Ambiguous Loss in Grief Memoirs: Meaning Making in Auster and Giralt Torrente Patriographies

Abstract

This article considers grief memoirs as a medium to create meaning amid the ambiguous loss that occurs when someone close is gone without any apparent reason. This experience may be resolved through a life narrative that holds and accepts all the different versions of that complex relationship; the presence/absence ambiguity of the person lost may be clarified by creating a narrative that encompasses all possible explorations. The article approaches Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (1982) and Marcos Giralt Torrente’s Tiempo de vida (2010) as “patriographies”—grief memoirs that achieve a meaning-making process through the different strategies they propose to deal with their fathers’ loss.