Writing trauma : the other into the story of the self

Memoir is the story of the story: we are relational beings, as are our histories, narratives, and tales. By this description, memoir is not uniquely the author's story; instead, it is three things: the author's autobiography, the biography of the other, and the autobiography of the other. Autoethnography is a social science method developed to scrutinize the author's own communities, people, and self, with an interventionist precept to give a voice to the voiceless" a voice to the silent stories of others. This ethnographic exploration, research and writing of the I, allows the author to better understand cultural experience, theoretically proposing that individual experience is not separable. This chapter will introduce and interrogate a new method of qualitative research and writing: exo-autoethnography" a distinct ethnographic method exploring own experience as directed by the experience of the other through transgenerational transmission of trauma (TTT). Exo-autoethnography is the autoethnographic exploration of a history whose events the researcher (author) did not experience directly, but a history that impacted the researcher through familial or other personal connections.