Writing the True Self in the Twenty-First Century: Christian Women Memoirists from 2000-2020

In the early 2000s, a number of Christian women participated in the tradition of Christian life writing through a newly accessible technology. Christian women bloggers, like Glennon Doyle, Ann Voskamp, Jackie Hill Perry, and Melanie Shankle have been insufficiently considered by scholars and their own communities as Christian thought leaders. Drawn from my dissertation project examining twenty-first century women bloggers-turned-authors as theorists of the self, this paper interrogates these women’s shared investment in the craft of writing. Together, they imagine writing not as a practice of formation but as a practice of attention. They understand writing to be a technology of the self, but given their belief in a true, unchanging self, writing can only reveal, not transform. Drawing from other theorists of writing and my memoirists own reflection, I argue that writing is transformative and formative. Nevertheless, to acknowledge this would require my memoirists to accept a dynamic self.