"What was failure? What was success?": The Impostor Syndrome's Literary Transformations

Marian Engel's Sarah Bastard's Notebook and Christine Smallwood's The Life of the Mind bookend an emerging literary history of the impostor syndrome and establish fiction as an important source for theorizing it as a cultural phenomenon. This essay argues that the impostor syndrome should be understood as a structure of feeling that articulates the contradictory experiences of women thinking in public. A comparative analysis of narrative irresolution in each book also tracks a shift in conceptualizing impostor syndrome from feminist optimism to neoliberal stuckness.