True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern

The essays in this collection explore new directions in autobiography studies. Examining a wide range of texts, from narratives of suicide survivors, cross-dressers and people with HIV/AIDS to self-representations in the visual arts, the collection demonstrates how writers have used the postmodern experience of fragmentation to forge new kinds of identities. Postmodern selves, the essayists argue, are relational selves, constructed from the acute need to find identity through collaboration with others. Postmodern autobiography emerges as a search, amid shocks to the stable self, for wider patterns of significance.