Sugar baby

This work of creative non-fiction explores notions of ‘taste’ in relation to memoir writing. The essay extends the application of memoir as mere retelling to one of critical refiguring. Core to much scholarly discussion of memoir is how to conceptualise and understand the past (Murdock 2003). This work recasts memoir as an ‘ethics of the self’ (Foucault 1986) that offers a way of remaking our encounters with the past. It does this by applying Julia Kristeva’s (1982) notion of the abject to a sequence of memories around sense experiences of ‘gendered taste’. As memory is fluid and changeable (Murdock 2003), this means that the application of these ideas to specific memories effectively ‘rewrites’ them, or at the very least provides a new context for understanding them. Given this, writing memoir can be seen as the rewriting of memory.