Less a Method than a Form: Repairing Shame and Illness in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Kate Zambreno

In this essay, I explore how Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's A Dialogue on Love and Kate Zambreno's To Write as If Already Dead contest the relationship between illness and shame through their renegotiation of the confessional form. Both memoirs, in their incorporation of other authorial positions ranging from case notes to novels, address an interlocutor, whose presence halts the circulation of shame. Consequently, I argue that Sedgwick and Zambreno enact a kind of reparative reading within their memoirs' form, and I trace how the relationality of their works moves towards repairing the harms of medicalized shame. Counter to current debates around post-critique and the method wars, I discuss how Sedgwick and Zambreno's memoirs model their own reading practice within their pages, a practice that is inextricable from their understanding of shame and illness.