Staying with Narrative: Stories of Shame and Gynecological Pain

Storytelling is good for us-or so we are told. This article examines two memoirs, by Hilary Mantel and Susanna Kaysen, in which narrating experiences of gynecological pain provokes shame and deepens pain. By attending to shame as a textual presence, I intervene in a longstanding debate about how to make sense of pain and illness. Shame, I argue, reveals the presence of multiple (and often contrasting) illness narratives; I analyze these narratives, and their interplay, across Mantel's and Kaysen's memoirs. As scholarship moves beyond, past, or post-narrative, I urge us to stay: to interrogate the ways in which illness narratives interact-amplifying some stories and storytellers whilst fragmenting or silencing others-and to examine the responsibility we all have within this collective sense-making.