This dissertation is a creative non-fiction manuscript following in the combined literary traditions of the American Captivity Narrative (e.g., Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), Hélène Cixous’s écriture feminine, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s “autobiographical consciousness” (Irene Lara “Daughter of Coatlicue” 54).
The project speaks to and for the common yet controversial reality in our society of the choices – for both natural mother and natural father – surrounding pregnancy. The project also provides an account of contemporary America’s response to single-parenting between the years 2002 and 2006.
Although the memoir is a personal investigation of pregnancy, abandonment-grief, birth, and mothering, this work is an act of transformation and healing that extends outward into the culture in that it is a textual moment of learning and knowing. The memoir is a process of interaction Anzaldúa would refer to as conocimiento: of writing self beyond self (Lara 44-45).
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