Violent Death, Mourning and Writing in How I Killed My Father by Sara Jaramillo Klinkert

Abstract

This study aimed to understand how mourning is represented in literary memoirs on disruptive losses marked by violence and to explore the role writing plays in the grieving process. Based on the interpretation of Sara Jaramillo Klinkert’s memoir How I Killed My Father, this article focuses on mourning after a homicide. The employed method was biographical-narrative, with a hermeneutic approach, and documentary research strategies. Results show the complexity of the mourning that marked the author’s childhood because of the disruptiveness of death, the confrontation with the destructiveness of another person, the awareness of vulnerability, and the fracture of previous referents. It is concluded that writing mediates the grieving process by mobilizing the narrative work of the wounded past, rescuing the father from forced oblivion, and relocating the bond in the realm of written memory.