‘Compulsively readable and deeply moving’: Women’s Middlebrow Trauma Fiction

This chapter examines the representation of trauma, specifically the impact of the loss of children on mothers and their families, in contemporary women's middlebrow fiction. Examining three examples of the genre, it problematizes the dominant trauma aesthetic with its emphasis on aporia, difficulty and non-communicability, and argues that women's trauma narratives offer an alternative mode of working through trauma, one which privileges concordance over discordance, and seeks a more restitutive reading experience than is available in the canonical trauma novel.