Vulnerability and life writing: Nancy Mairs’s autobiographical essays

Abstract

Nancy Mairs’s autobiographical essays offer an interesting insight into the way vulnerability can shape life writing and redefine it as a genre. The sense of discontinuity experienced by the author, whose multiple sclerosis keeps altering her body in unpredictable ways, is mirrored by her rejection of totalizing forms. Far from the unified, definitive portrait often offered by autobiographers, her essays turn provisionality into a defining feature; drawing from the author’s daily experiences, they question the body / mind dichotomy and other hierarchies that structure western thought, and advocate a more inclusive form of knowledge. In her essays, Nancy Mairs positions herself as a witness. Her vulnerable and marginal position as a disabled woman becomes a vantage point from which she exposes the patriarchal beliefs shaping our society and the ableist assumptions deeply embedded in our use of language. Her essays therefore often take the form of lexical analyses in which she proceeds to unpack the complex layers of meaning solidified around common words. Nancy Mairs’s rejection of the autonomous “I” of autobiography is at the heart of what one might call a relational poetics. Including the voices of her family and engaging repeatedly with the reader, her essays bring to the fore the interwoven dimension of all lives and the often unperceived reciprocity underlying the relationship between patient and caregiver.