Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory

Acknowledgments

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S This research was undertaken with the support of grants and awards from the University of Queensland and from Flinders University of South Australia. For permission to reproduce book covers, my sincere thanks to Doubleday, Fourth Estate, Fremantle Press, Granta, Hale and Iremonger, HarperCollins, Headline, Penguin, Picador, and Random House. Earlier versions of two chapters have appeared elsewhere: chapter 3 in Biography 24.4 (2001) and chapter 6 in Andrea O’Reilly and Elizabeth Podeneiks, eds., Textual Mothers, Maternal Texts: Representations of Mothering in Contemporary Women’s Literature: Fiction, Poetry and Life Writing (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2009). I presented earlier versions of chapters at conferences at the University of Queensland, the University of Adelaide, and the University of Sydney and at the International Auto/ Biography Association conference in Mainz, Germany, in 2006. I am grateful to all who offered helpful comments on these discussion papers. This project began during my time as a postgraduate candidate at the University of Queensland, under the tutelage of Professor Gillian Whitlock, whose intellect and generosity have informed my thinking at every stage. My thanks go first to Gillian, my mentor, friend, and collaborator, who has had such an invaluable influence upon all aspects of my career. Second, I want to thank all who read this manuscript in its various stages of development: Tom Couser—whose work and advice have been particularly influential—Susanna Egan, Jude Seaboyer, Sidonie Smith, and Joanne Tompkins. I appreciate the rigor you each brought to this the manuscript, the time you took to offer insightful comments, and the encouragement you offered. I benefited greatly from drawing on the wealth of expertise offered by people whose own work in the field I admire so much. Thanks to friends and colleagues near and far who have listened to my rambles, offering feedback, encouragement, and/or conversation along the vii viii acknowledgments way: Brodie Beales, Kylie Cardell, Shannon Dowling, Anna Johnston, Susan Luckman, Tasha Mayne, Kelly McWilliam, Catriona Mills, Laurie McNeill, Anna Poletti, Sue Sheridan, and Sue Williams. Current and former graduate students have offered fruitful challenges and encouraged me to think more about the genres I am working with: Tully Barnett, Sharyn Kaesehagan, Hannah Kent, Threasa Meads, and Ianto Ware. Thanks to my colleagues in the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA), as well as those working in the disciplines of trauma and memory studies, whose work has had a profound impact upon mine: Paul John Eakin, Leigh Gilmore, Craig Howes, Margaretta Jolly, Rosanne Kennedy, Nancy K. Miller, Susannah Radstone, Julie Rak, and Julia Watson. Thanks to Karen Douglas, Eileen Douglas, and David Douglas for their unwavering belief and encouragement over the years. Thanks to Robbie Sutton and Jamie and Rose Douglas-Sutton, simply for being you. My thanks to Leslie Mitchner,Myra Bluebond-Langner,Marlie Wasserman, Marilyn Campbell, Rachel Friedman, India Cooper, Nicholas Humez, and all others at Rutgers University Press who were involved in the editing and preparation of this manuscript. Their dedication and professionalism propelled the project forward. Finally, but most importantly, I would like to acknowledge the support of my family—Danni, Ella, and Josh Spencer—and to dedicate this book to them with love. Thanks for believing in me and the project, and for providing distractions when necessary. Contesting Childhood  1  Introduction constructing childhood, contesting childhood Childhood—a temporary state—becomes an emblem for our anxieties about the passing of time, the destruction of historical formations, or conversely, a vehicle for our hopes for the future. The innocent child is caught somewhere over the rainbow—between nostalgia and utopian optimism, between the past and the future. —Chris Jenks, Childhood The most notable and perhaps most infamous publishing trend of the 1990s was the autobiography of childhood—a piece of autobiographical writing concerned with the narration of childhood experiences.Autobiographers such as Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, and James McBride burst onto the American literary scene in the mid-1990s, paving the way for a plethora of similarly styled texts to follow. These autobiographies were distinctive for their depiction of challenging, often traumatic childhoods—characterized by abuse, poverty, discrimination, and identity struggles. A search on Amazon.com reveals that over a thousand autobiographies of childhood have been published in roughly the past fifteen years—and this only considers mainstream forms of publication. This literary trend shows no signs of...