Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped tells two concomitant stories: that of her own ascension from bright young student to author, and that of the violence, physical, environmental and biopolitical, suffered by the Black community of DeLisle, Mississippi at the hands of white supremacist power structures. The narrative pans between the intimate, personal details of the character Jesmyn's life to the broader issues that are connected to and influence that life. It weaves together the story of Jesmyn's coming of age, narrated chronologically, with that of the death of five men close to her, narrated in reverse chronology: Rog dies of undiagnosed heart disease, Demond is shot dead before acting as a witness during a drug trial, C.J. is hit by a train at a crossing with perpetually broken lights, and Ronald commits suicide. The two chronologies meet with the death of Jesmyn's younger brother, Josh. Across these converging narratives, Ward relates her developing consciousness of other women's coming-ofage stories and later the writing of civil rights activists, connecting her local and family history to the practice of oral storytelling and probing the communicative and emancipatory limits of storytelling. In this essay, I argue that Ward's memoir subverts the generic convention within American autobiography of a sovereign subject, replacing this with a posthumanist biopolitical subject. I show how Ward's memoir subverts the prevalent ideological underpinnings of mainstream American life-writing, in particular the narrative of upward mobility, and questions the ways this genre conceptualises and reifies ‘the good life’ and neoliberal subjects within the American imagination. Through a sustained analysis of state-sanctioned biopolitical violence, a reconceptualisation of the sovereign subject and agency, and a rejection of the racist and classist teleology of the upward mobility narrative, Ward posits a radical understanding of what it means to be an American subject. In particular, Ward's work centres on groups who are marginalised from the sovereign subject of the Enlightenment that the autobiographical genre has been central in constructing. Ward's undoing of this sovereignty is performed through intertextual references, generic innovations and metatextual commentary that serve to assert the relationship between the story and the subject, and to establish the lacunae and failures of that relationship for marginalised writers.