Poetry, Self-erasure and the Trace: Writing counter-history from an embodied archive

Abstract

This essay presents a poetic life writing practice developed through material exploration with diaries, to expose hidden, unwritten traces of anorexic experience that escape the archival page. Anorexia flouts tenets of traditional autobiography, skewing memory and breaking the ‘autobiographical pact’ of a truthful and consistent narrator. This article presents poetic digression and fragmentation to perform physical and cognitive anorexic intensities. This writing offers a counter-history to archival documents, leaden as they were with the voices of anorexia and medical discourse.