Dismembering the Heterosexual Imaginary: A Feminist Cultural Anatomy of the Infidelity Narrative in Nancy Mairs’s Remembering the Bone House

In a postmodern memoir of obsession titled I Love Dick (wherein a man named Dick is the object of the author’s obsession, not an anatomical generalization, though the provocative slippage is surely intentional), Chris Kraus raises questions about how women’s use of the personal in art is interpreted. Describing her friends’ nonplussed reactions to her book project, she poses a question that resonates with my pedagogical concerns in teaching courses on gender and autobiography: “Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come off clean?” A few pages later, Kraus rejects reviews of a 1975 installation of Hannah Wilke’s photography that called it “a deeply thrilling venture into narcissism.” Pointing to the feminist truism, the personal is political, Kraus insists there is more to self-revelation than self-absorption: “As if the only possible reason for a woman to publicly reveal herself could be self-therapeutic. As if the point was not to reveal the circumstances of one’s own objectification.”¹ When I teach the memoir Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Place and Space by Nancy Mairs, I approach the lectern equipped with passages like these to defuse the negative reactions I have come to expect, but it is an almost physical wrestling match to turn students’ eyes from authorial self-revelation to the circumstances of objectification, even when the author explicitly states social criticism as her autobiographical purpose, as Mairs does in the introduction to this fiercely political text.

Jeanne Braham also writes about the challenges of teaching Mairs’s literary nonfiction, noting, “readers who touch her incendiary essays often come away with burned hands.” She contrasts Mairs’s polemical essays with more softly rendered scenes in Remembering the Bone House, a book Braham posits as more audience-friendly compared to “the gaping wounds hung out on the taut line of essay to bleed, as in Plaintext.”² Yet, responses to Mairs’s memoir tend to be mixed. There is always a handful of students (often but not always female) who fall in love with the book and walk around with dog-eared copies saying things like I don’t want lovers, I want poems or Your body is not a temple as if the phrases were secret code for their own struggles towards self-actualization. Invariably, however, there are other students (often but not always male) who condemn Mairs for her sexual encounters—specifically her infidelity—invoking the harsh language of misogyny, calling the author selfish and slut and whore, and turning their noses up in the air as if the book itself smelled of sex and dirt.

These students dismiss her memoir as the unredeemable confessions of a narcissistic narrator, an uncanny echo of the negative reception in early reviews of Remembering the Bone House. A writer for the Chicago Tribune asserted that Remembering the Bone House “is weakest when it discusses Mairs’s physical and erotic development,” her language in these passages described as “tedious and all-too-familiar.” The review ended with a dismissive harrumph: “This reader would have preferred to have heard fewer ‘tales of doomed love’ and more about [Mairs’s] affair with words.” Likewise, the reviewer for Publisher’s Weekly asserted the memoir “loses much of its zest because of her incessant repetition, in eventually wearisome detail, of her sexual adventures with many men and her brief affair with a woman,” concluding that “the lurid effects drown her poet’s voice and seem more exploitative than revelatory.”³ Whereas Braham presents Mairs’s work (alongside Audre Lorde’s and May Sarton’s) as an “alternative script,” a “lens of empathy,” and “a window flooding our own lives with light” (p. 71), a reading that matches my own exuberant pleasure in the nonconformist stance of the narrative, there seems to be a piece of logic missing for other readers, as their moral and aesthetic condemnations constitute nothing less than a misreading of the book...