Post-Communist life writing and the discourses of history: Vesna Goldsworthy's Chernobyl Strawberries

Life writing in the aftermath of an Eastern European totalitarian regime combines the thorniest problems in autobiography - memory and self-representation - with the divisive aspects of remembering: blame and guilt. In the context of the war-torn former Yugoslavia, the use of memory, personal history, recollection, self-representation or the representability of one's autobiography become burning issues that inform one's understanding and rendering of historical moments. This essay analyses Chernobyl Strawberries by focusing on the way Vesna Goldsworthy recollects and portrays her homeland under Communism, the ways in which articulating personal life and family stories become crucial ways of writing recent Yugoslav history and explaining the loss of her native country to a British audience.