Writing Oneself Back In: Narratives of Care, Grief, and Loss

Abstract

Each of these two extraordinary books has illness or disability as its primary focus, yet to call either one an illness narrative would reduce its accomplishment. Each book hinges on the author's ability to evoke suffering, but the medical aspects of this suffering-specifically interactions with health care institutions and workers-are background to each book's real interest. Perhaps that is always the goal of life writing, and these books seem better understood as life writing that happens to focus on illness and disability, rather than illness or disability narratives-a subtle but significant shift. Moments of lucidity-for example, she maintains her psychotherapy practice on the telephone, and in these conversations has an uncanny ability to regain her former voice-alternate with Alzheimer's-like loss of orientation and self-awareness. The alchemy of the book is that this ending is integral, even expected, although exactly when things come around is not explicit; there's no epiphany, no particular "lessons learned" in Crosby's phrase. Butler's author bio on the book's cover says simply that she recently received her MSW from the Columbia University School of Social Work. By the book's ending, the opening question of how to make a life livable has become "What makes it feel like a horror story?" (197). Life writing offers the implicit promise that if we readers look closely enough at the life of another person, especially a person living in extremis, and if we can read with an openness that matches the author's honesty, we will be able to see our own...