Aftershocks

This chapter examines how Anglo-American COVID-19 autofiction captures the psychological toll of lockdown. Focusing on Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency (2022), Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables (2023), Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel’s Dayswork (2023), Clare Pollard’s Delphi (2023), and Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (2021), it highlights how authors fictionalize or marginalize themselves to depict isolation rather than illness. Drawing on trauma theory (Caruth, McNally, Luckhurst), the chapter analyzes fragmented timelines, dispersed narration, and oblique focus as strategies for representing slow, cumulative trauma. These works transform personal experience into provisional meaning-making, tracing domestic strain, social rupture, and collective disorientation. COVID-19 autofiction emerges as a genre uniquely suited to register the pandemic’s aftershocks obliquely, resisting linear, direct, or heroic narratives.