Citation:
Date Published:
June 7, 2025Abstract:
The paper examines how telling someone else’s life story, especially if this person is a close relative, sheds light on the author him- or herself or at least invites readers to wonder about the author’s relationship to the person whose life is told. The text analyzed is Jeannette Walls’s “true-life novel” Half Broke Horses, in which the author has her grandmother tell her own life in the first person. Drawing on research about narratives of vicarious experience, “fictional contamination” in life storytelling, and “narrator and disclosure functions” discussed in the context of unreliable narration, the paper unravels some of the ambivalences and conflicting (self-)images created in the text and explores the effects that such narrative choices might have on readers’ interpretations and how they create “resonance.”
December 2024. Jarmila Mildorf is Professor of English language and literature at the University of Paderborn. She has published widely on socionarratology, autobiography, oral history, medicine and literature, the medical humanities, dialogue, second-person narration, audionarratology and radio drama. Recent publications include Life Storying in Oral History: Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity (De Gruyter 2023) and the edited collections Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama (Ohio State University Press 2021), Narrative and Mental Health: Reimagining Theory and Practice (Oxford University Press 2023) and Word, Sound and Music in Radio Drama (Brill 2024).