We typically think of some moments in space and time as more significant than others. The day we get married is deemed more significant than a mundane day sitting in the office. In reality, what if our sense of space–and how we derive meaning in space–is all that matters? Does our interpretation of a moment in space and time still have meaning, even if the interpretation is false?
These are questions we can explore in T Kira Madden’s essay, titled “Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy.” In her essay, Madden creates a life narrative which intertwines important memories from her childhood, realizations about her purpose as a writer, and a vague but momentous remembrance of hearing a child’s screams one night.
Madden strategically selects certain experiences and moments from her life to include in her narrative. Time and space are manipulated; the “space” she describes isn’t entirely factual, and the memories she has are rearranged, introduced and revisited later on. By doing so, Madden creates her own sense of meaning from these experiences. Her essay is designed with a purpose–which is to prove that writing is more than just a stress-reliever. Her writing challenges what we assume when we hear the word “autobiography.” We think of truth, and we think of authors who reveal these emotional, groundbreaking experiences that shape their lives forever. On the contrary, Madden’s essay causes us to wonder if the significance of self-writing doesn’t have to rely on truth, or jaw dropping stories. She argues that writing about the self is just as calculated and tactical as writing any other literary piece, and that her ability to make the reader feel something is her primary job, not remembering every factual detail. Nevertheless, through her ability to mold experiences, and redefine them in a way that creates meaning, Madden turns a seemingly uneventful moment in time into the focal point of her essay. She turns the mundane day sitting in the office into the wedding day.
Against Catharsis: Writing is Not Therapy
The third edition of a book titled Reading Autobiography Now: An Updated Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, gives some insight on the complexity of life writing and the different ways self expression manifests itself. One excerpt describes autobiography as potentially “a coming to artistic self-consciousness,” which accurately describes the contents of Madden’s essay–and how her experience shaped her opinions about writing. (Smith and Watson 187). We will understand how Madden describes her journey to artistic self consciousness as a writer through her use of two agents: Spatiality and Temporality.
In Reading Autobiography Now, there’s a section titled “Autobiographical Subjects,” which explores multiple concepts related to autobiographical subjectivity and influence. A section dedicated to understanding Spatiality describes the significance of space, not only as a physical place in the world, but also as a medium for self expression. Spaces allow us to form a sense of belonging, or they can serve as a site of identity-formation. We can understand the significance of space in Madden’s writing–where space embodies both a physical place in time and an abstract area symbolizing self-realization and personal growth. The beginning of her essay is situated in a specific place in time–a night alone on 125th street. According to Madden, the street was dark and the winter breeze was hard when she heard the screams of a young boy. She turned around to find the boy, “no older than six, standing outside a Volvo station wagon, fists banging against the backseat window”(Madden). 
In the beginning of the essay, Madden is giving us a sense of her literal surroundings in this moment, establishing a scene that’s detailed enough for us to remember and visualize, but still leaves us with unanswered questions. Once she’s established this eerie scene, she immediately tells her audience that she turns around and leaves the scene. As her story progresses, it’s evident that Madden is not focused on discussing the specific details of that night.
As a reader, we’re still wondering what exactly happened. Is the boy okay? Why is he so upset?
Although this moment in space is the focal point of her essay–it is not important in the way that we’d assume. In reality, Madden has no clue what was going on with the young boy. She never saw why he was banging his hands on the car window, crying to his mother. In fact, some of the specifics in her recollection of the memory are fabricated. Madden actually “does not remember what kind of car he was banging on—I’m not the kind of person who knows, identifies, or remembers the details of cars.”
Her story is not significant because she heard a boy scream on 125th street, but instead it is significant because of what the scream on 125th street meant to her. The “space” that is described by Madden is not solely significant because of its real and immediate surroundings, instead it’s important because this moment evoked feelings inside of her she couldn’t shake.
According to Smith and Watson, the authors of Reading Autobiography Now, the “natural environment cannot be articulated in its own terms” and that our “space is humanized–rather than the material world taken on its own terms”(76). Madden’s depiction of the scene is shared to us through a biased lens. Even when she remembers the car–a seemingly objective detail about the scene–Madden falsely remembers it as a Volvo station wagon, because that was the car her mother once drove. The “space” of this story has been humanized, and the objective has quickly become subjective. Madden projected her mothers car in her recollection of the boy’s car because she was picturing herself in that moment, seeing herself as a little boy banging on the glass. She created a connection in that moment in space–a connection that wasn’t there on its own.
Concepts of spatiality and temporality “intersect in autobiographical narration” (Smith and Watson 137). Madden not only manipulates and reconstructs space in her writing, but she also manipulates the sense of time. Another way we can understand the sense of order in Madden’s essay is by understanding “Patterns of Emplotment,” a concept discussed in Smith and Watson’s book under “Autobiographical Acts.” This section describes the flexibility writers have when discussing time and space in narration. Although autobiographical narratives are often “plotted strictly by chronology,” this is only one of the ways writers can express time (Smith and Watson 136).
Madden jumps back and forth between past and present moments. Her writing could be viewed as cylindrical, because we end up at the same moment in time in the beginning–the night on 125th street. We don’t know exactly when this night happened. All we know is that she’s had some time to reflect back on it when writing her narrative.
After recalling this memory of the boy, she changes the subject of the essay, mentioning some of her thoughts and feelings on writing. Eventually, she describes another moment in the past, where she’s interviewed and reveals that the characters in her book are made up. Still, we do not have specifics on when she heard the boy scream, or when this interview occurred. She only mentions the interview to reiterate her point, which is that we are automatically disheartened when we hear writing is fabricated.
Then, Madden describes how she “fell in love with illusion magic” as a child, and she reveals details about her father being a gambler and taking her to Las Vegas. This is the earliest memory Madden introduces to us–yet it is almost towards the end of her essay. Finally, she brings us back to her memory of that night on 125th street, revealing her “truth of the experience” which is that nothing happened after the boy screamed. She went to a dinner and an awards ceremony and went home.
Why did Madden decide to write her essay in this manner? First of all, we know she is recalling memories that configured her identity as a writer, starting all the way back to when she was a child. Ultimately, no writer can recall every exact moment in time, so instead they should know that “its gaps as well as its articulated times produce meaning”(138). Madden’s writing does not have a precise time frame, and it doesn’t necessarily need one. The significance of her message is not contingent on dates and times. Instead, these memories just need to support her argument. As long as she can convince readers that self-writing is more than cathartic, she has succeeded.
Through small bits and pieces of information, we still get a sense of who she is. She reconstructs her memory of the boy screaming, she recalls her love for magic and illusions as a child, and she reanalyzes her interaction with the interviewer–all to show how her writing is more than catharsis, and in fact it is tactical. Her life narrative couldn’t even begin to encapsulate every idea or thought about writing and what it means to her. Instead, she has to strategically include moments which create a cohesive narrative. Madden’s writing extends beyond the traditional autobiography–it is not situated in one definite time and place. But through her fragmentation of moments–she is reanalyzing her experiences and expressing them in a way that has meaning. She wants to prove that writing is carefully crafted to create meaning, not only for herself, but also for the reader. This is why we start on 125th street–because by the end of the essay we know that exact “truth” in writing about personal experience is not always what gives meaning.
According to the Reading Autobiography Now, Madden took a place–a subjective event which exists outside of her conscious awareness–but used it as a means for understanding her own life and identity. She “created a site of psychic reflection” not only for herself–but also for us, the readers (Smith and Watson 189). The site on 125th street created a memory for us–not solely because of its physical location in space–but because of how Madden lured us in with it and made us think about what it means for writing to be considered “meaningful.” She challenged us to think about whether meaning is derived from the events themselves, or our interpretation of those events.
Works Cited
Madden, Kira T. “Against Catharsis: Writing Is Not Therapy.” Literary Hub, 1 Apr. 2019,
lithub.com/against-catharsis-writing-is-not-therapy/.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography Now: An Updated Guide for
Interpreting Life Narratives. 3rd ed., University of Minnesota Press, 2024.
Excellent post, Lindsey! You capture it so well when you say that “her writing is more than catharsis, and in fact it is tactical.” As Zachary noted in his post, Madden is deeply invested in artifice, drawing our attention to the magician’s tricks, and even playing with the expected “patterns of emplotment”–especially as she subverts the one that would help clarify or resolve the opening scene. Instead, she leaves it open, inviting the reader to create their own “site of psychic reflection,” as Smith and Watson would say.
I like how you begin by reflecting on the physical scene so clearly identified at the start, and then note the other “scenes” that sort of plot out the narrative–all carefully calculated to emphasize the overriding importance of artifice. It’s remarkable how “space” here immediately becomes fluid, becomes her own, shuttles to other spaces and times and emotions, and then, ultimately, becomes the reader’s own space. We are very much left in the room of our own past in the essay’s end.
I’m intrigued by the way Madden’s essay introduces us to her infatuation with both literal and literary “magic.” It’s also striking that she picked up magic on these trips to Vegas when her father was playing cards, etc., and otherwise indisposed. That is, magic becomes, in a way, a trauma response, a distraction that, in the end, becomes central–and a central metaphor–to the literary magic she would later create (again, create in order to manage a co-existent trauma). Fascinating stuff!