UC San Diego

Home Remedies is a collection of linked essays which merge memoir and discursive considerations of mental illness, care, ambition, and contemporary culture. The thesis consists of four essays, each centering an aspect the author’s personal and familial experiences with chronic and mental illness. The first essay explores a subcultural, post-anarchist milieu, and its positions towards contemporary lifestyle practices and domesticity as sites of happiness and being well. The second essay is about fantasies of creative success, imposed narrative arcs, and the schizophrenia of the author’s younger sibling. The third essay braids explorations of Siegfried Kracauer’s “Mass Ornament” and Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up with explorations of the author’s own domestic aspirations and chronic illness. The fourth essay examines meaning-making from illness as well as the impact of received narratives through woven meditations on family history, homelessness, psychoanalysis, myth, self-determination, and diagnosis. The research and creative practice which built this thesis especially concerned the overlap between cultural understandings of illness and of literary form. Its own form is a result of experiments with narrative sequencing to enable the simultaneous staging of story and the unfolding of questions.