This essay explores mothering and family life in three contemporary narratives: Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Sarah Manguso's Ongoingness, and Heidi Julavits's The Folded Clock. These texts, through an autofictional account of their... more
This essay explores mothering and family life in three contemporary narratives: Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Sarah Manguso's Ongoingness, and Heidi Julavits's The Folded Clock. These texts, through an autofictional account of their authors’ experiences with family making, call attention to the challenges contemporary American families face vis à vis gender and maternal roles and mainstream assumptions such as heteronormativity. The narratives’ combined interest in self- and family-making is reflected in their fluid generic status. In our post-postmodern literary period, these authors’ life writing is not only an attempt at postirony. Rather, these narratives respond to the affective logic of contemporary autofiction, portraying relational identities of the self. Nelson, Manguso and Julavits represent motherhood as a transformative, all-encompassing and bodily experience and choose to rely on “unfinished” genres (half-memoirs, half-essays, half-fiction) to reflect the idea of incompleteness around today’s motherhood and family matters.
