Abstract

This work of prose fiction traces the recollections of a young narrator as she attempts to piece together her own past through stories and letters written to her infant daughter. Particular emphasis is placed on the way the narrator's faltering memory figures and disfigures her sense of physical identity and gender, and also on issues surrounding the subjectification and objectification of desire. Focus is also placed on the narrator's consciousness of her written medium and the degree to which it supplants experience with an artificial facsimile; the narrator's inability to locate a consistent point-of-view in the vanishing world of her childhood points to the impossibility of constructing a reliable chronicle of the past. But unlike devices of mystery and suspense employed in fiction, the sense of mystery resulting from an incomplete memory does not necessarily point toward singular revelation. Instead, the narrator recalls the elaborate mythologies which she had created in childhood to explain those aspects of her family history which had been left unspoken or kept hidden. Her memory begins to resemble a series of rooms which the adult constructs in order to retain and restrain the mythical beast of childhood, an obscure creature which seems to vanish whenever it is looked at directly. Although the narrator's past remains obscured in shadow, its negative shape begins to emerge as her stories describe the peripheral environment surrounding her family's central inability to see, hear, or speak to one another.