On the Rhetoric of Gloom and Joy: “In turbulent love with the world”

A s an author who ponders the big questions of life and death, Nancy Mairs has made a career of writing relaxed, conversational essays that demystify traumatic events. Whether her focus is illness, depression, disability, suicide, adultery, murder, euthanasia, or the death penalty, Mairs grounds her essays in the tangible and frequently humorous rituals of daily life in a way that seems at once psychologically serious and rhetorically playful. Eschewing, on the one hand, a bygone ars moriendi tradition, and on the other the comic or transcendent plot common to disability and trauma narrative, 1 Mairs offers an alternative framework for responding to difficult experiences as both arbitrary and inevitable, one that dignifies the process of grieving but is just as quick to emphasize the wonders and delight of a tactile, relational world. Focusing here on her 2001 collection A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories , I want to address Mairs’s signature style through psychoanalytic theories of curiosity and work in order to understand what it means for Mairs, in her words, to “choose joy” ( Waist-High 209). How does an author so acutely familiar with loss and sorrow manage to sustain, in the face of anguish, the possibility of renewal, plenitude, and pleasure? These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.