Surrogate Selves

An autobiographically inflected work of lifewriting scholarship, this groundbreaking study examines how five autobiographical (or, in Tim O’Brien’s case, autobiographically adjacent) literary texts—The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien; “Kaddish” by Allen Ginsberg; “The White Album” by Joan Didion; and “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” by Art Spiegelman, and Psychiatric Tales by Darryl Cunningham—use distinct techniques of their respective genres—metafiction, poetry, essay, graphic narrative—to communicate the affective experience of psychic pain. This book situates the autobiographical subject/text as a stand-in (a surrogate self) for readers unable to give voice to their trauma.
Building on foundational lifewriting scholarship—particularly the work of Philippe Lejeune, Mary Mason, John Paul Eakin, and Nancy K. Miller — this book enlarges the scope of the relational self posited by Mason and subsequent feminist lifewriting scholars and extends the concept of relationality from the autobiographical subject and “chosen other” within an autobiographical text to the autobiographical text and the reader, specifically, here, in autobiographies of trauma.

As a former foster child and ward of the state with no surviving family or institutional records, the author has turned to the texts examined here—specifically those of O’Brien, Didion, Ginsberg, and Spiegelman—in the (re)construction of his lost, fragmented, and traumatic history, helping to objectify and articulate embodied memories that otherwise have had no locus. At key moments in the book, the author discusses his autobiography and affective connections to these four works, merging theory and practice. The book is distinctive in using this extended theoretical approach and the strategic use of autobiographical writing and personal history to map how O’Brien, Ginsberg, Didion, Spiegelman, and Cunningham communicate the experience of psychic pain.