This essay explores the practice of personal letter writing with reference to autobiographical theory, memory and trauma. It considers the extent to which the process of writing letters can assuage the difficulties of growing up in a family riddled with secrets and trauma. The writer uses her youthful fantasies of the philosopher Nietzsche and her mature understanding of his life, alongside her relationship with an authoritarian and damaged father, to explore some connections between these two seemingly disparate lives and how they link to her own. Letters to self, to family and friends, and in adulthood to other writers, including Drusilla Modjeska, Helen Garner and Gerald Murnane, frame the creative efforts to reorder lived experience. The narrative weaves between letter writing and life experience, at different stages, to explore how the rational abstractions of a philosopher and the idiosyncratic musings of an autobiographer might come together in unexpected ways. The creative element derives from the juxtaposition of such elements and the writer’s attempts to make sense of them.
Elisabeth Hanscombe
Elisabeth Hanscombe is a psychologist and writer who has published a number of short stories and essays in magazines and journals throughout Australia and the US in the areas of autobiography, psychoanalysis, testimony, trauma and creative nonfiction, including Meanjin, Island, Tirra Lirra, Quadrant, Life Writing and Life writing annual: biographical and autobiographical studies, as well as in several online publications. She has recently completed her PhD at LaTrobe University on the topic ‘Theories of autobiography: Life writing and the desire for revenge’ and was shortlisted for the Australian Book Review’s 2009 Calibre essay prize. She keeps a blog, sixthinline@blogspot.com.
