Folding Back the Skin of Text: Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces of Trauma, Testimony, and Auto/Biographical Form(s)

A reflection on the processes, limitations, and liberations of genre, Fugitive Pieces insists simultaneously on the absolute failure of—and necessity for—autobiographical and biographical forms. I argue the text calls for the impossibility of separating genres, texts, selves, and stories in the responsibility of telling out of Holocaust trauma.