‘Grievous loss’: reading Nicholas Royle’s <i>Mother: A Memoir</i>

This paper considers grievous loss from the perspective of a memoir. It briefly considers other types of memoirs, poetic, novelistic and musical, as well as the effects of grieving on the experiencing subject. It considers Freud’s essay,’ Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) and Derrida’s response to it in Mémoires for Paul de Man (trans. 1986), where he argues that ‘the other resists the closure of our interiorizing memory’. The paper concludes with the suggestion that a memoir, in whatever form, might constitute a tender rejection, a place for the lost other to be.