Crying’s Diaper

Becky Mclaughlin

pages: 98-115
First published online: 09 November 2017
Version: 09 November 2017

ABSTRACT
“Crying’s Diaper” is both personal narrative and memoir, in that sense, it goes beyond the recounting of a single event to meditate on the imbrication of death, grief, and love. Making use of what might be called the “writing cure,” the narrator of “Crying’s Diaper” attempts to recall and explain the events that led to the suicide of her favorite cousin, Jimmy, as well as to understand her response to his death in the aftermath. If, as Jacques Lacan argues in Seminar XXIII, “Writing is a doing which gives support to thinking,” then “Crying’s Diaper” is no more an exception, rather it gives support to mourning and perhaps more emphatically as stated in consequent discourse—it is the act of mourning.

Key words: Death- Fort/Da Game, Psychoanalysis, Narrative, Subjectivity, Trauma, The Uncanny.