In this paper I revisit several books that were published in Egypt soon after the ousting of Hosni Mubarak. The authors are Cairenes, mostly of a younger generation, who witnessed and participated in the uprising that started on January 25, 2011. Their accounts of their day-to-day involvement with, and experiences of what came to be labelled the Egyptian Revolution, can rightfully lay claim to authoritativeness and reliability as historiographical evidence. But, these texts not only record, describe and narrate the events, they envision circumstances that were yet to come. These acts of writing are thus more than ‘constatives’; in fact, they should be read as ‘performatives’ - articulations of visions, hopes and recommendations for the post-Mubarak Egypt. Written and published immediately after a symbolically important victory was achieved, yet at a time when Egyptian society was only entering what turned out to be a still lasting turbulent and uncertain period of transition, they intertwine the interpretations of what has happened with the ideas about what should happen. The future, however, has mostly let these writers down. What was supposed to have an illocutionary force did not bring about many perlocutionary effects. So, how is this disappointment negotiated? How is the writer-and-revolutionary coping with the on-going defragmentation of what in the early days of ‘our glorious revolution’ appeared to be much more compact – the imaginations of Egypt/ian/ness? Combining discourse analysis, New Literacy Studies, multimodal analysis and anthropology of writing, I approach these texts in search of tropes, sociolinguistic repertoires and discursive mechanisms through which the past, the present and the future were simultaneously written about. I then read them against another discursive backdrop, the one layered by the authors’ subsequent writings (those that have appeared after the initial ‘post-Mubarak’ texts were published) and the interviews I conducted with some of the writers two years after the uprising. I offer an interpretative commentary on how the acts of remembering and memorialising the past, experiencing the present and reflecting on the future form a nexus in which the meaning-making acts of writing engage with disenchantment.