Authoring Pain: Fragmentation and Autofiction in Maggie Nelson's Bluets

This article analyzes Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) as a prominent example of the fragmentary narration that can result from the experience of pain and loss. I demonstrate how Nelson's disparate ruminations on her obsession for the color blue, her heartbreak, and her quadriplegic friend's chronic pain defy the superimposition of a teleological plot over these experiences, in favor of episodic reading and sporadic not-knowing. Still, the autofictional nature of the text-with its alternatively overbearing and elusive authorial presence-challenges any naïve emotional investment in it. Focusing on Nelson's narration of her quadriplegic friend's experience of chronic pain, I conclude by highlighting how Bluets calls for a reconsideration of the reader's stance vis-à-vis the description of suffering, as well as of simplistic critical approaches to illness narratives as life-writing.