On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs: A Critical Anthology

231 Pages·2011·1.2 MB·English

by  Merri Lisa Johnson

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN’S
CRITICAL STUDIES IN GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND CULTURE
Highlighting the work taking place at the crossroads of sociology, sexuality
studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, this series
offers a platform for scholars pushing the boundaries of gender and sexual-
ity studies substantively, theoretically, and stylistically. The authors draw on
insights from diverse scholarship and research in popular culture, ethnogra-
phy, history, cinema, religion, performance, new media studies, and techno-
science studies to render visible the complex manner in which gender and
sexuality intersect and can, at times, create tensions and fissures between one
another. Encouraging breadth in terms of both scope and theme, the series
editors seek works that explore the multifaceted domain of gender and sexu-
ality in a manner that challenges the taken-for-granted. On one hand, the
series foregrounds the pleasure, pain, politics, and aesthetics at the nexus of
sexual practice and gendered expression. On the other, it explores new sites
for the expression of gender and sexuality, the new geographies of intimacy
being constituted at both the local and global scales.
Series Editors:
PATRICIA T. CLOUGH is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at
Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Clough is on the editorial
boards of Women’s Studies Quarterly, Body and Society, Subjectivity, Cultural
Studies/Critical Method, Qualitative Inquiry, and Women and Performance.
Clough is the co-editor of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays in the Governance of
Life and Death (with Craig Willse, 2011); author of The Affective Turn:
Theorizing the Social (with Jean Halley, 2007); Autoaffection: Unconscious
Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000); The End(s) of Ethnography: From
Realism to Social Criticism (1998); Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and
Academic Discourse (1994).
R. DANIELLE EGAN is Professor and Chair of the Gender and Sexuality
Studies Program at St. Lawrence University. Egan is the author of Dancing
for Dollars and Paying for Love: The Relationships between Exotic Dancers
and their Regulars (2006) and co-author of Theorizing the Sexual Child in
Modernity (with Gail Hawkes, 2010), both with Palgrave Macmillan. She
is also the co-editor of Flesh for Fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic
Dance (with Katherine Frank and Merri Lisa Johnson, 2006). She is on the
editorial board of Sexuality and Culture.
Titles:
Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A History of the First
International Sexual Freedom Movement
Elena Mancini
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Queer Voices: Vocality, the Uncanny, and Popular Music
Freya Jarman-Ivens
On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs: A Critical Anthology
Edited by Merri Lisa Johnson and Susannah B. Mintz
The Aesthetics of Cute in Contemporary Japanese Art
Yoke-Sum Wong [forthcoming]
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On the Literary Nonfiction of
Nancy Mairs
A Critical Anthology
Edited by
Merri Lisa Johnson
and
Susannah B. Mintz
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ON THE LITERARY NONFICTION OF NANCY MAIRS
Copyright © Merri Lisa Johnson and Susannah B. Mintz, 2011.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above c ompanies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–0–230–11370–1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the
Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: September 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
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This book is dedicated to Nancy Mairs for the pleasure of
her narrative company and for giving so many of us
the courage to say the next hard thing.
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Contents
Preface: Hello and Goodbye ix
Nancy Mairs
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction; Or Two Ways In
On Writing toward Trust 3
Susannah B. Mintz
On Feminist Intellectual History 7
Merri Lisa Johnson
New Essays
1 On Difficult Gifts: A Biographical Portrait of Nancy Mairs 25
Hayley Mitchell Haugen
2 On Writing in a Collaborative Spirit: Nancy Mairs’s Ethic
of Community 43
Susan G. Cumings
3 On Depression Narratives: “Hence, into the dark,
we write . . . ” 63
Hilary Clark
4 On the Rhetoric of Gloom and Joy: “In turbulent love
with the world” 79
Susannah B. Mintz
5 On Nancy’s Husband George: Masculinity, Disability,
and Sex after Cancer 97
Margaret Rose Torrell
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viii CONTENTS
6 On Embodied Theology: Sacraments of the Body in
Ordinary Time and A Dynamic God 115
Jenny Bangsund
Foundational Statements
7 Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Lifewriting 133
G. Thomas Couser
8 “Making Up the Stories as We Go Along”: Men,
Women, and Narratives of Disability 145
Madonne Miner
9 Transforming the Tale: The Auto/body/ographies of
Nancy Mairs 161
Susannah B. Mintz
10 D ismembering the Heterosexual Imaginary: A Feminist
Cultural Anatomy of the Infidelity Narrative in
Nancy Mairs’s Remembering the Bone House 183
Merri Lisa Johnson
Notes on Contributors 213
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Preface
Hello and Goodbye
Nancy Mairs
W
hen I first learned that a collection of critical studies of my essays
was going to be published, I laughed, partly in delight but also in deri-
sion. I was inclined to say, along with the French nobleman Michel
de Montaigne, who originated the form in the sixteenth century,
“Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason
thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a sub-
ject.” Throughout my studies for an AB, an MFA, and a PhD, I had
written countless critical pieces about a range of literature from the
poetry of the Exeter Book to Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor,
taking both the works and my criticism of them very seriously. Why
would anyone expend similar effort on my scribblings?
Very quickly my amusement turned to chagrin. I realized that in
laughing at this undertaking, I demeaned my own work, of which I
am proud, and even more importantly, I demeaned my readers, most
of whom I don’t know and over whose responses I have no control
but to whom I owe my life as a writer. The appropriate response,
which rapidly overwhelmed me, was gratitude. Not for readers’ criti-
cal insights—I haven’t yet read any of these essays nor will I until after
the book is published—but for their simply being there, over all these
years, keeping me company as I’ve explored the human condition and
my place in it.
We’ve covered a good bit of territory, readers and I, in the quarter
of a century during which I’ve carried out the task I set for myself at
the outset: deciphering a woman’s life. When I wrote my first essay,
“On Touching by Accident,” as an assignment for a class in nonfic-
tion writing taught by Edward Abbey, I had no idea I had found my
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