On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

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2. Introduction; Or Two Ways In

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. On Writing toward Trust

      • Susannah B. Mintz

      Pages 3-6

   3. On Feminist Intellectual History

      • Merri Lisa Johnson

      Pages 7-22

3. New Essays

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 23-23

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   2. On Difficult Gifts: A Biographical Portrait of Nancy Mairs

      • Hayley Mitchell Haugen

      Pages 25-41

   3. On Writing in a Collaborative Spirit: Nancy Mairs’s Ethic of Community

      • Susan G. Cumings

      Pages 43-62

   4. On Depression Narratives: “Hence, into the dark, we write…”

      • Hilary Clark

      Pages 63-78

   5. On the Rhetoric of Gloom and Joy: “In turbulent love with the world”

      • Susannah B. Mintz

      Pages 79-96

   6. On Nancy’s Husband George: Masculinity, Disability, and Sex after Cancer

      • Margaret Rose Torrell

      Pages 97-114

   7. On Embodied Theology: Sacraments of the Body in Ordinary Time and A Dynamic God

      • Jenny Bangsund

      Pages 115-129

4. Foundational Statements

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 131-131

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   2. Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Lifewriting

      • G. Thomas Couser

      Pages 133-144

   3. “Making Up the Stories as We Go Along”: Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability

      • Madonne Miner

      Pages 145-159

   4. Transforming the Tale: The Auto/body/ographies of Nancy Mairs

      • Susannah B. Mintz

      Pages 161-182

   5. Dismembering the Heterosexual Imaginary: A Feminist Cultural Anatomy of the Infidelity Narrative in Nancy Mairs’s Remembering the Bone House

      • Merri Lisa Johnson

      Pages 183-212

5. Back Matter

   Pages 213-215

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Much of the existing scholarship on Nancy Mairs has approached her essays in the context of disability studies. This book seeks to broaden the conversation through a range of critical perspectives and with attention to underrepresented aspects of Mairs's oeuvre, demonstrating her provocative combination of bold ethics and subtle aesthetics.

• community
• essay
• ethics
• feminism
• Nation
• rhetoric
• Sex
• trust
• women

'With the publication of this collection of critical essays, Johnson and Mintz confirm Nancy Mairs's place in both the intellectual histories of writing the body and in feminist literature about coming to voice. They have created a stirring critical milieu for Mairs's achingly embodied prose, charting her oeuvre with meticulous consideration. The editors and their contributors do homage not only to Mairs's subject position as a woman with disabilities, but also as a wife, mother, lover, social activist, poet, daughter, and more. Guided by Mairs's conviction that language has the capacity to effect change, the essays collected here explore the ways Mairs disrupts the fixed routes of our cultural narratives and widens the parameters of what can be said.' Janet Mason Ellerby, Professor of English, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and author of Intimate Reading: The Contemporary Women's Memoir and Following the Tambourine Man: A Birthmother's Memoir

'Nancy Mairs is not just a brilliant essayist; she is a valuable public intellectual with much to say about our present condition. As such, she deserves more critical attention than she has received to date. This welcome collection of essays, which explores her work from a variety of angles, illuminates the truth and beauty of her prose.' Tom Couser, Professor of English, Director of Disability Studies, Hofstra University

MERRI LISA JOHNSON is Director of the Center for Women's and Gender Studies and an Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of South Carolina Upstate, USA.

SUSANNAH B. MINTZ is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of English at Skidmore College, USA.

Policies and ethics