| Contents | 5 |
|---|
| Acknowledgements | 7 |
|---|
| 1. Introduction | 9 |
|---|
| CONTEXTUAL AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK | 27 |
|---|
| 2. Illness and Disability in Contemporary Memoirs | 29 |
| 2.1 Illness and Disability on the Literary Market: The Age of the Memoir | 29 |
| 2.2 The Personal and the Theoretical: Memoirs of Well-Being as Academic Memoirs | 36 |
| 2.3 Narrating Illness and Disability: Conventional Scripts and Their Revisions | 40 |
| 3. Approaching ‘Well-Being’ | 49 |
| 3.1 Health Problems and the Problem with ‘Health’ | 49 |
| 3.2 Rewriting Cure: The Remission Society | 60 |
| 3.3 Recovering the Body: Embodiment and the Remission Society | 68 |
| THE ‘CASE STUDIES’ | 73 |
|---|
| 4. Healing Beyond Reconstruction: Ampu-Narration in Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals | 75 |
| 4.1 Against Linearity, Certainty, and Closure: Deconstructing the Triumph Narrative in The Cancer Journals | 83 |
| 4.2 Subverting the (Silent) War on Breast Cancer: Lorde’s Vision of the ‘Warrior’ | 93 |
| 4.3 Exposing the Post-Mastectomy Body: Lorde’s Rejection of (Narrative) Prosthesis | 103 |
| 5. Musical Cu[r]e: Reconnection in Oliver Sacks’s A Leg to Stand On | 119 |
| 5.1 “Bringing the Body Back In”: Embodiment in Sacks’s Memoir | 125 |
| 5.2 Encountering the Doctor: Sacks, Dr. Swan, and the Disappointment with the Biomedical Cure | 130 |
| 5.3 Recovery in Action: Sacks’s “Muscle Music” | 142 |
| 5.4 Merging the Objective and the Subjective: Sacks’s ‘Neurology of Identity’ | 148 |
| 6. “She Rides It Like an Untamed Pony”: The Politics of Well-Being in Simi Linton’s My Body Politic | 157 |
| 6.1 My Body Politic and the ‘New Disability Memoir’ | 162 |
| 6.2 From Cure to Accommodation: Introducing Disability Rights into the Progress Narrative | 167 |
| 6.3 Becoming Disabled: Community, Sexuality, and the “Body Politic” | 177 |
| 6.4 Beholding (the Pleasures of) Disabled Bodies | 189 |
| 7. Variation and Well-Being: Rethinking The Impaired Body in Kenny Fries’s The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory | 199 |
| 7.1 Rethinking Impairment beyond the Medical and Social Model | 205 |
| 7.2 Rewriting the (Hi)Story of the Impaired Body in Fries’s Memoir | 214 |
| 7.3 Variation and Contingency: Deconstructing Dis/Ability | 223 |
| 7.4 “Everything an Adaptation”: Alternative Ways of Coping with Impairment | 230 |
| 8. Rewriting the Diagnostic Narrative: Siri Hustvedt’s The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves | 239 |
| 8.1 The Personal Meets the Scientific: The ‘Brain Memoir’ | 244 |
| 8.2 Beyond Diagnosis: The Case of The Shaking Woman | 251 |
| 8.3 “A Woman is Shaking:” Hysteria and the Discourse of Disease | 257 |
| 8.4 The Shaking Woman as Therapeutic Narrative | 269 |
| 9. Conclusion | 281 |
| Bibliography | 295 |
|---|
