On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs

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.

'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

• Preface: Hello and Goodbye - Nancy Mairs PART I: INTRODUCTION; OR TWO WAYS IN On Writing toward Trust - Susannah Mintz On Feminist Intellectual History - Merri Lisa Johnson PART II: NEW ESSAYS On Difficult Gifts: A Biographical Portrait of Nancy Mairs - Hayley Mitchell Haugen On Writing in a Collaborative Spirit: Nancy Mairs's Ethic of Community - Susan Cumings On Depression Narratives: 'Hence, into the dark, we write . . .' - Hilary Clark On the Rhetoric of Gloom and Joy: In Turbulent Love with the World in A Troubled Guest - Susannah Mintz On Nancy's Husband George Masculinity, Disability, and Sex after Cancer in Remembering the Bone House and Waist High in the World - Margaret Torrell On Marriage, Church, and Being a Feminist Catholic Sacraments of the Body in Ordinary Time - Jenny Christine Bangsund PART III: FOUNDATIONAL STATEMENTS Autopathography: Women, Illness, and Life-writing - G. Thomas Couser 'Making up the Stories as We Go Along': Men, Women, and Narratives of Disability - Madonne Miner Transforming the Tale: The Auto/Body/ographies of Nancy Mairs - Susannah Mintz Dismembering the Heterosexual Imaginary: The Infidelity Narrative in Nancy Mairs's Remembering the Bone House - Merri Lisa Johnson