“For if historical novels have been one literary way to make the reality of our social arrangements invisible, they haven’t been the only one. It was also in 1987 that Margaret Thatcher, as canny a cultural critic as Toni Morrison, pronounced herself tired of hearing about society’s problems and, in the wake of her triumph over the National Union of Mineworkers, took a stand against the idea of society itself, proclaiming: “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women, and there are families …” Anybody looking to explain the appeal of the memoir in contemporary writing need look no further. Every sentence in every one of them, true or false, literary or non-, tells us that there are only individuals and their families. Thus, for example, the proper way for workers to see themselves is not as workers or union members, but as entrepreneurs or husbands and fathers.”
Walter Benn Michaels, The Baffler
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