Grief As It Is: Genre and Narrative Withholding in the Miserable Memoir

One of the consequences of the so-called “memoir boom” of the 1990s and early 2000s is that it both reflected and generated an enormous hunger for memoirs of grief and suffering; these memoirs combine to provide that increasingly codified genre of storytelling (what the Bookseller magazine and industry jargon term “misery lit”) with fixed conventions. Here, I look at two memoirs, Helene Cooper’s The House at Sugar Beach (2009) and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2007), in order to trace writerly strategies of resistance against the modes of interpretation that the genre expectations of the grief memoir create. I analyze the moves that the writers make in order to honor the stories they tell despite the pressures that attend generic discourses of suffering, including where those discourses are moored to racial and gender associations.