Foregrounding and Backgrounding Intimacy in Family Narratives: The Ethics of Representing Children in Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am and Sally Mann’s Hold Still

Abstract

This paper explores the highly sensitive representation of children in two contemporary memoirs (Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am and Sally Mann’s Hold Still), from a visual and textual perspective. Sally Mann (foregrounding her children, both visually and textually) and Maggie O’Farrell (backgrounding her children, and especially her daughter who turns out to be the main reason why O’Farrell wrote her memoir in the first place) come to grips with what remains the main stake of memoirs—the representation of intimacy—by using drastically opposed strategies, at least at first sight. It may not come as a surprise that a majority of memoirs and autobiographical accounts explore the authors’ relationships with their parents whereas few focus on children. And yet, relationships with one’s children represent one of the most emotionally-charged experiences one can have, but writing about them often verges on taboo and requires great subtlety. In Personal Myths and the Making of the Self, Dan P. McAdams wrote that “an infant’s relationship with mother and father is likely to influence the long-term development of a myth’s narrative tone” (35), but the opposite, though mostly unexplored, is true: our relationships with our children have a major influence on who we are and on our self-narratives as we will see through the analysis of these two memoirs.