A Year Without a Name by Cyrus Grace Dunham

Author:Cyrus Grace Dunham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

I’d been hurt by my sister sketching me in her work with the broad strokes required to create a character. The character got inside me, disoriented me. The power of the page is such that I couldn’t tell what was real, her story or my own. I splintered into multiple truths until my own recollection seemed like nothing more than an abstraction. Is there any way to write about the people who shape my life without reenacting the flattening that’s been done to me? Writing about someone I love, someone toward whom my love is pained and tangled, I feel I’ve failed before I started.

Taking my own life as subject matter makes me feel like a woman. There’s no theoretical praxis for this. It’s an emotion more than a belief. The most rigorous analysis I have is that everything in my life—who I am, what I do, what I don’t do—exists in an unbreakable duality with my sister. She, the woman. She, the writer. There are only two options: to be her or reject her.

I don’t have the language for why I equate womanhood with subjecthood. It’s an equation I was given at a young age. Woman tells her story. Man listens. In all her gendered glory, I saw and continue to see my sister as having incalculable agency, indomitable power. This is precisely why I revere her. This is precisely why I am able to be angry at her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.