“This is how we live”: Witnessing and Testimony in BRCA Memoirs

While postmodern texts often challenge the expected conventions of illness narrative, BRCA memoirs offer a particular kind of intervention, especially through their representation of time. Recent memoirs by Masha Gessen (Blood Matters) and Sarah Gabriel (Eating Pomegranates) resist in complex ways the linearity of what Arthur W. Frank has called the “restitution narrative.” Informed by repetition and the cyclical pattern of unfolding trauma, these memoirs present the lines between past and present, subject and kin as hauntingly blurred and indistinct.