Not my trauma. Our trauma.

Unlike Winterson in Why Be Happy, Moss doesn't interpolate her adult musings into her recounting of her childhood in Change Me Into Zeus's Daughter. As a result, reading this memoir was an entirely different experience from last week's despite their sharing of major themes like parental abuse and rural poverty. The two texts approach trauma in a radically different way. Moss' book begins with a disclaimer: "This narrative is a true account of events, according to my memory,"which positions the text more as a recounting of historical events than a personal journey. In this way the potential for moments of misremembering or creative interpretation to serve a higher goal, is dissolved.

I imagine that a key reason that Moss relates the story in such a way without interpreting the lasting effects it had on her family is because, unlike Winterson she is not alone to tell it.
Moss' trauma was a shared one among her many siblings and although surely they each had their own distinct experiences of it, they are united in a shared pain. Presumably, Moss's siblings also made up part of the audience for her book and may have raised objections should she have chosen to incorporate more of her own self-formation into the telling.

As heart-wrenching and compelling as the story was, I felt an absence where Moss' older voice could have been to make meaning or to reflect on how her childhood circumstances shaped her and her siblings. The concluding chapters on her body image and facial reconstruction didn't fill that void for me because it seemed just to graze the surface of her sense of self. Throughout the text the reader is allowed very little time alone with Barbara without the presence of some if not all of her many characters. The effect of this is that her scenes feel crowded as her life often was,  with little space for her individualism.  Although she shares some of her personal thoughts to the reader about her self-doubt, she devotes equal attention to studying how her siblings and parents respond to the events of their lives as she does her own. In this way, I think Moss shows us her path to survival even without pointing to it directly as Winterson did. She demonstrates in thorough detail across the several years covered by the text how she and her siblings conspired to form a united front against the often unjust circumstances they found themselves in. It seems her membership in this team made everything just a little easier to bear.