The Life of the Body in American Autobiography: The Year in the Us

“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” A host of life writers seemingly responded to this urgent refrain sung by a multicultural cast of founding fathers at the conclusion of Hamilton. By putting the question of survival at the center of a musical about American history and futurity, Lin-Manuel Miranda joined a company of life writers whose memoirs and essays placed the vulnerable body center stage in bold narratives about life, death, belonging, and legacy. Alternately vulnerable, injured, desiring, pregnant, grieving, and haunted by history, the body offered life writers a way to think through public space, relationships, precarity, and survival. This wasn’t the year of self-help; this was the year of the body.

A net cast widely in 2015–16 across popular, critically acclaimed, and formally innovative texts alike would gather up a cluster of memoirs by women rockers, including Patti Smith’s M Train, a follow-up to her National Book Award winner Just Kids; founding member of Sonic Youth Kim Gordon’s Girl in a Band; and underground feminist punk-rock band Sleater-Kinney member Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. Other artists-from-another-form include poet Elizabeth Alexander’s account of her husband’s unexpected death, The Light of the World, and photographer Sally Mann’s Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs about her development as an artist. Mann’s well-known photographs of her children published in Immediate Family became a cause célèbre in the battle over the restriction of public funding for the arts.

Teacher of memoir writing and bestselling memoirist of The Liar’s Club Mary Karr offered The Art of Memoir and author Sarah Manguso, who has written two other memoirs, penned the meta-memoir Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, a meditation on the diary of over eight hundred thousand pages she has kept for twenty-five years. Less a eulogy for her relinquished diary than a meditation on how her relationship to it changed when she had a child, Manguso evokes the life writer’s acute awareness of time, of endings and beginnings telescoping and dissolving. Physician Paul Kalanithi’s posthumously published memoir When Breath Becomes Air recounts his diagnosis with stage IV metastatic lung cancer and physical decline. Kalanithi’s clinically clear prose is infused with moral clarity. His memoir about the finitude of our bodies survives him. Paul Lisicky’s The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship connects two distinct narratives—one about the dissolution of his marriage to poet and memoirist Mark Doty and the other about the death of his beloved friend, the writer Denise Gess—two mutually illuminating narratives of aching loss, memorialization, and writerly self-fashioning. Lisicky’s memoir of three writing lives explores the pressures of fame and the competition that accompanies success.

From the range of work ushered into the world in 2015–16, three texts will serve for more detailed description: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), Christina Crosby’s A Body, Undone: Living on after Great Pain (2016), and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2016). Each writer adapts form in the service of life story: for Coates, it’s the letter; for Crosby, the braided narrative; and for Nelson, the essay. All three writers place personal relationships at the center of life story.

TA-NEHISI COATES, BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

The deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland focused national attention on race, unequal policing in communities of color, and injustice. The social justice movements Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name joined public assembly and social media in an anti-racist and feminist framing of protest. As their influence spread, a backlash surfaced over whose lives could claim the status of mattering. The controversial conjunction of “black,” “lives,” and “matter” exposed the exclusions that haunt life in the US. Slavery intimately haunts life story. Its influence is felt in the relationship to diverse audiences that writers inherit and create, in the history of literacy and access to authorship...