AustLit

'Peter Rose's 2001 memoir Rose Boys is a meditation on male family relationships. Described by the author as 'an essay in fraternal juxtaposition', the work is not only a tribute to a brother but also an acknowledgement of the centrality of the father in the formation of two very different sons. This article will elaborate on this principal auto/biographical exchange in Rose Boys: the exchange between a speaking or performing subject (in the sons Robert and Peter) and a watching object (in the father Bob Rose). How is the paternal gaze conceived of and represented in this form of auto/biography? Can this work be read as a 'performance' for the father? How is the performance of sonship framed and represented? And how is Peter Rose's auto/biographical act both a 'speaking for himself' and an attempt to speak for his brother? Can a life writer speak for another, or will another to speak through his work, and what are the ethical implications of this attempt? Stephen Mansfield.

'As compared with life writing which expresses the writer's shifting understanding of past events, little has been written concerning the analysis of "life writing" about the future. As well as reflecting on some of the issues involved in analysing such an artefact, the article explores the gender and class patterns of the five "meaning motifs" found in the imagined life story essays written by 750 young Australians between 2000 and 2007: "love", "fulfilment", "wealth", "fame" and "fun".' Chilla Bulbeck.

'In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion laments the absence of any significant body of literature that will help her through her grief. I propose that the grief memoir fills this gap left by professional literature of bereavement and itself contributes to a community of mourners missing from contemporary grief practices as identified by Sandra Gilbert and Darian Leader. This genre, new to literary analysis, provides a fertile ground for the discussion of recent literary and psychoanalytic analyses of mourning that have resisted the neat split Freud draws between normal and pathological grief. My chosen texts deliberately complicate "packaged and frozen" (Ellmann qtd. in Payne, Horn and Relf 78) notions of recovery while honouring what Jenny Diski calls the "texture of experience." As such, I am essentially identifying a sub-genre of the grief memoir, which I call "memoirs of textured recovery." What sets them apart is the performance of complex 'recovered' selves that show how "recovery," ambiguous and shifting in nature, calls for more complicated theories of mourning able to accommodate an understanding of grief not in terms of Freud's absolute recovery nor Tennyson's "loss forever new" (Laura Tanner), but rather a space located somewhere in between.' Amy Prodromou.