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'This paper explores the representation of ambiguous loss in a recent Australian memoir, Learning how to breathe by Linda Neil (2009). My reading of this memoir focuses on the way presence and absence are manifested in the text and the way acts of creativity— making music, recreating family history and writing the memoir—are invoked as a way of tolerating ambiguity and reconfiguring the narrator’s sense of identity. I suggest that memoirs about ambiguous loss give an important voice to an otherwise silenced, though common, form of grief.' (Publication abstract)
Notes
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Epigraph: That feeling of nearness to the shapeless ghost, Ambiguity, is what I want most, what I want to put inside a book, what I want the reader to sense. And because it is at once a thing and a no-thing, the reader will have to find it, not only in what I have written, but also in what I have not written. (Hustvedt 2012: 23)
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Last amended 22 Sep 2014 13:11:02
http://www.axonjournal.com.au/issue-4/%E2%80%98-shapeless-ghost%E2%80%99
The Shapeless Ghost : Ambiguous Loss and Creativity in Learning How to Breathe
Axon : Creative Explorations
Axon : Creative Explorations
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