Description
Examining the generically hybrid auto/biographical grief memoir, La ridícula idea de no volver a verte (2013), by the well-known contemporary Spanish author and journalist, Rosa Montero, this talk traces a number of parallels between Montero and her biographical subject, the Polish scientist, Marie Curie—particularly regarding their respective grieving processes in widowhood. Superficially, the text concentrates principally on the biography of the distinguished scientist, which has led a number of critics and writers to censure Montero for failing to reveal sufficient details about herself and her deceased husband. This talk will analyse the mourning process in Montero’s text and locate it within a recent trend in grief memoirs which Amy Prodromou calls “memoirs of textured recovery” (2015). Such texts challenge the Freudian distinction between normal and pathological grief. La ridícula idea resists such neat dichotomies, and instead presents a much more nuanced, complex and ambiguous approach to mourning. In this unconventional grief memoir, we will see how Montero navigates the tensions between her ethics of life writing and her attendant restrictions and self-censorship on the one hand, and her aspiration to achieve freedom in her writing process and in her life on the other.| Period | 5 Apr 2017 |
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| Held at | Trinity College Dublin, Ireland |