Forgetting and the Writing Moment: Corrections and Family Archives

This chapter is devoted to an analysis of texts which use paratextual devices such as extensive footnotes, corrections, or multiple narratives in order to accentuate the complications of writing memory. Texts analysed include the works of Mary McCarthy, George Perec, Dave Eggers, and Martin Amis. By analysing texts that bring to the foreground the memory processes at work in autobiographical writing, we gain insight, not only into the nature of experimental texts of this type, but into autobiographical writing in general. In the second half of the chapter I discuss autobiographers’ search and encounter with the family archive. This is an area which draws attention to the writing moment and to the attempts the authors make at discovering and reworking the past. Among the texts discussed are works by Vladimir Nabokov, Sally Mann, and Linda Grant.