Drawing on the critical disability studies concept of cripistemology, the article shows how Robison’s novel both dismantles the trope of minimalism’s attention deficit and demands a reformulation of the relationship between writing and diagnosis. Evocative picture of a divorced mother, coping with a number of crises at once, all while she is working, being a friend and perhaps finding a new love interest. These fragments depict moments from the life of Money Breton. The novel is composed of 536 numbered sections, most of which could fit into a 280 character Tweet. To pursue this question, the article performs a close reading of Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever (2001), a novel narrated by Money Breton, a woman with an ADD diagnosis. Mary Robison’s 2001 novel, Why Did I Ever, is the great lost American fragment novel. Engaging with recent debates on the relative function and value of description and interpretation in literary studies, the article asks whether the notion of an ADD literary aesthetics, grounded in critical disability studies, might provide a route out of the dichotomy of suspicious analysis and reparative description. Pursuing some links between literary criticism and the third volume of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the article shows how minimalism was seen to resemble the ADD patient because both were defined in terms of a descriptive surface that yielded no depths for expert excavation. Thirty brief, sharply delineated short stories written over three decades by Robison (Days) chronicle emotional dislocation with witty dispassion. Why Did I Ever The Testament of Mary Mary Queen of Scots One D.O.A., One On The Way A Match for Mary Bennet Life of Mary, Queen of. : Why Did I Ever: A Novel (9781619029644) by Robison, Mary and a great selection of similar New, Used and Collectible Books available now at great prices.

What does it mean to diagnose a literary work with attention deficit disorder (ADD)? This article traces how US literary minimalism came, in the late twentieth century, to be understood as a literary counterpart to the new diagnostic category of ADD.

Why did i ever by mary robison