Panel #9 Session 2
Friday 1 November - 9:00
Building 25, Room 2
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​Chair: Samantha Bowers
We need to talk about writing and reading the monstrous mother in I’m Glad My Mom Died
- Cheryl O’Byrne
University of Sydney
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Abstract: Jennette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died has been on the New York Times Best Sellers List for Hardcover Nonfiction since the memoir was published 50 weeks ago, in August 2022. It has sold more than 2 million copies. McCurdy was a childhood television star. She narrates her experience in the industry and paints her mother, Debra, as an abusive, manipulative woman who orchestrated McCurdy’s career. Debra died of cancer when she was 56 and McCurdy was 21. The title of the memoir is not ironic. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. On Good Reads, nearly 620,000 reviewers have given it an average of 4.5/5 stars. The Atlantic calls it “a triumph of the confessional genre,” and The Sydney Morning Herald praises the way McCurdy “expertly treads a tightrope between hilarity and heartbreak.” In this paper, I draw on scholarship from literary, life writing and motherhood studies to trouble the memoir’s reception and composition. I discuss the ethics of McCurdy’s portrayal in terms of the responsibilities a matriographer has to her mother-subject; and I discuss the politics of the memoir in terms of the way it reinforces patriarchal motherhood. I make a case for why the monstrous mother trope in I’m Glad and other recent matriographies (filial life narratives that centre on the writer’s mother) is fuelled by and exacerbating socio-political crises. I argue for more nuanced matriographical representations and more discerning responses.
Dr Cheryl O’Byrne is an associate lecturer in the Media and Communications discipline at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the relationships between ethics, aesthetics and politics in life writing. Her work appears in Life Writing, a/b: Auto/biography Studies, Australian Literary Studies and Literary Journalism Studies (forthcoming). In 2021, she was co-winner of the inaugural Australian Literary Studies PhD Essay Prize. Cheryl completed her PhD at the University of Sydney in late 2022 and is currently working on a monograph, provisionally titled The Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Matriography: An Australian Perspective.
Beyond the academy: Researching the biography of Eliza Cook
- Carmel Summers
University of Canberra
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Hermione Lee describes the biographer’s role as trying to make a solid figure out of fragments, left-overs and gaps (Lee, 2005, p. 4). Archives may not only be neglected, incomplete, or frugal, but worse, deliberately destroyed, as was the case for Eliza Cook, the forgotten wife of Captain Cook. Traditional academic approaches often yield information of little value under these circumstances. Both biographies written to date about Eliza Cook, have been “imagined”, reflecting the scarcity of information about the subject (Day, 2005, Enquist, 2022). Working beyond the academy was not only helpful, but essential to gain access to the information to accurately depict the subject and avoid speculation. In addition to traditional academic research at libraries, archives and museums, this took many forms; meeting volunteers, local historians and church treasurers, interrogating objects, serendipitous discoveries from location visits, joining the Captain Cook Society. Some of these conversations were difficult: although the name of James Cook today is associated with invasion and colonisation, was this true of his wife, Eliza? While she may have supported her husband in his patriotic quests and obsession to “go farther than any other man” (Edwards, 2003), was she complicit in his intentions? Research indicates that she was the active beneficiary of his quests but paid only a meagre return to the community from her accumulated wealth. This paper examines the value that working beyond the academy can provide to the biographer to avoid the temptations of speculation, and reciprocally the contributions of the biographer to diverse communities outside the academy, especially when issues are contentious.
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References:
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Edwards, Philip (ed.) (2003). James Cook: The Journals, 30th January 1774, Penguin Books. p.331.
Day, Marele (2005). Mrs Cook: The Real and Imagined Life of the Captan’s Life. Allen & Unwin.
Enquist, Anna (2022). The Home Coming. Trans. Eileen J. Stevens. Amazon Crossing, Seattle.
Lee, Hermione. (2005). Introduction: Writing about Lives. In Body Parts : Essays in Life-writing. Chatto & Windus. p.4
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Carmel Summers is a PhD Candidate at the University of Canberra, writing a poetic biography of Eliza Cook and researching the capability of poetic biography to convey the truth of the biographic subject.
A way of discovering: How artworks represented in fiction can reflect a character’s state of mind
- Sarah Giles
Swinburne University of Technology
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This presentation will offer insights into the development of my work in progress A Lot Like Joy. A short story cycle using multiple first-person perspectives and informed by the artworks and recorded details of Australian modernist artist Joy Hester (1920—1960), A Lot Like Joy explores three women’s interconnected lives and experiences of isolation caused by trauma. The discussion will examine how artists and artworks can be represented in direct and indirect ways in fiction to create a foundation of knowledge so that even a reader unfamiliar with the artist or their work can enjoy the intricacies of the artwork within the context of central themes and issues in the short stories. I will refer to what A. S. Byatt (2001: 10) describes as ‘invisible things’: things that define character, such as a painting, positioned within a narrative, that reflects the values, attitudes and ‘thought processes’ of a character, exposing their innermost fears or reflecting their ‘attractions’ or ‘repulsions’. I will discuss Byatt’s (ibid: 71) suggestion that sometimes in fiction ‘portraits are a way of discovering […] they are mirrors in which […] identity is reflected’, and how, in this way, a painting represented in fiction can serve as a measure of the protagonist’s ‘state of mind’ (Fishwick 2004: 56). Drawing on Byatt’s essay Portraits in Fiction (2001) alongside her short story cycle The Matisse Stories (1993), my presentation will illuminate the creative choices made regarding the purpose and presence of Hester’s artworks throughout A Lot Like Joy.
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References:
Byatt A S 1993 The Matisse Stories, Chatto & Windus Limited, London
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Byatt A S 2018 [2001] Portraits in Fiction, Vintage, London
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Fishwick S 2004, ‘Encounters with Matisse: Space, art, and intertextuality in A. S. Byatt’s The Matisse Stories and Marie Redonnet’s Villa Rosa’, The Modern Language Review, 99:1, 52–64
Sarah Giles (she/her) is a PhD candidate at Swinburne University researching the possibilities of the contemporary short story cycle exploring women’s experiences of isolation, trauma and mental illness. Her writing has been published in ACE III: Arresting Contemporary stories by Emerging Writers, The Incompleteness Book, TEXT Journal, The Victorian Writer, Science / Art Network (ScAN) & Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP), ILLUMINATE, and Lip Magazine.
Sarah takes an interest in fractured narratives, women’s relationships, Joy Hester, intersectional feminist perspectives and realist fiction.
We need to talk about longing: The imperative of languaging the feeling body through writing to health and wellbeing policy and practice
- Stephanie Dale
Queensland University of Technology
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What is the impact of unactioned human longing on health and wellbeing, and, by extension, on communities and the world/Earth? This paper presents findings from a longitudinal wellbeing-through-writing program group study. The study exposed the absence of language (common or otherwise) for the feeling body (the one doing the living) among adult humans from a general population. It evidences transformational lifeworld outcomes made possible by a) actioned longing supported by a writing program, and b) languaging the feeling body through writing.
The study was underpinned by an online wellbeing-through-writing group program, and embedded in a phenomenological, salutogenic (origins of health) theoretical framework. Data analysis involved fifty-four semi-structured interviews undertaken over four months with sixteen participants, all of whom were navigating lifeworld challenges, such as natural disaster, gender transition, cancer, and divorce. Viewed salutogenically, the study identified longing as a tension between ease and dis-ease. The study found humans capacitated to language the feeling body through writing see more, hear more, trust more. It also found that languaging through writing the interrelationships between longing/shame, trust, connection (with self, others, world/Earth), as experienced by and through the feeling body, are foundational to recovery and growth. The author concludes that health and wellbeing practitioners and policymakers who do not pay attention to human longing, as languaged by/through the feeling body, fail clients and communities; and that health, wellness and public policy may be optimised by tending to the longing of the being in well-being. These findings present a conceptual frontier in wellbeing-through-writing research.
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Stephanie Dale is a researcher and writing program developer with a background in newspaper journalism. In 2014 she founded The Write Road, a wellbeing initiative that pioneered writing programs in rural and remote Australia. In 2020 she began work on doctoral research investigating the missing theoretical key in wellbeing-through-writing research and practice: that is, not whether but how writing facilitates and sustains health and wellbeing. Her thesis is under examination. Stephanie is interested in whole-of-life community-based research that employs salutogenic (strengths-focused) design, to produce research and research experiences of value to individuals, communities, and policymakers.