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  • Memoirs as Mirrors:Counterstories in Contemporary Memoir
  • Abigail Gosselin (bio)

Stories about psychological problems like addiction typically follow a common structure.1 The narrative begins with an account of how the subject became sick, chronicles her worsening condition, and culminates in her lowest point or darkest moment when she hit "rock bottom." In some narratives, the subject dies or is permanently institutionalized or otherwise has little hope for recovery;2 in other memoirs, the subject undergoes treatment following this lowest point and gains full recovery or management of the problem.3 Memoirs with this structure are entertaining and often educational. They offer sensationalistic drama that safely contains the pain, messiness, and monotony of actual experience, and they often provide moral lessons as well. To achieve these purposes, certain aspects of experience—especially identity, subjectivity, agency, and responsibility—must be represented simplistically and straightforwardly. For example, these memoirs typically depict the subject as an autonomous individual who is either an agent or a victim and who is plagued by a problem that has identifiable causes and solutions. This problem progresses naturally through a plotline that has a clear beginning, a dramatic middle, and a tidily resolved ending. Experience is presented dichotomously either as something to which one can relate and therefore with which one can identify and perhaps empathize; or, it is presented as something that is radically different from one's own experience, something that invites a sensationalistic and judgmental gaze at the "other."

In simplifying experience, this narrative structure does not reflect the lived reality of most people and is consequently problematic. By narrowly circumscribing how a story about psychological disorder can be told, the dominant paradigm limits the ways that people can understand such experiences, both their own and those of others. This limitation reduces the potentially transformative power of narratives, which can often aid in understanding and can contribute to public discourse.4 Alternative narrative structures—or counterstories5—are necessary to avoid these pitfalls. When [End Page 133] memoirs accurately reflect complications of experience, they act as mirrors of lived experience rather than as fairy tales, moral lessons, or means of escape.

This paper analyzes two memoirs that serve as counterstories. Ann Marlowe's How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z shows readers what heroin use feels like by reflecting her phenomenological experience through a writing style intended to effect a similar feeling. David Sheff's Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction provides a mirror of addiction in his desiring of and searching for an end that is ultimately unattainable: understanding of his son's addiction to methamphetamine and knowledge of its outcome. The formats that the authors use to tell their stories mirror the particular complications they depict. Through their alternative narrative structures, the authors represent aspects of lived experience more realistically than they could otherwise, as they are unconstrained by the limitations of the dominant paradigm and thus able to achieve more sophisticated purposes.

Complications of Time and Identity

Disordered Time and Flattened Experience

One way that a counterstory subverts the dominant paradigm is by accurately reflecting the lived experience of time as disordered. A typical memoir chronologically orders and paces experiences for dramatic effect—an effect it achieves by organizing such experiences into a clear beginning, a dramatic middle, and a tidy ending. This structure sanitizes and simplifies the lived experience that it is supposed to reflect. While people certainly experience time chronologically, those with psychological disorders often do not experience it neatly. In her depiction of what being-in-time on heroin is like, Ann Marlowe effectively demonstrates complications of experience and time.

What makes Marlowe's memoir, How to Stop Time, so provocative is that the style of the book reflects its subject matter. The immediate impression of the book is that it is a series of vignettes told arbitrarily and randomly, out of chronological order, arranged only by the alphabet (each vignette is labeled by a word, which allows the stories to be put in alphabetical order).6 Each vignette could stand alone as its own story or philosophical musing; the collection is united only by the fact that the stories are the...

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