Assembling Reading and Writing in the Face of Loss: Christa Couture’s How to Lose Everything and Dakshana Bascaramurty’s This Is Not the End of Me
Abstract Through nonfictional texts dealing with complicated and traumatic experiences related to loss, readers and writers seem to become more intricately entangled. Following Rita Felski, reading is said to ignite a process of “recognition” (23) which might be paralleled to the self-discovery process which writing may achieve. Sympathy and mutual identification arise and bring readers’ and writers’ identities closer, creating an intersubjective space where health and illness assemble their relations. This analysis of Christa Couture’s How to Lose Everything and Dakshana Bascaramurty’s This is Not the End of Me: Lessons on Living from a Dying Man will attempt to show that there is a tight link between reader and writer through nonfiction which transcends the literary text. In addition, the healing nature of this connection will be highlighted, which supports the idea of using reading and writing techniques as therapeutical strategies in the coping with emotional turmoil and distress.
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Rak, Julie. Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. E-book ed., Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013.
Reis, Harry T., et al. “Toward Understanding Understanding: The Importance of Feeling Understood in Relationships.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, vol. 11, no. 3, 2017, pp. 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12308.
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Sommer, Robert. “The Use of Autobiography in Psychotherapy.” Journal of Clinical Psychology, vol. 59, no. 2, 2003, pp. 197–205, https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.10146.
“What a Dying Young Father Taught a Toronto Reporter about Grappling with Loss in her Own Life.” CBC Radio, 19 June 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-foroct-6-2020-1.5751777/what-a-dying-young-father-taught-a-toronto-reporterabout-grappling-with-loss-in-her-own-life-1.5733038. Accessed 20 June 2023.
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Anderson, Ben. “Affective Atmospheres.” Emotion, Space and Society, vol. 2, no. 2, 2009, pp. 77–81, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005.
Anderson, Ben, et al. “On Assemblages and Geography.” Dialogues in Human Geography, vol. 2, no. 2, 2012, pp. 171–89. Sage Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/2043820612449261.
Barnett, David. “‘Everyone’s Got a Book in Them’: Boom in Memoir Industry as Ordinary People Record their Stories.” The Guardian, 24 Sept. 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/24/ghostwritten-memoirs-industry-boom-ordinary-people-tell-stories. Accessed 15 June 2024.
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Readings in the Theory of Religion: Map, Text, Body, edited by Scott S. Elliott and Matthew Waggoner, e-book ed., Routledge, 2016, pp. 141–45.
Bascaramurty, Dakshana. This is Not the End of Me: Lessons on Living by a Dying Man. McClelland & Stewart, 2020.
—. “What I Learned Writing a Book about Someone Else’s Death.” Interview by Christina Vardanis. Best Health, 17 Aug. 2020, https://www.besthealthmag.ca/article/dakshana-bascaramurty-this-is-not-the-end-of-me/. Accessed 23 June 2023.
Beatty, William K. “A Historical Review of Bibliotherapy.” Library Trends, vol. 11, no. 2, 1962, pp. 106–17.
Brewer, John D. “Remembering Forwards: Healing the Hauntings of the Past.” Post-Conflict Hauntings: Transforming Memories of Historical Trauma, edited by Kim Wale, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, and Jeffrey Prager, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 29–46.
Canty, Nick. “Bibliotherapy: Its Processes and Benefits and Application in Clinical and Developmental Settings.” Logos, vol. 28, no. 3, 2017, pp. 32–40.
Carnes, Patrick J. Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships. Health Communications Inc., 2018.
Carroll, Robert. “Finding the Words to Say It: The Healing Power of Poetry.” Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, no. 2, 2005, pp. 161–72, https://doi.org/10.1093/ecam/neh096.
Couture, Christa. How to Lose Everything: A Memoir. Douglas and McIntyre, 2020.
Cummings, Jeanne. “Sharing a Traumatic Event: The Experience of the Listener and the Storyteller within the Dyad.” Nursing Research, vol. 60, no. 6, 2011, pp. 386–92, https://doi.org/10.1097/NNR.0b013e3182348823.
DeLanda, Manuel. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh UP, 2016.
Duff, Cameron. “Atmospheres of Recovery: Assemblages of Health.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, vol. 48, no. 1, 2016, pp. 58–74. Sage Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X15603222.
—. “The Ends of an Assemblage of Health.” Social Science & Medicine, vol. 317, 2023, pp. 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115636.
Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Blackwell, 2008.
Frank, Arthur W. “Illness and Autobiographical Work: Dialogue as Narrative Destabilisation.” Qualitative Sociology, vol. 23, no. 1, 2000, pp. 135–39, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005411818318.
Gilligan, Carol. “Hearing the Difference: Theorizing Connection.” Hypatia, vol. 10, no. 2, 1995, pp. 120–27, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1995.tb01373.
Hazlett, Emily. “Canada Reads.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 30 Aug. 2012, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/canada-reads. Accessed 16 Oct. 2023.
Horáková, Martina. “Bearing Witness: Trauma, Testimony, Scriptotherapy.” Inscribing Difference and Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Personal Non-Fiction and Life Writing in Australia and North America, edited by Martina Horáková, Masarykova Univerzita, 2017, pp. 155–73.
“How to Lose Everything: Christa Couture’s Memoir about Loss, Strength, Music, Hope and More Loss.” CBC Radio, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/breonna-taylor-ruling-video-game-disinformation-wildfire-photography-christa-couture-monkey-beach-and-more-1.5737731/how-to-lose-everything-christa-couture-s-memoir-about-loss-strength-music-hope-and-more-loss-1.5737739. Accessed 2 Jan. 2024.
Hübl, Thomas, and Julie Jordan Avritt. Healing Collective Trauma: A Process for Integrating Our Intergenerational and Cultural Wounds. Sounds True, 2020.
Jonas-Simpson, Christine M. “Feeling Understood: A Melody of Human Becoming.” Nursing Science Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 3, 2001, pp. 222–30. Sage Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/089431840101400309.
Kaur, Rupi. Healing through Words. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2022.
Kristeva, Julia, et al. “Cultural Crossings of Care: An Appeal to the Medical Humanities.” Medical Humanities, vol. 44, no. 1, 2018, pp. 55–58, https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2017-011263.
LaCapra, Dominick. “Trauma, Absence, Loss.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 4, 1999, pp. 696–727.
Lapsley, Michael. “The Healing of Memories.” The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work, no. 2, 2002, pp. 72–75.
Larson, Thomas. The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative. E-book ed., Ohio UP, 2007.
Martínez, M. Angeles. “Storyworld Possible Selves and the Phenomenon of Narrative Immersion: Testing a New Theoretical Construct.” Narrative, vol. 22 no. 1, 2014, pp. 110–31. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2014.0004.
McAvinchey, Caoimhe. “Clean Break: A Practical Politics of Care.” Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance, edited by Amanda Stuart Fisher and James Thompson, Manchester UP, 2020, pp. 123–38.
McLoughlin, Danny. “Self-Help Books Statistics.” Wordsrated, 16 Dec. 2022, https://wordsrated.com/self-help-books-statistics/. Accessed 17 Oct. 2023.
Miller, Nancy K. “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir.” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 2, 2007, pp. 537–48. JSTOR, https://doi.org/ 10.1632/pmla.2007.122.2.537.
Ostenson, Jon. “The Healing Power of Stories: Reading and Rereading A Monster Calls.” When Loss Gets Personal: Discussing Death through Literature in the Secondary ELA Classroom, edited by Michelle M. Falter and Steven T. Bickmore, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018, pp. 59–67.
Rak, Julie. Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. E-book ed., Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013.
Reis, Harry T., et al. “Toward Understanding Understanding: The Importance of Feeling Understood in Relationships.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, vol. 11, no. 3, 2017, pp. 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12308.
Riestra-Camacho, Rocío. “Three Uses of Recognition in Emma Woolf’s Anorexia Recovery Memoir An Apple a Day (2012).” Prose Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, 2021, pp. 85–105, https://doi.org/10.1080/01440357.2021.1995291.
Sommer, Robert. “The Use of Autobiography in Psychotherapy.” Journal of Clinical Psychology, vol. 59, no. 2, 2003, pp. 197–205, https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.10146.
“What a Dying Young Father Taught a Toronto Reporter about Grappling with Loss in her Own Life.” CBC Radio, 19 June 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-foroct-6-2020-1.5751777/what-a-dying-young-father-taught-a-toronto-reporterabout-grappling-with-loss-in-her-own-life-1.5733038. Accessed 20 June 2023.
Artacho-Martín, L. (2025). Assembling Reading and Writing in the Face of Loss: Christa Couture’s How to Lose Everything and Dakshana Bascaramurty’s This Is Not the End of Me. Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, 14, 127–144. https://doi.org/10.14201/candb.v14i127-144
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