“Indecent Exposure? Margaux Fragoso and the Limits of Abuse Memoir”

Abstract

In 2011, North American creative writing graduate Margaux Fragoso published her first book, a memoir titled Tiger, Tiger. Detailing the author's childhood sexual “relationship” with a 57-year-old man, the memoir was highly controversial. In critical receptions of the memoir, three themes recurred: a sense that it exceeds the limits of appropriate representation, unease with Fragoso bringing child abuse into a stylized literary space, and the question “why do we need to read this story” – a view that it is potentially damaging for readers to consume such narratives. In this paper, we explore the reception of Tiger, Tiger and we argue the text reveals how memoir remains lodged in an uneasy relationship to ideals of public good (dictated by critics and reviewers) versus the needs and ethics of individual representation.

Keywords:

• childhood
• trauma
• abuse
• ethics
• literary culture

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Tully Barnett, Rocio Davis, Leigh Gilmore, Pamela Graham, Leena Kurvet-Kaossar, Claire Lynch, Emma Maguire, Anna Poletti, and Julie Rak for their insightful feedback on this work-in-progress.

Notes

 1. We examined many reviews of Tiger, Tiger available on the web. Although, some reviews praised the memoir (for example, Hampson; Harrison; Jackson; Kois; Liem; and Tkacik), an equal number or more expressed strongly negative responses to the text (Bradbury; Bywater; Cooke, James, and Anon; Diski; Mackenzie, Young – to name a few examples).

 2. Of course it is important to note that reviews influence the content of other reviews. It is perhaps difficult, once a dominant view has emerged, for reviewers to “go against the grain” of dominant views (unless you are a memoirist/author like Kathryn Harrison or Jenny Diski, who is not bound by the same conventions).

 3. Cooke, James and Anon no page.

 4. The evaluative tone of the article, encapsulated in its titular question, frames the act of reading as one fraught with potential trauma and pain and the review article presents itself as a kind of intervention, a justification or warning for the confronting material in the memoir. Such a response raises difficult questions around what we might think as an ethics of memoir, and especially in relation to thinking about whom (and what) is memoir for. Indeed, the assumption underlying this and many other reviews of Tiger, Tiger is that memoir is for its readers: this is a discernible shift from how critics have theorized life writing in the past, and particularly in relation to testimonial or other kinds of narratives involving the disclosure of private individual trauma or pain, where responsibility and listening on behalf of the reader, positioned as a belated witness, have been considered of paramount importance. A shift to readers of memoir (and to the affect of their reading experience) is congruent to a contemporary context where life narrative has powerful cultural capital as a marketable commodity.

 5. Bradbury no page.

 6. The choice of “blurbers” is always significant as a hint to the reader that this new memoir may be like the blurber's. In this instance, the choice of Sebold is highly significant. Sebold is best known for her prize-winning, critically acclaimed bestseller The Lovely Bones (2002) but also for her memoir Lucky (1999). In both texts, Sebold represents sexual abuse.

 7. See Douglas 110–3.

 8. For example, Fragoso describes it as a “relationship”, in her prologue:

I started writing this book in the summer after the death of Peter Curran, whom I met when I was seven and had a relationship with for fifteen years, right up until he committed suicide at the age of sixty-six. (3)

 9. Penguin paperback edition, 2011.

10. As Douglas has argued elsewhere, such statements function as plot spoilers in memoir (70).

11. For example, Kitzinger writes of how the media has “encouraged the formation and expression of private identities around previously fragmented and silenced experience. It helped sexual abuse, particularly incest, to enter public discourse.” (86)

12. Douglas talks about this elsewhere,

We readers might be forgiven for believing that these narratives of resilience and forgiveness are more broadly representative of the ways in which people remember and write about their traumatic childhoods, rather than considering these autobiographies as idealized templates that prescribe the ways in which traumatic childhood can be recalled and written about. (74)

13. It is also important to note that book reviewing is a discourse and reviewers often write in light of, or in response to, each other's reviews. Once a few negative reviews enter the public sphere, it can be difficult for reception to shift radically beyond this.

14. The “bad mousie” keeps coming back no matter how many times the girl and her family try and get rid of him (95).

15. Haaken and Reavy makes an intriguing statement about the role of narrative in memory and the significance of non-literal storytelling in narrativizing abuse:

Focussing on the narrative structure of memory and the social uses of stories, rather than on their veridical truth context does run the risk of downplaying the importance of factual claims. But in recognizing how victim and perpetrator images inhabit the human psyche in complicated ways, a richer realm of self-understandings unfolds than if we focus narrowly on factual claims alone. Once stories acquire social symbolic meaning and go beyond literal representation of past events, they also are open to multiple psychological and social uses […] women […] deserve the freedom to explore – to both create and discover – the dynamic flux that constitutes personal identity and the contours of history itself. (Memory Matters 228)