Telling: The Ethics and Healing from Speaking Up

Abstract

“[In] fiction we can hide behind characters... memoir asks you
to remember as truthfully as you can what actually happened...”

-- Elizabeth Nunez in “The Art of Memoir” (The Center for Fiction, 2014, 14:45)

“My writing life has been a series of breakings and mendings, a shattering of the writing self that was, a repairing, through writing, of something in my life that warranted understanding and that needed fixing.”

-- Louise DeSalvo, The House of Early Sorrows (2018, p. xiii)

Woman, why are you crying?
Your tears should become your thoughts,

--Traditional song, rewritten by the Mahila Samakyha Project,
Andhra Pradesh, India (Nussbaum, 1999, p. 2)