HOW DO YOU TELL A SHATTERED STORY? THE INTIMATE DISASTER IN 21ST CENTURY MEMOIR AND FICTION

Abstract

This dissertation considers the ways in which writers write about disaster in 21st century memoir and fiction. It positions narrative as an intermediary in the confrontation of loss, dread, and upheaval, and proposes the concept of the “intimate disaster” as a vital connective tool. This research interrogates the intersection of the colossal disaster (tsunamis, earthquakes, geopolitical warfare) and the individual disaster (heartbreak, illness, loss) as a crucial point of transformative witnessing and creative mediation. By examining the ways in which the big and the small communicate, this dissertation explores the concept of “the intimate” as a point of access between the ordinary and the extraordinary, and between the individual and the collective. I argue that intimate disasters undo the world like the big, spectacular disasters, and the colossal, in turn, is made known through the intimate. Through an interdisciplinary lens that combines literary analysis, narrative theory, and the tenets of disaster and emergency management, this dissertation analyzes contemporary works of memoir and fiction that confront disaster. Chapter One, “The Opening,” examines key temporal phases of disaster onset through the opening pages of Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, Wave, and Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. Chapter Two, “The Meeting of Dread,” explores anticipatory disaster through the concept of the “dread space” in Julia Phillips’ novel Disappearing Earth and Andrea Gunraj’s novel The Lost Sister, texts that narrativize the familial and communal wreckage caused by abduction and disappearance. Chapter Three, “How Do You Tell a Shattered Story?” confronts the atrocity of the Cambodian genocide through the exploration of the child witness in Loung Ung’s memoir, At First They Killed My Father and Madeleine Thien’s novel, Dogs at the Perimeter. By theorizing the intimate disaster, this research contributes to contemporary scholarship on disaster writing by showing how writers confront—or meet—disaster through a liminal, fragmented, intermediary space grounded by objects of intimacy. It emphasizes the role of the intimate in making vast, incomprehensible upheavals points of vital witnessing where both the individual and the collective work in contentious symbiosis to mediate disaster.