Abstract
This chapter draws on Lynch’s idea of the “ante-autobiography”—the ethics of working with texts that come before public autobiography and/or may never have been intended to be read as autobiography. I consider a case study: adults retrospectively speaking back to their childhood and adolescent selves through the documentary diary project Mortified Nation. I raise some methodological and ethical questions about working retrospectively with child-authored personal diaries. I explore the potential value of the Mortified archive to researchers working with diaries of childhood and youth.
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Notes
- 1.
The diarists in Mortified Nation are mostly young adolescents. So, working critically with the definition of childhood as referring to those under the age of eighteen, I will use the terms child, adolescent and youth in this paper to refer to the young diarists I discuss. I will not use these terms interchangeably, but I will use them to show and explore how the diarists might be both children and adolescents all at once. However, these age categories are affected by different cultural stereotypes and constructions.
- 2.
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 76.
- 3.
Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 78.
- 4.
Smith and Watson.
- 5.
Kate Douglas, Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Kate Douglas, “Childhood and Youth,” in “What’s Next? The Future of Auto/Biography,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32, no. 2 (2017): 303–306.
- 6.
danah boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Douglas, “Childhood and Youth”; Kate Douglas, “Youth, Trauma and Memorialisation: The Selfie as Witnessing,” Memory Studies, 11 July 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698017714838; Kris Fallon, “Streams of the Self: The Instagram Feed as Autobiography”, in Interactive Narratives, New Media and Social Engagement, eds. M. Hudson, R. Sternberg, R. Cunha, C. Queiroz, and M. Seilinger (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto, 2014), 52–60.
- 7.
Kylie Cardell, Kate Douglas, and Emma Maguire, “‘Stories’: Social Media and Ephemeral Narratives as Memoir,” in The Literature of Remembering: Tracing the Limits of Memoir, eds. Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph (London: Routledge, 2018), 26–42.
- 8.
boyd, It’s Complicated; Vanessa Brown, “How Teens Are Hiding Their Real Lives with ‘Fake’ Instagram Account,” News.com.au, viewed 23 November 2015, www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/family-friends/how-teens-arehiding-their-real-lives-with-fake-instagram-accounts/newsstory/bc52a4959c6c05430b713ff5eb7119d9; Jennifer Charteris, Sue Gregory, and Yvonne Masters, “Snapchat, Youth Subjectivities and Sexuality: Disappearing Media and the Discourse of Youth Innocence,” Gender and Education 30, no. 2 (2018): 205–221, https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2016.1188198; Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd, “Networked Privacy: How Teenagers Negotiate Context in Social Media,” New Media & Society 16, no. 7 (2014): 1051–1067; Daniel Patterson, “What the Finsta?! The Darker World of Teenagers and Instagram,” The Huffington Post, viewed 28 September 2016, www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-the-finsta-the-darker-world-of-teenagers-and_us_57eb9e03e4b07f20daa0fefb; Valeriya Safronova, “On Fake Instagram, a Chance to Be Real,” The New York Times, 18 November 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/fashion/instagram-finstagram-fake-account.html?_r=0.
- 9.
boyd, It’s Complicated, 56.
- 10.
Marwick and boyd, “Networked Privacy,” 1056.
- 11.
Cardell, Douglas, and Maguire, “Stories”.
- 12.
Claire Lynch, “The Ante-Autobiography and the Archive of Childhood,” Prose Studies 35, no. 1 (2013): 97–112.
- 13.
Lynch, “The Ante-Autobiography,” 105.
- 14.
Kate Darian-Smith and Carla Pascoe, Children, Childhood and Cultural Heritage (London: Routledge, 2013).
- 15.
Popular social media sites gain a lot of mileage from embarrassing celebrities, and in March 2017 a young Taylor Swift’s MySpace site was providing hilarious click bait. Was it real? Swift herself never commented and the blurred lines between truth and invention (when it comes to celebrity cultures) meant that the veracity of the site was not particularly relevant to its humour. People wanted to believe that this was Swift’s former self because it was so embarrassing and funny, because childhood is an embarrassing legacy we must all endure and surely Taylor Swift shouldn’t be immune from this?
- 16.
The Mortified Sessions TV series focused on celebrities sharing their childhood diaries. According to the Mortified website, “In 2011, we teamed up with Sundance TV to create an offbeat interview series, The Mortified Sessions, that invited various artists and innovators to unearth their childhood mementos in an attempt to discover, are the secrets of success buried in the pages of our past?” The programme included celebrities such as Eric Stonestreet, Ed Helms, Bryan Cranston, Cheryl Hines, Nick Offerman, Megan Mullally, Alanis Morissette, Jennifer Grey, Ed Burns, and Ricky Schroder.
- 17.
Mortified, 1 April 2016, http://getmortified.com/.
- 18.
As Lynch reminds us, “the ethics and poetics of writing about and by children magnifies some of the key debates in life writing” including authority, truthfulness, and literariness: Lynch, “The Ante-Autobiography,” 101.
- 19.
Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 78.
- 20.
There are fascinating cultural memory stakes here too that I am not able to explore in depth within the limits of this chapter. However, Mortified plays on the nostalgic chic of the 1980s and 1990s that is currently prevalent within popular culture. For instance, consider the success of Netflix TV series such as Stranger Things, television revivals of Grease and Dirty Dancing, and the remake of the cult films Ghostbusters and IT. These revivals are notable (and sometimes successful) because they encourage the target audiences to reminisce about their own childhoods within the frame of living memory.
- 21.
Kyle Cardell, Dear World: Contemporary Uses of the Diary (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 5.
- 22.
She writes of “the misinterpreted hope of a very friendly waitress at a Mexican restaurant.” Again, the spectator is brought into a knowing space. We know, as the adult Amber-Jo also knows, that it is only in retrospect that she understands her attraction to this waitress and that this attraction was not reciprocated. We can laugh with her about this now, even though we understand that this must have been painful at the time.
There is further scope here to think about the assumptions that we make about the diary format. We assume the diary has an addressee and a structured format. But there is a lot we do not know about these diaries and their original format. Does this matter? It depends on what we are most interested in analysing. As previously suggested, though I am writing here about diaries here, I might as easily be writing about other genres: documentary or stand-up comedy. As the diary moves into a new genre, its mediations are something we can and should speculate upon.
- 23.
Rosamund Dalziell, Shameful Autobiographies: Shame in Contemporary Australian Autobiographies and Culture (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999), 7.
- 24.
Erikson cited in Dalziell, Shameful Autobiographies, 7.
- 25.
Dalziell, Shameful Autobiographies, 7.
- 26.
Dalziell.
- 27.
Dalziell, 8.
- 28.
Pia Haudrup Christensen, “Childhood and the Cultural Construction of Vulnerable Bodies,” in The Body, Childhood and Society, ed. Alan Prout (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 39–59.
- 29.
Christensen, “Childhood and the Cultural Construction of Vulnerable Bodies,” 42.
- 30.
Lynch, “The Ante-Autobiography,” 109.
- 31.
Paul John Eakin, “Introduction: Mapping the Ethics of Life Writing,” in The Ethics of Life Writing, ed. Paul John Eakin (Ithaca: Cornell, 2004), 4.
- 32.
“It Gets Better Project” is a not-for-profit digital project founded in the US by Dan Savage and Terry Miller. The project is a response to rising mental health issues, self-harm and suicide of LGTB+ teenagers. The project aims to spread the message that “it gets better” by having LGBT+ adults upload positive and supportive autobiographical video messages to the It Gets Better website and YouTube channel. The channel has grown rapidly and currently has over 50,000 videos on its website and videos have been viewed over 50 million times.
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Douglas, K. (2019). ‘Share the Shame’: Curating the Child’s Voice in Mortified Nation!. In: Moruzi, K., Musgrove, N., Pascoe Leahy, C. (eds) Children’s Voices from the Past. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11896-9_8
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