ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to draw conclusions from the combination of the tools of refusal, potential and resistance, alongside the reflections throughout the social histories of Munchausen and MSbP. The chapter explores how experience might fail to match up to written histories for various reasons, and further how its ambivalence and flickering nature can draw upon feminist analysis of identity and experience. It explores how complicated experience is, and how high-level choices around the kind of history pursued can also have huge relevance. The chapter concludes that a sense of failure suffuses this book for various reasons, some connected to the author's privileged position and the role of experience in resisting marginalisation. But, in general, the failure to heal, to provide authentic access or authority when speaking about the past, need not sink the project of attempting to be active and critical about experience. A space of critical choice and meaningful reflection – where experiences might be drawn into relevance, but they might not – is a useful outcome. It is not that every historian needs to confess their darkest secrets, but that it is possible for critical, analytical links to be made and appraised for every work of history.
