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This paper explores the process and outcome of a collaborative life writing project about the death of a parent. Aiming to discover whether collaborative creative nonfiction writing can broaden the representation of experiences of grief and address some of the ethical challenges of writing about vulnerable others, we draw on the scholarship on memoir writing and collaboration and analyse our own process and challenges against this literature. We also identify some of the benefits of collaboratively writing about a recent and personal grief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper takes as its starting point the memoirs of a French sergeant who took part in Napoleon's Moscow campaign. After discussion of a number of war narratives from World Wars I and II, it brings out two features. The first is that the vast majority of these do not belong to the genre of fiction. The memoir form has been seen as more appropriate. The second feature is that the mode of narration used, both in fiction and non-fiction, has been that of literary realism, hence the title 'The Mimetic Imperative'. The paper goes on to discuss aspects of realism, such as attacks on it as being no more than 'reportage', the denigrating of the 'Reality Effect', and the 'Chaotic Fallacy', of assuming that the chaotic aspects of modern war can be replicated in a written text with war as its subject-matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the confessional pages of her memoirs Prozac Nation and More, Now, Again and in the meditations on popular culture that characterise her journalism and non-fiction, Elizabeth Wurtzel's writing demonstrates a consistent emphasis on images of iconic rebellion. Recognising the ways these patterns mesh with her wider focus on addiction and depression, this article situates Wurtzel's vision of outsiderdom in relation to cool's often explicitly masculine discourses and moves from there to demonstrate the extent to which the focus on cool lifestyles informs her representations of addiction and depression. In terms that connect the cultural with the psychological, 'Uncomfortably numb' illuminates not just Wurtzel's writing and the patterns that shape the interpretation of cool, but the nature of the way a depressive self is narrated, negotiated and understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]