Writing, reading and teaching the (fr)agile/fragmented self: mapping life writing's intimate geographies

The typical relation between a writing self that identifies as chronically ill, disabled, impacted by traumatic experience(s), or otherwise 'fragile' and the autobiographical writing that portrays that self has tended historically towards a mapping of the subject's fragility and fragmentation. From academic autoethnographers to literary memoirists the works of such writers often comprise a chronicle of difficulties imposed by a condition or conditions seen and portrayed as a deficit. More recently, however, life stories and their readers have demonstrated a rising cultural interest in a range of skills 'assets' referred to by buzzwords like 'agility' and 'resilience'. Such terminology and the attributes to which it attaches (self-reflection leading to positive growth and adaptation) have travelled from the spheres of psychology and self-help to those of education and business. This essay explores how a range of those self-declared 'fragile' life-writer-selves from Virginia Woolf to Joanne Limburg have mapped intimate geographies of both struggle and capacity-building. In so doing, they enable reflection on the often-generative dynamic between the fragile and the agile, the challenged, isolated self and the self who creates spaces of possibility, connection, and relation, open to the demands of the future.