Strangers Within: On Reading Disability Memoir (original) (raw)

Once the domain of statesmen and war heroes, already-renowned writers and the soon-to-be-beatified, autobiography has become a democratic genre. Now it is not so much the powerful who write autobiography, but autobiography that confers the power of self-authorship upon the individual. In the act of telling our stories, we materialise. There is a degree of hubris in this impulse: we put ourselves centre-stage. But in claiming those life stories as legitimately told*in assuming an audience of persuadable, if not already sympathetic, readers*we might also defy stereotypes, resist the nullifying effects of those other, more dominant narratives in which we play but bit parts, relegated to the periphery. Much contemporary life writing participates in such reclamation projects, making subjects of people whose circumstances or characteristics may have denied them social agency. And so we write to reestablish a sense of perspective, to express something vital about our experiences that we hope will at once guarantee selfhood and create community. We call this autobiographical enterprise speaking out, making visible, giving voice, being heard, in language that seems almost inescapably corporeal*just as much psychoanalytic theory, and indeed our language of identity generally is also a bodily one. When we write (and do we not understand ‘writing’ as the hand that types, the eyes that read what’s there, the brain that thinks?), we write a life story into existence, and that story has a kind of physiological arc. We grow up to accumulate the expected markers of success in linear, or at least narratively dramatic, fashion, according to life cycles that are, by virtue of human aging, inherently physical. Along the way we see to believe. We’re taught to stand on our own two feet, follow in our forebears’ footsteps, Life Writing VOLUME 9 NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER 2012)