Hannie Lawlor, Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century French and Spanish Women's Writing

Abstract

This review discusses Hannie Lawlor’s Relational Responses to Trauma in Twenty-First-Century French and Spanish Women’s Writing (2024), which conceptualizes autobiographical writing as a relational form in which narratives of the self are shaped by the lives of others. Focusing on contemporary French and Spanish texts, Lawlor examines how intergenerational trauma, family memory, and ethical questions of representation are negotiated through first-person narration. The review highlights the study’s comparative perspective and its analysis of narrative strategies that challenge binary notions of voice, authority, and testimony in post-traumatic life writing, thereby contributing to ongoing debates in life writing and trauma studies.