Three Years on Doreen’s Sofa: Holding Fast to the Comforts of Intimacy and Family in a Postcolonial World

This article explores the troubling intersections among postcolonial, metafamily, and memory studies in Three Years on Doreen’s Sofa (2011), a novel by Lee Cataluna. Through this colorful recidivist tale of a dysfunctional local man named Bobby, Cataluna weaves together a tragicomic story that sharply critiques the breakdown of contemporary social and family ties in Hawai’i. Bobby’s meandering, picaresque journey through Maui highlights the diverse forms of imprisonment and memory loss that have debilitated contemporary Hawaiian society. As Bobby seeks to connect on the outside to his friends, family, and his past, he is confronted by postcolonial legacies that have degraded the possibilities for authentic subjectivity, memory, intimacy, and familial bonding.