Subverting Autobiography: Illness, Narrative, and Negotiating Dis-ease in Margaret Ogola's Place of Destiny

ABSTRACT:This article explores the repressed autobiographical narrative that runs through Margaret Ogola's Place of Destiny (2005). Based on Ogola's experience, the novel takes the form of a fictional autobiography as it documents the story of Amor A. Lore, a business executive woman in her late forties, from the moment she was diagnosed with liver cancer and ends with her eventual demise. In this article, I critically reflect on Margaret Ogola's personal experience of writing about cancer and how she focuses on the complex dynamics of self-representation, challenges, and opportunities related to fictional autobiography. While emphasizing the victims' experience of cancer in this fictional life story, I argue that Margaret Ogola rewrites the cancer narrative by fictionalizing her personal experience as a means of stationing the authority of the artistic enterprise in the desires of a diseased body to overcome the trauma of disintegration. This essay draws on the ideas of Ann Jurecic and Leigh Gilmore to conceptualize the dialectical interplay between facts and fiction in an attempt to understand possibilities of thinking about and experiencing disease without submitting the text to an effusive paranoid reading.