essay establishes this recognition as a threshold in ethical reading and care.

Lucia Crowley-Osborne: “Shame and the Performance of Vulnerability”

In 2021, the journalist and memoirist Lucia Crowley-Osborne reflected in an essay for online literary journal Kill Your Darlings on her experience of writing and publicising a recent memoir. She outlines and articulates a series of tensions and contradictions and returns to a central paradox: “Vulnerability used to sell books is in fact, to some degree, a performance. It is a performance of not-performing.”⁵¹ In her first memoir, I Choose Elena, Crowley-Osborne narrated a personal story of surviving sexual assault—one that, in her own life, she had attempted to suppress for over a decade. The not-telling exacerbated deep physical and psychological trauma; writing memoir was an important act of agency and control for her as an individual, and telling her story as memoir granted her a platform. Her second book, My Body Keeps Your Secrets, is a personal and cultural history of shame that is also an act of collective storytelling and witness, incorporating the stories of a range of other victims and survivors as well as more of Crowley-Osborne’s own experiences and perspectives. It is a memoir about “bodies under threat. And some bodies are always under threat”.⁵² But it is also a commitment to people who “are not as lucky as I am”—who do not have access to the psychological appointments and income and housing that she has secured, who are not “white or middle-class … I wanted to share the information I had access to as a result of those privileges”.⁵³

My Body Keeps Your Secrets is also propelled by Crowley-Osborne’s desire to contest and uncover myths about trauma and recovery. It is conceptualised as an intervention, a turning away from the spectacular, dramatic “event” of trauma and towards its long aftermath: “the everyday challenge of living in a body that has been damaged and disrespected and shamed in some way”.⁵⁴ In her essay, Crowley-Osborne confirms that sharing her own and the stories of others has been a critical therapeutic tool, yet promoting her work has also impacted her process of recovery: “No matter how much I try and write my way out of shame, I still live with it, and it with me. And it seems to come out most powerfully when I have to be observed by an audience, have to be seen—which is always when I am promoting my book.”⁵⁵

For the memoirist, representing painful personal experience can be an essential part of an ongoing process of healing and recovery, but it may also be in conflict with cultural expectations that circulate around promoting and publicising a memoir about trauma. That is, while most readers understand that the life is not simply the book, memoir exists in a cultural context in which a perceived or symbolic conflation between narrative representation and the life of the author also gives the autobiographical text its complex affective power. For Crowley-Osborne, it is not only the textual representation of her “self” that is judged by others in the wake of memoir’s afterlife—as this text now enters into circulation and comes in contact with a reading public—but also her ability to evoke and continue to perform the self of this text in ways that audiences have come to expect of memoir genres. As she explains:

Every story in my book is about how we learn the value of the false self, how we unlearn it, and the price we pay trying to attain it. It is about trying to overcome the false self; the version of myself I have built around my obsession—born from trauma—with other [people’s] approval. And yet a necessary part of writing that book is promoting it—and therefore asking for people’s approval. Book reviews, Instagram likes, complimentary tweets. I understand why this is important—publicising a book is how we connect with readers, and connecting with readers is the greatest joy of my life. But it does create a tension in me—I need to try and find a way to resist the temptation to let the performance of vulnerability not pull me back into reliance on external validation.⁵⁶

A memoir is a version of life: it is a representation of experience. The capacity to carefully craft and shape this account—to tell this story in the way she sees fit—can confer agency, and it may well be cathartic or healing, enabling resilience. Yet there is an ongoing tension here: as the author of her book, talking about and promoting the book also requires a vulnerable performance of self that pivots on a central paradox: “by putting my shame in words, I am indicating I have overcome it”.⁵⁷

In her work on the “American neoconfessional”, Gilmore has explored the centrality of redemption as a narrative plot in contemporary memoir. Following a period of “boom” in which memoir was a key form for mobilising and speaking about systemic and endemic social injustice, the neoconfessional marks an era in which the public’s relationship to memoir is as a judge. Scandalous memoirs such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces represent the material and symbolic heart of this moment, in which narratives that succeed in the market are energised by dreams of mobility and overcoming, of individual success. In this way, neoconfessionals, says Gilmore, “displace the analysis of wrongdoing away from questions of justice. The subjects of these memoirs seek nothing in the way of a reckoning from their audiences”.⁵⁸ Instead, the memoirist is formed as supplicant—continuing a confessional inheritance already deeply embedded in auto/biography as a genre—and the popularity or not of the memoir in the market determines the value and worth (and truth) of the life represented. Crowley-Osborne reflects: “It is me. It is the part of me that believes I have to perform to be accepted, but it is also a culture that rewards the performance.”⁵⁹

As Crowley-Osborne explains, and as Gilmore has indicated through her work, for her trauma story to be heard by those to whom she wants to matter, Crowley-Osborne must also negotiate a literary culture that demands she is healed enough to talk about her trauma, as often as required: “The trope of the honest, vulnerable memoir that does not shy away from difficult subjects seems, in some ways, to require that you have come out the other side by the time the book is published. That is, at least, what the publishing industry so often wants to see and so often rewards: the sad girl who wrote a book about her sadness as a way to find absolution—and who, crucially, is willing to stand in front of a room full of people and talk about the worst things that have ever happened to her.”⁶⁰ In this cultural formulation, not being healed, continuing to experience or battle shame, is an individual burden for the author. At stake here is a critical assumption that also underwrites the circulation of trauma more broadly in literary contexts, that an author achieves “closure”—symbolically—as the writing is completed, as the book is closed. It is a narrative trope but also a cultural supposition that, as Crowley-Osborne shows, can undermine the capacity for audiences to adequately hear stories of traumatic experience. Indeed, Gilmore observes that one of the consequences of the rise of the neoconfessional is that a capacity to hold and sit with unresolved and “unhealed” stories or an anomalous narrative trajectory has become limited by genre: “Suffering in this model is ubiquitous, and insufficient to catalyse interest; what appeals is struggle and overcoming.”⁶¹

The narrowing that defines contemporary memoir about trauma to plots of redemption and overcoming can account for the emergence of the kinds of essays by memoirists that have, as this article has explored, begun to characterise and supplement the publication of trauma memoir in recent years in Australia. While, as I have been arguing, these essays constitute important ethical thresholds for reading memoir about trauma, they also present yet another site for the author to perform and narrate part of a story they have already told, and this performance produces its own ethical complexity. How are authors of trauma memoir asked to perform in relation to a published life story by the literary culture? An important shift towards representative diversity within publishing has the potential to enable marginal voices, but these subjects must also navigate a literary culture that continues to fetishise victim narratives and serve institutions and corporations that benefit from the consumption and storying of trauma without necessarily contributing to repair.⁶²

In her essay, Crowley-Osborne reflects directly on what she says her memoir has been required to conceal: she acknowledges and addresses the performative nature of life writing and the reality of a cultural industry in which narratives of pain also circulate and gain traction as valuable commodities. In navigating and making visible the many tensions and contradictions of writing about trauma in memoir, as well as its craft and narrative realities, Crowley-Osborne illuminates the act of judgement by literary audiences, and she explores limits for how narratives (and the understanding) of trauma exist among the public. Ultimately, and like Haydar, she asks for readers not only to approach the text of her trauma memoir with care, but also to recognise the ongoing reality of the body behind the text, a body who continues to experience trauma and “misery” as excessive and ongoing, unable to be contained by formal or textual bounds.

Conclusion

“Resilience,” says the Arabic-Australian writer Lur Alghurabi, is a “sham”. She explains: “We move from one pain to the next and, sometimes, we find a moment of pause between what we swing to and from, and there is peace for a short period of time. Resilience has a happy ending. Resilience has stability. Resilience has an ‘it’s over now, you can breathe, you can start your life’ simplicity.”⁶³ What happens after the life writing can be challenging and may threaten resilience that has been won through the process. Alghurabi observes that resilience is also a narrative effect that can seem to preclude the excessiveness of trauma or the ongoingness of recovery, neutralising a potential of writing about trauma. For instance, Gay reflects of her own writing that the process was to some degree therapeutic, but it was also not simply a “magical solution” to the messiness of recovery.⁶⁴

How does memoir itself, as a generic narrative form, perpetuate certain understandings about healing, resilience or overcoming? While writing about trauma is a craft and certain skills can be taught (for example, how to maintain an emotional register without overwhelming a reader; how to negotiate legal or ethical constraints on what can be said), it is less easy to address the emotional and wellbeing challenges of writing trauma, or to account for how these challenges shift over the writing life cycle and are ongoing. In the essays I have explored in this discussion, the challenges of writing about trauma are supplemented by an increasing sense that care for the writer must also continue after the words are done. My discussion has been located in the tension between autobiographical narrative as social justice and memoir as valuable literary product. It has drawn attention to an ethics of reading memoir that expands this framework to consider the need for a duty of care also in relation to authors. As subjects of the experiences of the trauma, illness or abuse that they write about, autobiographical authors are regarded as authentic—and this authenticity is authoritative. But trauma memoir is also a popular genre, and demand for personal storytelling that confesses or testifies is produced unevenly. For example, Dženana Vucic has argued that “emerging writers are expected to perform their trauma for publication. This applies particularly to BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ and disabled writers, but also to cis women and especially in terms of sexual violence”.⁶⁵ Similarly, Alghurabi has documented the distinct pressures that attend to racialised and cultural minorities who speak from experience, including a constraining imperative to forms and genres such as memoir.⁶⁶ In this way, paratextual essays reflecting on the afterlives of trauma memoir constitute an ethical threshold through which the limits of memoir as a genre might be recognised and actively negotiated.

As Julie Rak asserts, an important but uncomfortable shift has been required to talk about memoir in the 21st century: “from thinking about books as mere textual vehicles for an author’s thoughts to thinking about books as commodities that are manufactured for market by an industry”.⁶⁷ Memoirists who represent trauma may be seeking to subvert and contest silence or ignorance, but this is also a performance that makes ongoing demands of writers themselves, even after the words are done.⁶⁸ So, one of the critical and foundational ethical knots of both writing and interpreting life writing is that memoir is at once “literary and political”—a representation of experience that is also art.⁶⁹ Gay notes that the complex condition for memoir as a literary representation of trauma is therefore that it not only represents painful personal experience but must do so well.⁷⁰ What “well” means, as Gay discusses, is subjective. That this is a question we can ask at a broader level than between an individual and their craft is a central proposition of this article. For instance, Atkinson observes that while resilience can be created through autobiographical writing itself, assuming resilience “places the burden of resilience on particular, structurally disadvantaged individuals and communities rather than redressing social injustices and inequities”.⁷¹ Leena Kurvet-Käosaar argues that a range of “complex entanglements” border and shape life writing about trauma, including the “publishing industry, popular markets, contemporary (Western) ideologies of self-improvement, -monitoring and -promotion and public appetites for sensationalism”.⁷² Given this context, writing trauma well, to reframe Gay’s question, might also be about how well audiences, publishers and others are prepared to read and respond to the dynamic but unstable “futurity” of autobiographical narrative. Further, it speaks to a responsibility within the literary culture itself to better care for those who do this work, for better support—material, institutional and cultural—for those who do the work to tell these stories. And this is not only about authors.⁷³ How we care for those who write about and publish stories of trauma is a material, social issue and a cultural, industry-wide challenge.

Over the past few decades, a consideration of life writing ethics has been foundational in framing new interpretative responses to a range of memoirs as well as for attending to the situated politics of those subjects whose personal lives and communities are implicated by writing in this genre. But the work of writing about trauma also continues to evolve in the afterlife of an autobiographical narrative, and this phenomenon has less often been the subject of research or attention. At stake is better recognising the wellbeing and psychological challenges of writing memoir that also persist or emerge after the words are done.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph, “Introduction,” in Still Here: Memoirs of Trauma, Illness, and Loss (New York: Routledge, 2019), 8.

2 Leena Kurvet-Käosaar, “Trauma and Life Writing,” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, ed. Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja (Oxon: Routledge, 2010), 306.

3 As Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith state, they are in fact “multidimensional”, with multiple points of “critical contact”. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 2.

4 Leigh Gilmore, “#MeToo and the Memoir Boom: The Year in the US,” Biography 42, no. 1 (2019): 163.

5 So Gilmore observes, for example, that self-representation can be an important part of “survival” in the aftermath of sexual assault. See Gilmore, “#MeToo,” 163.

6 Sam van Zweden, “More than Opening the Door: Holding Space for Mental Health Writing,” Meanjin (Summer 2020): 158.

7 Kurvet-Käosaar, “Trauma and Life Writing,” 309.

8 See Julie Rak’s incisive discussion of the fallout from the James Frey memoir for the publishing industry and memoir as literary product. Julie Rak, “Memoir, Truthiness, and the Power of Oprah: The James Frey Controversy Reconsidered,” Prose Studies 34, no. 3 (2012): 224–42.

9 See, for example, Imogen Dewey, “Readers Are Hungry for Stories about Trauma,” Guardian, 19 November 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/nov/19/readers-are-hungry-for-stories-about-trauma-but-what-happens-to-the-authors.

10 Gillian Whitlock, “No Friend but the Mountains: How Should I Read This?” Biography 43, no. 4 (2020): 706.

11 Whitlock, “No Friend But the Mountains,” 707.

12 Gérard Genette and Marie Maclean, trans., “Introduction to the Paratext,” New Literary History 22, no. 2 (1991): 262.

13 Published online, the essays I consider in this discussion constitute, I argue, Genette’s “fringe”, and I think this is an important expansion to properly account for the influence of what Simone Murray has called the significance of the “digital literary sphere” in contemporary literary culture. See Simone Murray, The Digital Literary Sphere: Reading, Writing, and Selling Books in the Internet Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).

14 Whitlock, “No Friend but the Mountains,” 706.

15 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “The Afterlives of Those Who Write Themselves. Rethinking Autobiographical Archives,” European Journal of Life Writing 9 (2020): 11.

16 See, for example, my work with Kate Douglas for a broad discussion of this context and its impact in tertiary education: Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas, “Why Literature Students Should Practise Life Writing,” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 17, no. 2 (2018): 204–21.

17 Meera Atkinson, “On the Complex Interweaving Relationship between Writing and Resilience,” Writing NSW, 24 June 2021, https://writingnsw.org.au/meera-atkinson-on-the-complex-interweaving-relationship-between-writing-and-resilience/.

18 Monica Lewinsky, “Roxane Gay on How to Write about Trauma,” Vanity Fair, 18 February 2021, https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/02/roxane-gay-on-how-to-write-about-trauma#:~:text=So%20many%20people%20think%20that,understand%20the%20impact%20of%20it.

19 Donna Lee Brien, “‘First the Misery, Then the Trauma’: Australian Trauma Memoir,” TEXT 42 (October 2017): 3. https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.25894

20 Beejay Silcox, “The Art of Pain: Writing in the Age of Trauma,” Australian Book Review (November 2018): 1, https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2018/232-november-2018-no-406/5172-the-art-of-pain-writing-in-the-age-of-trauma-by-beejay-silcox.

21 Silcox, “The Art of Pain,” 2.

22 Gilmore makes her statement in relation to the United States, but there is no doubt the concept applies globally. Leigh Gilmore, “American Neoconfessional: Memoir, Self-Help, and Redemption on Oprah's Couch,” Biography 33, no. 4 (2010): 657–79.

23 Brien, “First the Misery,” 8.

24 Brien, “First the Misery,” 12.

25 Gemma Carey, “I Wrote a Memoir about Abuse. That Doesn’t Mean You’re Entitled to Every Detail,” Guardian, 23 October 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/23/i-wrote-a-memoir-about-abuse-that-doesnt-mean-youre-entitled-to-every-detail.

26 G. Thomas Couser, Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2019).

27 Couser, Vulnerable Subjects, 7.

28 Whitlock, “No Friend but the Mountains”; Astrid Rasch, “Anxious Reading: Interrogating Selective Empathy in Trauma Memoirs,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 38 no. 1 (2023): 163–88.

29 Smith and Watson, “The Afterlives,” 10.

30 In a recent analysis, Camilla Cripps argues that professional editors are often ill-prepared to support or guide writers exploring autobiographical trauma, leading to the potential for negative effects on both writers and editors. See Camilla Cripps, “Editors and Trauma: Why We Need an Industry Framework,” Books + Publishing, 31 January 2023, https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2023/01/31/225939/editors-and-trauma-why-we-need-an-industry-framework/.

31 Whitlock, “No Friend but the Mountains,” 706.

32 Van Zweden, “More than Opening the Door,” 158.

33 Amani Haydar, “Writing from and through Trauma,” Sydney Review of Books, 29 August 2022, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/writing-from-and-through-trauma/.

34 Haydar, “Writing from and through Trauma”.

35 Haydar, “Writing from and through Trauma”.

36 Haydar, “Writing from and through Trauma”.

37 Haydar, “Writing from and through Trauma”.

38 Haydar, “Writing from and through Trauma”.

39 Haydar, “Writing from and through Trauma”.

40 Van Zweden, “More than Opening the Door,” 158; Recently, writers including Anwen Crawford and Sally Olds have highlighted the structural conditions that affect the capacity of certain kinds of stories (for instance, by writers who are facing economic hardship) to be told at all. Anwen Crawford, “Book Advances Are a Gamble Not a Prize,” Kill your Darlings, 7 November 2022, https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/book-advances-are-a-gamble-not-a-prize/; a longer version (a downloadable zine) is available on the author’s website: Anwen Crawford, “Decorum Serves the Rich,” https://demandspopular.net/decorum-serves-the-rich (accessed 10 March 2024); Sally Olds, “What Can Writing Essays Do?” Making Art, https://makingart.work/projects/sally-olds (accessed 10 March 2024).

41 Van Zweden, “More than Opening the Door,” 158.

42 Haydar, “Writing from and through Trauma”.

43 The challenges for diverse writers are compounded. Maya Hodge, for instance, highlights the burden of representation when blak and First Nations authors are regarded as “information centres” for white audiences who fail to recognise that “writers and authors do not travel to festivals to answer complex questions from individuals with their own agendas. Writers come to speak on their books”. Navigating the context of promotion and opportunities for speaking further that writers are called on to participate in by publishers can exacerbate the vulnerability of already marginalised subjects. See Maya Hodge, “Why Are Writers Festivals Unsafe for Mob?” Kill Your Darlings, 11 October 2022, https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/why-are-writers-festivals-unsafe-for-mob/; and Jumaana Abdu, “A Manifesto for the Diverse Writer,” Kill Your Darlings, 11 July 2022, https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/a-manifesto-for-the-diverse-writer/.

44 Gilmore, “American Neoconfessional,” 659.

45 Haydar, “Writing from and through Trauma”.

46 Haydar, “Writing from and through Trauma”.

47 Haydar, “Writing from and through Trauma”.

48 The “Writing Gender” project launched in 2021 as part of an ongoing project by the Sydney Review of Books to curate essays about “gender, knowledge and writing”. Haydar’s essay appeared in 2022 for “Writing Gender #2”, which focused on “how writing plays a significant role in making visible acts of cultural, physical and gendered violence against women and trans and gender diverse people, through both the telling of stories, and the re-witnessing of trauma”. See “Project: Writing Gender,” Sydney Review of Books, August 2022, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/project/writing-gender/.

49 Whitlock is describing the effect of translator Omid Tofighian’s foreword to No Friend but the Mountains, a peritext that as such “traditionally” urges the reader forward, “to turn the page and engage”. Crucially, she explains, “the paratexts to No Friend track Behrouz Boochani’s migration from Manus to New Zealand, initiating a new trajectory for Southern reading embedded in our ongoing complex histories of colonization, and the cultural politics of Australia’s shame.” See Whitlock, “No Friend but the Mountains,” 706.

50 See Hodge: “At the end of each session, the writers are the people who often walk away re-traumatised, while the crowd and organisers go home with new knowledge and zero accountability.” Hodge, “Why Are Writers Festivals Unsafe for Mob?”.

51 Lucia Crowley-Osborne, “Shame and the Performance of Vulnerability,” Kill Your Darlings, 11 October 2021, https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au/article/shame-and-the-performance-of-vulnerability/.

52 Lucia Crowley-Osborne, My Body Keeps Your Secrets (London: Indigo Press, 2021), 8.

53 Crowley-Osborne, My Body Keeps Your Secrets, 8.

54 Crowley-Osborne, My Body Keeps Your Secrets, 8.

55 Crowley-Osborne, “Shame and the Performance of Vulnerability”.

56 Crowley-Osborne, “Shame and the Performance of Vulnerability”.

57 Crowley-Osborne, “Shame and the Performance of Vulnerability”.

58 Gilmore, “American Neoconfessional,” 659.

59 Crowley-Osborne, “Shame and the Performance of Vulnerability”.

60 Crowley-Osborne, “Shame and the Performance of Vulnerability”.

61 Gilmore, “American Neoconfessional,” 659.

62 See, for example, Hodge’s essay “Why Are Literary Festivals Unsafe for Mob?” for a discussion of how the responsibility for narrating trauma is an asymmetrical cultural pressure that further marginalises vulnerable subjects—in this case, Indigenous Australians who are routinely called on to explain “blak experience” for predominantly white audiences. Hodge observes, “To speak out about our ongoing experiences as blak people is to re-dig into old wounds that stretch back to Invasion. We need safety for our people on the panel and in the audience. These festivals and institutions need to ask themselves whether they truly value the work we are doing in our communities, our stories and our legacies.”

63 Lur Alghurabi, “You either Die a Refugee or Live Long Enough to See Yourself Become a Diaspora Writer,” in Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory, ed. Leah Jing McIntosh and Adolfo Aranjuez (Neutral Bay: Pantera Press, 2022), 45.

64 Lewinsky, “Roxane Gay on How to Write about Trauma”.

65 Dženana Vucic, “Q&A with Dženana Vucic,” The Suburban Review, 19 April 2021, https://thesuburbanreview.com/2021/04/19/qa-with-dzenana-vucic/.

66 Alghurabi, “You either Die a Refugee or Live Long Enough to Become a Diaspora Writer”.

67 Julia Rak, Boom!: Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (Toronto: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2013), 4.

68 Melissa Febos, “The Heart-Work: Writing about Trauma as a Subversive Act,” Poets & Writers, 14 January 2016, https://www.pw.org/content/the_heartwork_writing_about_trauma_as_a_subversive_act.

69 Schaffer and Smith, Human Rights, 2.

70 Gay, speaking on the complexity of craft in relation to trauma, explains in her interview with Lewinsky: “I had edited an anthology called Not That Bad, a compilation of women writing about their experiences with rape culture. Most of the submissions were just straight testimony. They weren’t essays. And I was in the unfortunate position of having to reject these truly painful stories that clearly took quite a lot for the writers to submit. It got me thinking, how do we teach people how to take a trauma—whether it’s theirs or someone else’s; a cultural trauma, collective trauma, so on—and write about it in ways that can be more than just catharsis?” Lewinsky, “Roxane Gay on How to Write about Trauma”.

71 Atkinson, “On the Complex Interweaving”.

72 Kurvet-Käosaar, “Trauma and Life Writing,” 306.

73 See Cripps, “Editors and Trauma”.