An autobiographically inflected work of lifewriting scholarship, this groundbreaking study examines how five autobiographical (or, in Tim O’Brien’s case, autobiographically adjacent) literary texts—The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien; “Kaddish” by Allen Ginsberg; “The White Album” by Joan Didion; and “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” by Art Spiegelman, and Psychiatric Tales by Darryl Cunningham—use distinct techniques of their respective genres—metafiction, poetry, essay, graphic narrative—to communicate the affective experience of psychic pain. This book situates the autobiographical subject/text as a stand-in (a surrogate self) for readers unable to give voice to their trauma.

As a former foster child and ward of the state with no surviving family or institutional records, the author has turned to the texts examined here—specifically those of O’Brien, Didion, Ginsberg, and Spiegelman—in the (re)construction of his lost, fragmented, and traumatic history, helping to objectify and articulate embodied memories that otherwise have had no locus. At key moments in the book, the author discusses his autobiography and affective connections to these four works, merging theory and practice. The book is distinctive in using this extended theoretical approach and the strategic use of autobiographical writing and personal history to map how O’Brien, Ginsberg, Didion, Spiegelman, and Cunningham communicate the experience of psychic pain.

David Bahr is an Associate Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, The City University of New York (CUNY), USA. His scholarship, journalism, and creative writing have appeared in The New York Times; The New York Times Book Review; GQ; Poets & Writers; Prairie Schooner; Affective Disorder and the Writing Life: The Melancholic Muse; Class, Please Open Your Comics: Essays on Teaching With Graphic Narratives; American Creative Nonfiction, Critical Insights Series; Modern Language Association’s Approaches to Teaching Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, and The Palgrave Handbook of Masculinities in Contemporary Anglophone Literatures.