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Popular Culture Review
I should fictionalize it more, I should conceal myself. I should
consider the responsibilities of characterization, I should conflate her
two children into one, or reverse their genders, or otherwise alter them,
I should make her boyfriend a husband, I should explicate all the
tributaries of my extended family (its remarriages, its intercince
politics), 1 should novelize the whole thing, I should make it
multigenerational, I should work in my forefathers (stonemasons and
newspapermen), I should let artifice create an elegant surface, I should
make the events orderly, I should wait and write about it later, I should
wait until I’m not angry, I shouldn’t clutter my narrative with
fragments, with mere recollections of good times, or with regrets, I
should make Meredith’s death shapely and persuasive, not blunt and
subjunctive, I shouldn’t have to think the unthinkable, I shouldn’t have
to suffer, I should address her here directly (these are the ways I miss
you), I should write only of affection, I should make our travels on this
earthly landscape safe and secure, I should have a better ending, I
shouldn’t say her life was short and often sad, I shouldn’t say she had
her demons, as I do too.
Works Cited
Anderson, Linda. Autobiography. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
Cixous, Helene. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. New York:
Routledge, 1997.
Colacurcio, Michael J. “Introduction.” Nathaniel Hawthorne. Selected Tales and Sketches.
New York: Penguin, 1987.
De Man, Paul. “Autobiography as Defacement.” The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York:
Columbia UP, 1984.
DeMott, Benjamin. “Guilt Stalker.” The New York Review of Books (Sept. 26, 2002): 7376.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York:
Routledge, 1992.
Kent, Thomas. “Hermeneutics and Genre.” The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science,
Culture. Ed. David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1991.
Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1989.
Lodge, David. After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. New York: Routledge,
1990.
Moody, Rick. The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002.
—. Demonology. Boston: Little, Brown, 2000.