Humouring self-care in Trump-era fiction

This thesis offers the first sustained reckoning with the role of self-care in American fiction during the Trump era. Drawing on a rich body of interdisciplinary scholarship and online material, I read four Trump-era novels that I argue participate in the contentious cultures of self-care flourishing in the wake of the 2016 election. Where scholarship has so far focused primarily on distinguishing between self-care’s consumerist incarnations and its radical possibilities, I turn to self-care as it appears in the mainstream. I do so in good humour, with an eye to the ways in which fiction enlivens and retextures—rather than eviscerating or dismissing—contemporary discourses of self-care. This apparently flippant and compromised pop-cultural phenomenon, I argue, emerges in the Trump era as a rich site of literary possibility.

Chapter One reads Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) as a pointedly toxic confrontation with Trump-era self-care’s conflicting consolations. Chapter Two proposes that evasive internet humour constitutes a troubled form of self-care in Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021). Chapter Three argues that Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (2021) negotiates the struggle to practise radical self-care, ultimately remaining tame. Chapter Four turns to the apocalyptic narrative of Ling Ma’s Severance (2018) as an exercise in wryly humouring self-care and frustrating the accusations of complicity that often accompany it. Reading each text as a layered and conflicted product of Trump-era political unease, I recast self-care as a vantage point from which contemporary novelists negotiate their ability to spectate, engage with, and intervene in a Trumpian present.