Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives

The surge in life narratives published in the late twentieth century has been described as a memoir boom.¹ In this expanding market, women’s life stories gained new prominence. They were published by commercial presses, were circulated to broad audiences, garnered reviews, were widely adopted in resurgent book clubs, and were consumed within the dynamics of “compassionate liberalism” that Lauren Berlant has described as an “intimate public.” As Berlant notes, popular forms like memoir, where audiences experience reading together as emotional connection to others, participated in and themselves represented a form of politics: a sentimental citizenship that promoted feelings of attachment to the ideals of democracy that the objects themselves could not guarantee.²

Unlike the boom-bust cycle suggested by the analogy to a boom, memoir publishing remains strong. However, the boom now incorporates a full-blown backlash against memoir itself and women’s memoir in particular, in the form of a boom/lash.³ The boom/lash describes how the discrediting of the genre of memoir is now routinely included in reviews of specific texts. The stigma attached to memoir represents a form of witness tainting that can be mobilized as a ready-made judgment against any particular text. What accounts for the simultaneous popularity and denunciation of this form of testimony? How does the act of publishing a memoir provide material for further judgment that can stick to women witnesses? How do the transits of specific memoirs enable us to view the range of judgments circulating within testimonial networks now?

If we focus on the rise of neoliberal life narratives less as the periodization of a boom followed by a bust and more as the attachment of backlash to first-person nonfiction, we gain a new perspective on the investments in tainting witnesses during this period of testimony, as well as an alternative historicization of its time frame.⁴ We notice two key features here: first, a different historicization of the boom recognizes that the popularity of memoirs published in the mid-1990s—like Girl, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen (1993); The Liar’s Club, by Mary Karr (1995); and Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt (1996)⁵—is preceded and prepared for by Anita Hill’s testimony, as well as the rise in the publication and circulation of first-person literature by women of color, including Rigoberta Menchú, and queer writers. And, second, a focus on Oprah Winfrey’s media empire and its relation to testimonial networks reveals how representations of trauma and gender migrated from memoir to self-help through her television show, book club, magazine, network, and live tours at a particular moment in the boom/lash and provided a structure for preserving the redemption narrative’s popularity by relocating to self-help from its proximity to doubt.

The memoir boom/lash represents a neoliberal formation in which the potency, and threat, of nonnormative witnesses and narratives that catalyzed this period of vitality in life writing were absorbed and neutralized by a newly ascendant redemption narrative. Although memoir was initially welcomed as it reached broader audiences, writers like Kathryn Harrison, whose memoir, The Kiss (1998), focused on adult daughter–father incest, were subsequently tainted: first, as rule breakers of public decorum, and second, as potential liars and frauds. Within an earlier moment of openness to such confessional accounts, testimony seemed almost welcome. It drew new audiences to memoir through popular and critically acclaimed texts, enabled a politics of identity to come into view, and demonstrated the persistent cultural authority of a first-person account. This openness would prove brief, but that it was displaced so rapidly by more traditional notions of social, human, and literary value indicates that the jurisdiction of memoir already contained the sticky judgments that would amend doubt to women’s testimony.

In the decades after highly charged jurisdictions coalesced around Anita Hill and Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony, life stories by women with compelling literary voices and stories to tell about everyday violence circulated to broad audiences. Publishing houses added memoirs to existing lists and created new imprints, booksellers reorganized displays to create profiles for these narratives, and editors and agents focused new attention on memoir, which often meant shifting away from the autobiographical first novel to marketing a first book as memoir.⁶ A marketplace emerged for writers whose personal accounts emphasized aspects of experience and consciousness that differed from those typically featured in memoirs by famous men with public careers or by distinguished figures writing retrospectively later in life. Perhaps surprisingly, the market showed considerable interest in these new narratives and they claimed memoir’s distinction as being the literary eyewitness to history, capturing the experience of complex lives not characterized by privilege and status.⁷ Many of the texts brimmed with formal innovation that experimented with or exposed the limits of genre.⁸ Some revealed the limits of genre to contain their testimony: they were often hybrid in combining poetry with essays, memoir, and autobiographical fiction; occasionally bilingual; and innovative in drawing life story into new media, like graphic memoirs and blogs.⁹

Yet as these narratives gained in prominence enough to become representative of life writing, readers, reviewers, and some scholars began to greet these stories with censure.¹⁰ They were tagged as both lies and inconvenient truths, and their authors were shamed, sidelined, and turned into examples of the excesses of identity politics, and increasingly of the pitfalls of memoir itself. Women’s testimonial narratives in the last decades of the twentieth century were displaced by a new influx of neoliberal life narratives. At the same time, the capacity to criticize any memoirist as potentially untrustworthy through association with memoir as an incubator for tainted testimonial witnesses and potential liars became increasingly routine. How was this accomplished? The application of a binary test of whether or not a witness was telling the truth migrated to autobiographical literature. The strategy of preempting the formation of an adequate context to contain the testimony of complex lives had been used to discredit both Anita Hill and Rigoberta Menchú. It now attached to memoirists and to memoir, a form whose testimonial energies test the limits of genre to contain them. Through an increasing hostility to innovation and invention in life writing associated with women of color, queer writers, and white writers who expose violence within the family, self-representational texts about lives in crisis were absorbed within neoliberalism.

What is a neoliberal life narrative? Like the life story offered by Clarence Thomas in his Pin Point strategy, the neoliberal life narrative features an “I” who overcomes hardship and recasts historical and systemic harm as something an individual alone can, and should, manage through pluck, perseverance, and enterprise. The individual transforms disadvantage into value.¹¹ The message frames the narrative and also shapes the self and its career, as the narrative becomes a platform to launch new ventures, from Supreme Court justice to motivational speaker. Neoliberal life narrative conditions readers to affirm and accept the redemption story as natural and desirable, and to embrace life stories that absolve readers of the requirement to do anything other than follow the writer’s advice in their own lives because the writer has relieved readers of history’s ethical claims on us.¹²

The best-selling memoir The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls offers an example of neoliberal life narrative.¹³ The memoir has been extraordinarily popular since its publication in 2005. It spent 216 weeks on the New York Times best seller list, was adopted in middle and high school curricula for young readers, and, in a nod to this new market, won an American Library Association Alex Award in 2006.¹⁴ In The Glass Castle, Walls maintains that she was able to overcome poverty in Appalachia, one of the most persistently impoverished areas in the United States, by doing well in school, going to college, and marrying up. Her parents, she claims, made a personal decision to be homeless and she, as an individual, chose differently. Following the success of the memoir, Walls became a popular speaker, who focuses on the theme of leadership for young, female audiences. A blurb by Keppler Speakers, which manages Walls’s speaking events, succinctly captures the key features of her brand: “Walls shares an inspiring message of triumph over obstacles and encourages audiences to face their fears, confront their past, and understand that our flaws can be our greatest assets.”¹⁵

Walls’s successful book follows years in which autobiographical narratives by women of color transformed nonfiction. These texts paved the way for the surge in memoir publishing by establishing it as a newly important form for a civil rights era. Although the texts most often associated with the memoir boom are written by white authors (Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, and Tobias Wolff, among them), this limits the frame of reference to a moment in the mid-1990s when memoir’s prominence seemed to rise out of nowhere and obscures the pathbreaking cultural and literary precursors: Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969); Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976); Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982); Cherrie Moraga’s formally and bilingual hybrid Loving in the War Years (1983); Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984); the collection coedited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa that included personal essays, This Bridge Called My Back (1984); and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands: La Frontera (1987).¹⁶ Allied with and energized by these first-person texts, scholars in the academic fields of women’s studies and ethnic studies included these texts in college curricula, often alongside I, Rigoberta Menchú, to theorize a range of issues from self-representational texts. Authors and texts with a range of investments in feminist inquiry and aesthetics, including Carolyn Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman (1986) and Monique Wittig’s Lesbian Body (translated in 1975), and a host of formally diverse autobiographical texts presented multiple feminist “I’s” characterized by intellect, creativity, and political critique.¹⁷ Through their place in college curricula, feminist reviewing, and interdisciplinary scholarship, they circulated to knowing and new audiences alike. In contrast to the conservative voices of Clarence Thomas and Jeanette Walls, these texts were fueled by a “feminist killjoy” affect and a profound commitment to building resilient communities.¹⁸ They abided by no set trajectory of narrative resolution or closure. Verging into autobiographical fiction, the essay and manifesto, and graphic memoir and comics, they connected submerged histories of violence to contemporary trauma and brought both into view.

Neoliberalism has gained traction as a critical term in the humanities after being imported from the fields of political science and economics, where it specifies the capitalist ideology associated with economist Milton Friedman’s promotion of individuals as beneficiaries of free markets, and the effective masking of this unrestrained activity’s tendency to produce inequality by concentrating wealth narrowly. It is used in globalization studies to describe how financial regulators like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank use policies including structural adjustment to undermine national sovereignty and the structure of local communities. The disastrous consequences of austerity measures—in the absence of other forms of support to address poverty—are on view in multiple nations who are the laboratories for neoliberal financial policies. The narrative that underwrites neoliberalism promotes personal responsibility. It places both the blame for structural problems and the responsibility for their solution on individuals. Within neoliberalism, the individual is endowed with the appearance of personal choice (Pepsi or Coke?), while the asymmetries of actual power, vulnerability, and reward are continuously suppressed through the language of self-striving. If we think of the Pin Point strategy in this context, it exemplifies neoliberal life narrative because it pits Clarence Thomas as an individual against structural racism and poverty, which he is said to overcome in order to rise to the Supreme Court. His largest obstacle in this narrative is affirmative action and the conspiracy to punish him for his conservative politics that allegedly used Anita Hill to destroy him. And while neoliberalism trades in persecutorial fantasy and falsifies who disproportionately benefits from the deregulation of financial markets and the removal of workplace and labor protections, it does so by attaching itself to the rhetoric of self-improvement and the rags-to-riches life story that functions as a vernacular corollary to democracy in the United States.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008 and the bursting of the housing and tech bubbles, a narrative of blame was readily applied to individuals in the absence of a narrative of responsibility for creditors who were excused as “too big too fail.” Neoliberalism’s need for a robust discourse of individual choice and responsibility points to the cultural work the popularity of memoir performs. The pervasiveness of the redemption narrative preserves the hope that neoliberal policies and ideologies mock. Specifically, the transformations that occurred within the memoir boom in order to promote neoliberal life narrative included the shift from a politicized “I” of self-representation—a hard-won space carved out by feminism, critical race theory, and queer studies—to a type of the resilient and redeemed individual, including the postracial nominee, the self-made man, and the empowered woman. These generic selves offer self-help, which turns out to be “merely personal” rather than critical or revelatory of the functions of power.¹⁹ Yet this move buried emotions now bursting the seams of neoliberal life narrative, which are often characterized by intense and sometimes inchoate pain²⁰—the kind of engulfing pain that indicates, in the context of this book’s focus, the presence of painful pasts but nothing that cannot, in neoliberal narrative, be overcome and redeemed.²¹ My alternative periodization of neoliberal life narrative acknowledges the actual breakthroughs in publishing that characterized the run-up to the memoir boom, highlights the later ascendancy of popular redemption stories, and contextualizes the danger of disaffiliation: of being called out as a liar, fake, or hoax.²²

Memoir in the late 1980s was less characterized by trauma per se, although that became the narrative associated with the boom, than by the self-representation of complex lives that included it. In other words, trauma consisted in exposure to the everyday violence of poverty, racism, homophobia, and misogyny. Rather than falling “outside the range” of experience, it was chronic, systemic, and ordinary. Indeed, feminist clinicians and scholars shifted the definition of trauma during the memoir surge from the Freudian notion of the event that breaks the frame to feminist theorizing about chronic exposure to vulnerability and everyday violence.²³ Exemplified by autobiographical texts like Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison (1992), and, including the critical essays and poetry of Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and other poets, as well as writing from the AIDS epidemic, like David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives (1991),²⁴ these texts drew both acclaim and censure, and generated new strategies for writers who sought alternative jurisdictions to the genre of memoir, which was increasingly policed by reviewers sniffing out “impropriety” and calling out public disclosures of family violence as unethical because family members did not have a reciprocal opportunity to respond. Such disciplinary responses represent how the feminist use of memoir to expose violence came to be depoliticized and folded into the juridical framework of “he said/she said.”

As I have argued elsewhere, writers such as Dorothy Allison, Jeanette Winterson, and Jamaica Kincaid sought the freedom of self-representation and a public forum but avoided the genre of memoir rather than see their innovative and nuanced presentations of trauma reduced to “he said/she said.”²⁵ Because the radical potential of memoir consists in the public platform it offers to newly visible writers and the social and literary transformations they seek, its potential had to be absorbed into neoliberalism by emptying the form of its challenging and politicized content and replacing its aesthetic challenges with the closure of the redemption narrative. Memoir became a tainted witness, certain kinds of texts were substituted as its representative, and authors were dismissed as self-indulgent or disreputable.

Testimony travels along the same pathways as neoliberal life narrative, to similar audiences, and can also reinforce judgment. Although testimony is rooted in specific contexts of contemporary harm for which witnesses seek a hearing and relief, neoliberal life narratives adapt this form toward other ends. Neoliberal life narratives, like The Glass Castle, are better understood as neoconfessional rather than testimonial insofar as they promote individual life experiences as examples of a generic humanity and eschew historical or political analysis or contextualization. The engrossing examples within this pattern scale up such that the rise and fall of specific narratives reproduces the narrative template of redemption writ large. The cycle of praise and blame is gendered, to be sure, with women often standing to lose the most by being too closely associated with testimonial forms that carry with them the taint of scandal.

Neoliberal life narrative does more than play out endless versions of down and outers who make good: it displaces other life narratives, including those that commanded attention in the early years of a memoir boom stretching into the twenty-first century. These memoirs identified the systemic nature of disenfranchisement, unmasked middle-class pieties about privacy and sexual violence, linked suffering and violence to poverty and state indifference, and challenged dominant reading practices around testimony. Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, for example, challenged expectations around incest in white, middle-class families and literary self-representation, while I, Rigoberta Menchú raised questions about translation and collaboration, eyewitness testimony, and the gender politics of indigenous activism. As Gillian Harkins argues, neoliberalism emerges to counter social movements as they gain traction, including feminism, racial recognition, and LGBTQ movements.²⁶ The brief period of openness that greeted memoirs about violence within families, addiction, and illness gave critics a new target and helped them to hone the message that not only an individual and her memoir were tainted, but the entire genre was spoiled.

We see here how markets and jurisdictions overlap conceptually and materially to promote certain kinds of life stories. In contrast to counterconfessional and redemption-wary self-representation, neoconfessional life narrative is situated at the crossroads of self-help, travel narrative, and memoir. These texts now construct the conditions in which testimony by insufficiently redeemed narrators is denigrated and drops out of view. Neoliberal life narratives diminish other witnesses as they are mobilized within the testimonial network they cohabit. As redemption narratives become increasingly generic, tolerance for other life narrative decreases. How, then, do we keep the feminist witness in view?

In The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison restores the representation of incest to its statistically normative locale—the white, middle-class family—and bears witness to an adult experience of incest with her father that she expects no one to find particularly sympathetic. Harrison does not file suit, it is important to note, nor does she name names explicitly.²⁷ Instead she writes a memoir. Like testimony, memoir seeks a hearing, can be oppositional, and, in its elicitation of a forum of judgment in which to air its claims, creates the possibilities around which to form politicized energies. Memoir need not be confessional, as Harrison’s is not, in the sense that it need not promote a victimized identity as its subject or seek relief from or offer penance to any authorities. Memoir is often written from a position wholly unlike that configured via the embrace of injury-as-identity.²⁸ As an anticonfessional subject, Harrison refuses to behave like a victim or a criminal, and attempts instead to present herself as a subject coming to terms more with the mystery of her agency than her injury.

Harrison’s mother divorced Harrison’s father when Harrison was six months old. Her mother moved out of her parents’ home and into an apartment when Harrison was six years old but left Harrison behind to be raised by her grandparents. When Harrison is twenty and a college sophomore, her father returns for the kind of visit of which apocalypses are made. He devours her with “hungry eyes” and obsesses over her body, all of which creepily foreshadows his violation of their roles and her integrity. It is both surprising and horribly predicted that on the morning of her father’s departure, he will betray her mother by telling Harrison he slept with her because “she asked me” and violate his daughter by turning their goodbye into a bewitching straight out of the unexpurgated Brothers Grimm: “My father pushes his tongue deep into my mouth: wet, insistent, exploring, then withdrawn…. In years to come, I’ll think of the kiss as a kind of transforming sting, like that of a scorpion: a narcotic that spreads from my mouth to my brain. The kiss is the point at which I begin, slowly, inexorably, to fall asleep, to surrender volition, to become paralyzed.”²⁹

Harrison’s memoir places this four-year adult incest experience in the context of her relationship with her mother. The writing is elliptical and etches brief scenes focused on images of entrapment, violation, and inertia. The memoir’s refusal of a conventional rhetoric of blame, judgment, and expiation persuaded many readers that Harrison was implicated ethically in both the incest and its retelling. At fault, stained by having a secret and for exposing it, Harrison’s capacity to bear witness was derailed into scandal. Yet what was lost in this shift from attending to Harrison’s account to blaming her for it was an engagement with an ethically allusive representation of incest that seemed to call for a chorus from Greek tragedy as its adequate witness. How else to encounter the evocation of mythic precursors, particularly the figures of Oedipus and Antigone, fused into Harrison, and the doomed familial relations in which damage, debt, and agency develop? As the tragic daughter, she is a stranger to herself and within her family, estranged from custom and law, and speaking as if she could bear public witness to her grief. She has not buried a brother in defiance of an edict; she has buried herself. Harrison achieves a condensation of Greek tragedy and fairy tales through her figure of the violated daughter for whom the primary locus of injury cannot be limited to childhood or even to gender.

Upon publication, The Kiss was greeted with some reviews that praised its literary achievement, as one might expect from a contemporary memoir by an established author and characterized by skillful allusions to fairy tales and Greek tragedy, as well as Harrison’s courage.³⁰ However, psychologist and author of The Moral Life of Children (1986) Robert Coles withdrew his blurb for the book when he was told the author had young children.³¹ Soon, other critics worried that Harrison’s artfulness confused the boundary between fiction and memoir and undermined her credibility. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in particular wondered “whether a memoir can ring too artistic for truth” and concluded that “the mystery of her survival is a flaw in the memoir.”³² For him and others, Harrison’s success as a writer and her achievement of marriage and motherhood discredited her claim to harm. If she could marry, have children, and write the book, they asked, how bad could the incest have been? On one hand, the claim seems to be that trauma is unrepresentable, so Harrison should have been silent, too; on the other, that injury is transparent with no art or interpretation needed to represent it, so Harrison should have said it all rather less artfully. The irreconcilable demands (to be silent, to be transparent) implied in this judgment mark the place where the woman witness is made to vanish.

The injunction not to tell this tale took many forms but emerged most succinctly in Cynthia Crossen’s concluding words to her Wall Street Journal review: “Hush up.”³³ “The Naked Literary Come-On,” an article in the New York Times about sex and sales, featured a photo of Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City, sprawled on a bed and described how publicists use sex to market authors and, to a lesser degree, their books. It assessed Harrison’s marketability: “If an unattractive woman were to write a book about sleeping with her father, it would not command the same media real estate as an attractive woman sleeping with her father.”³⁴ The claim that women’s testimony about incest is best contextualized as one commodity among others related to feminine appeal, and that one text by a woman is interchangeable with any other, highlights the merging of women’s testimony into a neoliberal marketplace. Just as capital is regulated to protect global finance,³⁵ life narrative is regulated to protect testimonial speech about the family. As Gillian Harkins observes, the critical response is a market strategy that merges an “excitation of moral disapproval as an incitement to buy the book.”³⁶

In the negative reviews and the controversy generally, the complicated terms through which Harrison represents incest were manipulated, flattened, and misrepresented. Those manipulations were then debated as if they were hers. In other words, the scandal operates here as it did in Stoll’s attack on Menchú; namely, the author’s terms were mischaracterized and the substitute terms were recycled via media, and then taken up in debates. In this case, because of her age at the time and her physical appearance, incest was turned into one more version of sexiness. In this reformulation, Harrison becomes the greedy purveyor who attaches her own sexiness and story, and therefore the exploiter of her experience for profit. The market’s prurience catachrestically becomes Harrison’s come-on. When Harrison appeared as an interview subject in newspaper and magazine articles, her attractiveness rendered her unintelligible as one who had suffered harm. The copresence of past sexual violation and current vitality suggests something of the atemporality associated with trauma and its survival: the wound of trauma injures not only the person but also the person’s sense of time, splitting it into before and after, hypostatizing the traumatic contents of the past in flashbacks, and disordering memory. In this case, many of Harrison’s readers seem themselves to be caught in the delayed effect of trauma. That Harrison can tell this story and not have it be her suicide note, can appear in photographs in which she holds the camera’s gaze without shielding her face or her body, and can give interviews in which she embraces her sexuality are disturbing in a jurisdiction that requires Harrison to appear as a proper victim

Harrison’s memoir is more troubling to many readers than the narratives by women who suffered sexual abuse as children. Harrison was an adult when her father’s incestuous demand wiped out her precarious sense of self. Surely, some critics want to say (and did), she was an adult, she was protected by her majority status, by the law, by her independence. If there were ever a time for just saying no, this was it: Why couldn’t she? Why wouldn’t she? Isn’t she responsible? Isn’t she at fault? Cast as indictments of her personal judgment rather than her father’s actions, these questions go to the construction of privacy in law, the family, and memoir and also to the legacy of disbelief and censure that greets women’s representations of sexual trauma. They point to a familiar pattern in which radically different material and psychic formations from the ones in which many women live are fervently wished for. Those wishes are then promoted into phantasms of substance and endowed with legitimacy such that those phantasmic constructions of some other “reality” for women (one in which women do not experience incest, for example) may then be invoked as a standard of behavior that women have violated. That is, the “reality” behind sexualized violence is represented as the phantasm. While Harrison expands an analysis of incest, sex, and the family beyond the courts of family law and beyond debates about recovered childhood memory, judgments that fetishize incest as the sex that dares not speak its name circulate in various admonitory responses to her memoir. Although a very different reading of The Kiss is certainly possible, the scandalous one obscured the harm initiated by her father and brought out the daughter to stand trial.

The critical response to The Kiss caps a developing anxiety about the proliferation of trauma narratives. When judgment about women and memoir itself overlap, the boom fuses with its backlash. Memoirs of sexual trauma by women particularize the anonymous statistics of sexual violence. Thus the prevalence of trauma narratives threatens to rewrite the meaning of autobiography as a genre of representative individualism. Can such inappropriate victims really be representative? The politics of representative individualism as they are staged in life narrative hold both threat and promise. In the U.S. context, the cultural work done around the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Malcolm X, as well as those by Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, provides a discourse through which to understand political status, or the linking of citizenship and identity. Not as fully constrained as legal testimony, these self-representational antecedents offer a way to think about the nexus of trauma, gender, and race. This is the material of testimonial life narrative. In this jurisdiction, an alternative to the sovereign subject or the confessional subject as producer of meaning emerges to offer a testimonial account that risks censure, to be sure, but also opens up the possibility for other authorities and advocates to engage in the production of meaning with regard to trauma and gender.

“A million little pieces” is precisely what many predicted the market for memoir would shatter into with the revelation in 2006 that James Frey’s narrative of the same name was not the true story of addiction and recovery its author claimed it to be. Yet because the publication and sales of memoir remain robust, we see how scandal is less an anomaly than an integrated feature of how life narrative is consumed during the boom/lash. The popularity of redemption is important here because it names the preferred theme of life narrative and also describes the structure of participation in scandal: when readers consume narratives and throw out the fakers, then tastemakers and readers participate in a ritual cleanse of the category and the redemption narrative is redeemed for future use. The predominance of redemption narratives helps to discredit other life narratives, often written by women and exposing sexual violence, as well as memoirs written by authors who do not resemble majority book-buying audiences, and whose personal stories rely on a critique of the nation for its subjects’ legibility. As Patricia Williams points out, without the context of slavery and generations of family and community experience in its long shadow, as well as the contemporary complexities of post–civil rights racism, an African American woman—herself—who expresses anger does not make sense; instead, she looks crazy.³⁹ It is precisely the evacuation of specific histories of harm that has enabled a series of shifts in the literary marketplace.

Unlike testimonials that bear witness to human rights abuses and are more directly political in their aims, the neoconfessional primarily bears witness to personal pain that can be overcome and redeemed. By locating the cause, experience, and end of suffering within the framework of the individual rather than in histories of violence that require political critique and legal and social remedies, and that compel readers to negotiate acts of witnessing, neoliberal life narratives displace the analysis of wrongdoing away from questions of justice. Instead, they focus on a personal subject whose particularities are smoothed to fit the amorphous and general shape of a generic self. Even as the market expands in volume, neoliberalism narrows and norms permissible accounts. To secure dominance, this market formation recruits new audiences and pressures all life narratives to enter the mass market through the narrow gate of the redemption narrative. In the packaging of the redemption narrative in neoliberal times, the individual becomes tasked with her own redemption.

The consumption of popular memoirs promotes a practice of reading in public focused on the mass circulation of life narratives, especially those with a redemption plot whose authors become the target of potent judgmental energies. In response to the presence of hoaxes, these energies are mediated and negotiated through the intertwining strands of memoir and self-help discourse represented by A Million Little Pieces; The Power of Now; Eat, Pray, Love; and Wild. The normalizing effect of self-help narratives that offer stories of personal trauma with happy endings directs the sympathy that autobiography can mobilize away from nonnormative life narrative and toward life writing that allows readers to experience compassion for similar others. Yet neoconfessional voices, like the confessional voices that Foucault famously warned were not simply speaking of truth, have an enigmatic force beyond the universals they propound. Instead, as Foucault suggests, “silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them.”⁴⁰ Although neoconfessional speech has been read as communicating an enhanced, even robust, form of civic engagement⁴¹—namely, that as it pours forth from voices too numerous to count, it represents a democratization of the public sphere—unspoken norms and explicit market formulas shape the dynamics of reading and limit whose lives may claim attention, for how long, and with what capacity to challenge the norms of reception. Neoconfessional speech that successfully hails an audience primed to expect certain conventions cannot by itself provide the materials for an analysis of its own truth claims, ethical investments, and identificatory desires. Indeed, what is not being currently discussed includes the value of autobiographical accounts that fail in public without harming the neoconfessional brand.

For many readers, the bedrock of autobiographical narrative is confessional in the sense that the writer and reader can be taken to be in a particular relation to each other, bound by a demand on the writer to render a transparent truth taken as ethical norm.⁴² Compounding the confessional compact between reader and writer, and in fact reinforcing its confessional core, is the theoretical claim that the writer may be so bound and judged precisely because she or he has already assented to this quasi-juridical relation via the choice of genre (memoir and its variants) and is now obligated as if by contractual agreement. Legal contract and ethical relation reinforce each other within the confessional compact. The benefit of a verifiable relation between life writing and the events it narrates is hard to argue against, yet the ethical issues here are vexed in the mass market for life narrative. If the confessional compact is part of what generates the coercions and distortions within self-representation—constitutively and not merely facetiously so—then current controversies around memoirs are unlikely to be further illuminated by calls for more properly confessional (i.e., “truthful”) autobiographical performances.

Yet if the histories consumed in neoliberal life narratives have been emptied of vexed realities, economic inequalities, and hierarchies of human value, then what grounds the ethical contract audiences claim to have had violated by memoirists like Frey? When experience is displaced by the requirements of the redemption narrative, then who is contracting with whom, and in what terms? It seems that the privileged relation autobiography relies on now is less one between writer and biographical events (the referential contract), or even between the writer as guarantor of the meaning of these events and the reader who believes them (the autobiographical contract/pact). If what memoir offers now is largely sentimental—an opportunity to feel together with/as a reading community—then can history only haunt neoliberal life narrative? And what does this haunting look like?

Oprah Winfrey may be described as both media/market assemblage and a jurisdiction of taste when it comes to the reach and diversity of her brand and the centrality of personal life story within the talk and writing she promotes so successfully. Acts of witness emerge as Oprah interviews authors of redemption memoirs, positions these writers more as guides and sages than literary authors, advocates for self-improvement, and promotes and sells many, many books.⁴³ Her position as a reader who is also a platform marks the public that forms around her with differing affective and economic interests. When Oprah picked Frey’s faux rehab memoir, she endorsed his book, his message, and him. When its exaggerations were discovered, she had to negotiate how best to walk away from book and author without discrediting the message so closely tied to her brand. When memoir itself became a target of criticism during the boom/lash, memoir’s most public promoter and consumer became a tainted witness.

Many of the issues about shareable life story, including the critical narratives produced about them, have been raised on Oprah’s couch, a site that blends therapy with commerce in the production of “talk.”⁴⁴ Winfrey has presided over the fall of celebrity autobiographers and the compensatory rise of self-help. She is a complex witness, however, and also subject to the forms of discrediting that attach to women’s life narratives because in the 1980s she was instrumental in opening a public discussion about sexual violence against women. Indeed, in the unlikely forum of the single-host, daytime TV talk show, she sponsored a counterdiscourse to the sensationalized accounts that revictimized survivors on other talk shows. Winfrey’s intervention in the production of knowledge about sexual abuse helped to create a market for nonfiction and fiction by women that featured sophisticated critiques of the limits of privacy for women. Winfrey herself participated publicly in the production of a therapeutic narrative of female suffering by telling her own story of abuse, and by modeling a form of public listening in the mode of empathy rather than judgment. She became a dual witness to trauma: she told her story and she provided an adequate witness for the stories of others.

Although Winfrey has been able to capitalize in her Book Club on the market for first-person accounts of suffering and redemption that her talk show taught women to consume as a means of belonging, she has hardly done so from the imperious distance of a Rupert Murdoch. Instead, she immersed herself as an active subject in the production of this community, whose complexities exceed her. It is important to underscore, as a generation of intensive scholarship on Winfrey has ably demonstrated, that Oprah is complicated. Among the currents that swirl around her are racializing discourses and stereotypes, her own considerable rhetorical skills drawn from Southern Baptist preaching experience and her years in Chicago television, and the proliferation of her lifestyle brand with its investment in reading as self-improvement. Winfrey’s overwhelming success and popularity, however, often create a perplexing effect: although she empathizes with survivor speech, and recognizes the realities of suffering that redemption narratives include, her public modeling of how to consume the current neoconfessionals consistently directs audiences away from the racist and sexist histories such discourses carry.⁴⁵

Winfrey’s preference for the redemption narrative predicts her promotion of self-help discourse, which I trace here through her handling of the wildly popular memoirs A Million Little Pieces and Eat, Pray, Love, and her subsequent promotion of A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose and The Power of Now,⁴⁶ as well as her return to Wild, a book that successfully merges self-help and memoir in a potent narrative of a daughter’s struggle following her mother’s death. Wild prompted Winfrey to revive her moribund Book Club in 2012. The first three books were published between 1996 and 2006 during the height of memoir’s popularity and notoriety when boom had become boom/lash. They trace a tight spiral around the themes of judgment and sentimentality, celebrity and self-help, and gender, race, and redemption so vivid in the neoconfessional. Yet long before a notable number of discredited memoirists found their way to celebrity on Oprah, critiques of Winfrey already presented her as an emblem of what would be censured in memoir. Like these memoirs, Winfrey fuses “public issues and private problems” without political analysis.⁴⁷ Like Winfrey and her guests, these memoirs are part of “the explosion in the 1980’s of the ‘recovery movement’—an amalgam of therapeutic practices, self-help groups, publications, mental health policies, and treatment programs.”⁴⁸ Like Winfrey, they prefer confession and redemption to the messier histories and subjects with which testimony engages.

As critics and fans alike note, Winfrey engages in emotional displays, invites and performs confessions about sexual trauma, and seeks to coproduce with her guests a therapeutic narrative that takes pain as material for self-transformation⁴⁹ rather than an adequate politics. Lauren Berlant agrees with Janice Peck and Eva Illouz that these therapeutic narratives lack political analysis, even as they teem with political material. For Berlant, talk shows, the recovery movement, and even memoirs are “juxtapolitical”: they are proximate to politics but represent a space that seems more available for participation—and even civic engagement—“because the political is deemed an elsewhere managed by elites who are…not [interested] in the well-being of ordinary people or life-worlds.”⁵⁰ Part of Winfrey’s canny appeal to popular markets and women readers depends on traveling a neoliberal path of personal redemption that does not lead to political analysis or action.

Winfrey’s status as dual witness depends on how her own story conjoins two classical autobiographical storylines—the rise and the redemption narrative—and sutures them to the stories she promotes. Winfrey’s biography includes her rise from poverty in Mississippi and sexual abuse to become Forbes’s richest woman and the most powerful woman in media. At the same time, she showcases redemption narratives through her ongoing and public search for spiritual meaning, and her promotion of writers who produce them. These two storylines are complicated by Winfrey’s transformation of the presentation of survivor speech for a female audience in the 1980s. In those early shows, Winfrey altered the dynamics in which women had previously spoken about incest, rape, and sexual assault on daytime TV. Instead of having experts on such shows tell the audience what this violence meant, the women themselves were given the authority to interpret as well as narrate their experience.

Winfrey’s temptation by the redemption narrative suggests an angel/devil tableau. On one shoulder, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, radiant Elizabeth Gilbert whispers of true goodness as birthright and destiny, toward which the journey of self-discovery and acceptance proceeds. On the other, the bearded bad boy of privileged white masculinity, James Frey, glowers. Each represents resonant aspects of the redemption narrative, in which, through a combination of unfortunate choices and circumstances, the narrator finds him- or herself in a world of hurt and struggles not only to rise but, through suffering, to transform damage into self-knowledge and reap the rewards that follow. Although as exemplars of living through, these narratives corroborate an optimistic set of principles consistent with the self-help discourse Winfrey prefers, their authors’ suffering, if compelling, is thin. Both have received their hard knocks while standing fully in the social and psychic space of white privilege. Well-educated, with supportive and materially comfortable families, Gilbert and Frey drift away from happiness and become miserable. Oprah’s couch became a forum of judgment first for acknowledging the worthiness of their pain and endorsing their programs for self-improvement, and later for testing the tolerances around scandal and the celebrity that such memoirs generated—most spectacularly in the exposé of Frey.

Frey created a persona—a hard-core addict—who refused AA or any twelve-step program because surrender to a higher power was effeminate. Both persona and his white-knuckle recovery plan were revealed to be largely fictional, and, because other details also conformed more to the genre in which Frey originally crafted the tale, he and his publisher entered into a legal agreement that required Frey to acknowledge the claims established by his critics in an “Author’s Note” that would accompany future printings of the book. Readers could also ask for a refund. Frey made a few public appearances as the scandal broke but did little to reduce its damage. While he tried to shift the discussion to a more literary distinction between “writing from memory” and “writing from fact,” the shift asked audiences who knew only the tough guy persona Frey had gone on the road as for two and a half years of interviews to encounter him as a literary writer debating the elasticity granted by creative license.

Winfrey was exposed to the dynamics of judgment surrounding Frey. She was defamed as his promoter but was not hailed as his discreditor. Following his second seating on Oprah’s couch, Frey let it be known that he felt ill-used by Winfrey. In comments on websites and in blogs, the tide turned against her: she was assailed not only for being gullible but for overreaching, and, in a surprising turn, sympathy shifted to Frey.

Once a market has been created, as with memoir, something interesting happens: the texts themselves are secondary to the possibility of identification and belonging they offer. Thus any such intimate public would not be defined by genre alone but could, in its own interests, preserve the promise of absorption by broadening the domain of texts to include, for example, self-help. When Gilbert slipped to the number 8 spot on “What They’re Reading on College Campuses” on May 23, 2008, the number 1 position was held by self-help guru Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, Oprah’s sixty-first pick for her Book Club and the first self-help book chosen. The shift to self-help preserves the possibility of affective transaction at a time it was rendered less available in memoir. Berlant’s model provides insight into how self-help, with its autobiographical roots in its authors’ traumatic experiences, could become memoir’s sunny twin, absorbing the singularity of autobiography and reshaping suffering as remediable to improvement. Indeed, where memoirs focused on wrenching human trauma obligate readers to witness injustice for which remedies must be crafted, self-help discourse urges readers to lay aside injustice by changing their view of the past, and to address happiness, pleasure, and contentment as their birthright, objective, and mission. Self-help speech differs from survivor speech in that it does not cry out for justice; instead, it offers the end of crying out and asks, who would not want that?

Self-help gurus like Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie (author of Loving What Is and creator of a therapy program called “The Work”), Wayne Dyer, Louise Hay, and the cast of The Secret advertise themselves as the first selves helped by their methods. Self-help discourse succeeds by producing a celebrity guru identity that draws on but is never bogged down by autobiographical history, then streamlines this identity toward the construction of a new self. No longer exemplary by virtue of a striking particularity and historical grounding, the self in self-help is universal by virtue of its nonspecificity. A generic humanity replaces the specific subjects who might offer testimony or engage ethical witnessing. Readers who might have turned to autobiography to learn about someone else, a “you,” may find affective transaction barred by shifts in reception—like memoir’s discrediting—that magnify vexed specificity. This frustration in engaging with “you” finds relief in the consumption of an alternative capacious, undifferentiated, and universal “me” that smoothes over the complexities of injustice, racial dynamics of address, and gender politics. By providing such structures for identification, self-help discourse taps fantasies of belonging in which consumers feel that before any such market existed, they were already part of a web of strangers who intimately understood and sympathized with each other’s “compassionate liberalism.”⁵¹

The overriding message of self-help discourse literalizes those longings. The ease with which consumers absorb such texts is enabled by the autobiographical pretexts with which many begin and which audiences have been trained to consume. In self-help discourse a guru briefly presents an autobiography that condenses elements of the conversion and redemption narratives. These mini-memoirs provide a portal through which consumers of memoir might enter but quickly redirect their identification from the guru to the imagined community of self-help. In many of these autobiographical sketches, the guru briefly offers a retrospective account of a conventional life filled with inexplicable unhappiness, condensed for maximum ease of sympathetic consumption. Byron Katie, for example, briefly notes a severe depression that struck in her early thirties and lasted over a decade, until one February morning in 1986 she “woke up.” In “The Origin of this Book” section in The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle, too, describes experiencing years of depression before waking up “one night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday.” He clearly flags the pedagogic use of life story: “I have little use for the past and rarely think about it,” and, indeed, he is disconnected from the histories or contexts from which he has departed: “It feels now as if I am talking about some past lifetime or somebody else’s life.” He characterizes waking up with a terrible sense of dread as a familiar experience. He describes suicidal ideation: “I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live.” Two thoughts arise in succession, neither of which feels as much like thought as some other experience of consciousness. First, “‘I cannot live with myself any longer,’” followed by, “‘If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.’ ‘Maybe,’ I thought, ‘only one of them is real.’”⁵²

Tolle awakens from this episode a new man. The remainder of the introduction, however, begins to untether the narrative from the self who tells it. Filled with self-knowledge, Tolle is awakened but not fully fledged. He spends several subsequent years studying spiritual writings and sitting on park benches but offers no description of where he lived or how he supported himself—only these words: “no relationships, no job, no home, no socially defined identity.”⁵³ What Tolle loses in his crisis is a false, suffering self, which he previously identified simply as himself. The self that emerges has a hard time continuing in the autobiographical mode. Indeed, whenever Tolle begins to observe himself, to reflect, or to dwell on autobiographical singularity, he falls into time, anxiety, and the multiform qualities of the “I” with which autobiographers grapple. He advises his readers against this. The autobiographical sketch, marked by trauma, history, and the burden to narrate it, concludes, cannot be reengaged without risk, and is abandoned. As a witness to history, Tolle counsels not looking back.

Tolle provides an example of how self-help autobiographical pretexts are pervasively traumatic, without being described as such. In fact, these accounts of lives, careers, relationships, and families disrupted (even spectacularly so) are presented as fortunate steps along a preordained path. Memoirists are under less generic pressure to present the chaos of life as purposeful than self-help writers. Indeed, memoir admits chaos as a goad to self-reflection; unruly events make writers square the demands of narration with the resistance of history. In self-help texts, however, this tension is unsustainable and would undermine a program that presents personal choice as part of an inevitable universal mandate.

Self-help authors offer a kind of witness. The author repackages pain, sorrow, and blank dissatisfaction in such a way that his or her personal narrative comes to sound a lot like everyone else’s. It offers readers a generic language of personal growth to call their own. Although the opportunity to tell one’s story differently constitutes the ongoing appeal of self-representation for many, the influences of self-help and the redemption narrative steer toward normativity. The self at the center of these texts is adumbrated in the autobiographical pretext in which trauma begets awakening, cut loose from the material conditions in which this begetting occurs. The rhetorical program of self-help replaces a wounded self—anxious, depressed, suicidal—with a generic “I.”

As I have been arguing, such homogeneity developed out of greater diversity in life writing. In the 1980s and 1990s self-representation—mostly by women, people of color, and queer people—explored themes of wounding, vulnerability, and recovery and resisted the confessional compact. These texts circulated within testimonial networks as new forms of judgment were emerging and the redemption narrative was rising. Although all these accounts have been lumped together as “confessional” in order to disparage them as pathography or self-exploitation, taken as a whole this eruption of grief and grievance in the public sphere had the effect of recalibrating norms for a time. These memoirs were anticonfessional because they refused shame and judgment. They also represented life writing as a form of ethical engagement.

What are the obligations of citizens to national narrative forms that reproduce normativity as life story, eviscerate histories of harm, and urge women readers to follow Elizabeth Gilbert on personal journeys that lead more often to the purchase of O magazine than to the international travel few can afford, or acts to benefit others? In other words, what narratives will we get more of and be more conditioned to norm once the ethical work of veiling all the inappropriate exposures has occurred? In this context, consider, finally, Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, the memoir of her 1,100-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail as personal redemption program, an American version of the Camino without the religious history of pilgrimage. As if to concede that readers seek specific outcomes from an array of interchangeable experiences, the subtitle declares its true destination: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Strayed depicts her effort to cope with her mother’s death when Strayed was twenty-two years old. In the aftermath of this loss, Strayed’s marriage and life fall apart and she conceives the plan to hike in order to redeem her mother’s faith in her.

Wild represents a shift and renewal in the market for life narratives by women. Strayed’s persona as a nurturing, sincere, and down-to-earth advice columnist in her Dear Sugar columns at the online site The Rumpus, published in book form as Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar in 2012,⁵⁴ rolls over the self-help message expressed by Tolle from her successful advice column to her memoir and sets the travel narrative of Eat, Pray, Love on a rough track of wilderness hiking trail. In 2010 Oprah Winfrey launched her Book Club 2.0 to embrace Wild, endorsing for the first time both print and e-book, and championing Strayed, as she had Elizabeth Gilbert, as both a fine writer and a life mentor. Reese Witherspoon bought the film rights to Wild and won an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Strayed. Cheryl Strayed has become a popular speaker, she and writer Steve Almond are featured in a Dear Sugar podcast where they give life advice, and Strayed published Brave Enough in 2015, which Amazon.com describes thus: “From the best-selling author of Wild, a collection of quotes—drawn from the wide range of her writings—that capture her wisdom, courage, and outspoken humor, presented in a gift-sized package that’s as irresistible to give as it is to receive.”⁵⁵ Elizabeth Gilbert was featured as a lead player in Oprah’s worldwide “The Life You Want” tour and has followed a big and successful novel, The Signature of All Things, with Big Magic, a guide for incorporating creativity into daily life.⁵⁶

Unlike Tolle and Byron Katie, who repress personal story and are not literary authors, Gilbert and Strayed illuminate new pathways in testimonial networks that reveal the power of markets to monetize misery and norm self-help as the “responsibilizing” solution when structural solutions don’t exist. They also testify to the continuing potency of the literary voice: both are skilled and compelling writers whose progress reveals the energies—literary and market-driven—that propel life story now. They offer examples of the fusion of women’s witness within a testimonial network and the canny marketing of feminist empowerment redeemed from earlier women’s writing about trauma combined with the heroic survivor of self-help.

Within neoliberal life narrative, trauma is survived and redeemed. Those who thrive in this brand may use life story as a platform from which to launch careers in offering advice in personal appearances, via social media, and in popular TED Talks, and to continue as professional and accomplished authors, like Gilbert and Strayed. Or they can flame out, like Frey, and regroup elsewhere.⁵⁷ In chapter 4 I examine how the dual emphasis on self and help migrates to humanitarian storytelling where a reading public trained to associate feelings with help and to consume life story as something to learn from, enjoy, and judge finds a sufficiently familiar and generic human subject at the center of stories of overcoming and resilience.