When Memory Speaks | Jill Ker Conway | Autobiography, Feminism, and the Self of Modern Fiction

When Memory Speaks | Jill Ker Conway | Valuable For Its Deep and Thoughtful Discussion

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When Memory Speaks

	When Memory Speaks Jill Ker Conway Vintage, 1999 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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J ill Ker Conway, one of our most admired autobiographers--author of The Road from Coorain and True North--looks astutely and with feeling into the modern memoir: the forms and styles it assumes, and the strikingly different ways in which men and women respectively tend to understand and present their lives.
In a narrative rich with evocations of memoirists over the centuries--from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand to W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, Frank McCourt and Katharine Graham--the author suggests why it is that we are so drawn to the reading of autobiography, and she illuminates the cultural assumptions behind the ways in which we talk about ourselves.
Conway traces the narrative patterns typically found in autobiographies by men to the tale of the classical Greek hero and his epic journey of adventure. She shows how this configuration evolved, in memoirs, into the passionate romantic struggling against the conventions of society, into the frontier hero battling the wilderness, into self-made men overcoming economic obstacles to create an invention or a fortune--or, more recently, into a quest for meaning, for an understandable past, for an ethnic identity.
In contrast, she sees the designs that women commonly employ for their memoirs as evolving from the writings of the mystics--such as Dame Julian of Norwich or St. Teresa of Avila--about their relationship with an all-powerful God. As against the male autobiographer's expectation of power over his fate, we see the woman memoirist again and again believing that she lacks command of her destiny, and tending to censor her own story.
Throughout, Conway underlines the memoir's magic quality of allowing us to enter another human being's life and mind--and how this experience enlarges and instructs our own lives.

From the Hardcover edition.

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Autobiography, Feminism, and the Self of Modern Fiction

This book is a fascinating, clear, balanced, and informed look at what Conway calls "the most popular form of fiction for modern readers"--autobiography. Although Conway is drawn to modern themes of race and gender, she also has a keen critical eye, balances the popular with the less-well-known, and the present with the past. She focuses on meaning making, the way people see their own lives, and the lessons they draw for others from them. For better or worse (and often worse) she argues, the Homeric Greek hero on his action packed odyssey is archetype for meaningful autobiography. Church father Augustine in his Confessions (c. 400) internalized the action, chronicling his attempts to resist temptation and submit to the will of God.Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Confessions (1871) attempts to succeed on the temporal level, to be a worldly success in touch with self and emotions beyond society's external laws. Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography (1818) defines such worldly success in economic terms based on diligence and delayed gratification. The analysis of 19th century women's rights leaders such as Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are artfully analyzed through their autobiographies, as are colorful female personalities less obviously political such as stepbrother-abused Virginia Wolf (1882-1941) and the hilarious Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962)who was married four times (and had an affair with D.H. Lawrence) and wrote a four-volume memoirs entitled Intimate Memories. More familiar feminists such as Australian Germain Greer, Gloria Steinem ("full-time feminist leader, slipping into the role of caregiver for the feminist movement and unable to care for herself") are also analyzed with a critical focus of Conway's refreshingly non-monolithic feminism. Because of her rare combination of empathy and critical clarity, Conway excels when she is examining more marginal characters such as lesbian May Sarton's 1968 Plant Dreaming Deep, the 1974 Flying by lesbian Kate Millet (who appeared on the cover of Time),black lesbian Audre Lorde's 1982 Zami, A New Spelling of My Name, and so on. Conway also analyzes gay male autobiographies such as historian Martin Duberman's 1991 Cures, and A Different Person (1993) by James Merril (son of Charles E. Merril, one of the founders of Merril Lynch). She examines James/Jan Morris's transexual account in Conundrum, and decides that such stories are intrinsically more essentialist (structurally sexist)than simple gay and lesbian autobiographies. I am not sure I agree with all of Conway here--her definition of postmodernism seems too simple, and it is not clear that the true goal of autobiography writing is to own up to ourselves as significant actors in the drama of our own existence, rather than victimlike or overly modest ("feminine") being to whom things happen. To know that we would have to know the status of free will, which we don't, and there is the added danger (also an artistic one, although it can have comic effects) of the egotistic memoirist who takes credit for all sorts of things that were not related to his actions or decisions. So there is a continuum between active/egotistic/sellable autobiography and passive/modest/marketplace-challenged memoirs that needs to be carefully navigated by any aspiring autobiographer.But what is good about Conway is she is nice without pulling any critical punches. She shows how even the most successful feminists can hurt their cause by the way they report their story, and she ends with the striking image of a man (French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby--The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 1997)paralyzed in all but one eye from a stroke, telling his story by blinking as a devoted helper goes through the alphabet until arriving at the correct letter. Although nominally about autobiography, and a brilliant work of feminism, this book may perhaps be of most use to creative writers.

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Valuable For Its Deep and Thoughtful Discussion

Jill Ker Conway, author of The Road from Coorain and True North, is one of our most widely-read and admired memoirists. Her books are praised for their graceful explorations of our most urgent questions of personal meaning: Where do I come from? What is my story? How has my past experience shaped me?

In When Memory Speaks, Conway turns her attention from her own life to the stories of other lives, looking at the modern memoir and the way it reflects our culture and ourselves. She isn't writing exclusively about women, but this is a help, for she uses the narrative patterns of men's stories about their lives to show how women's memoirs evolved, comparing and contrasting the forms. Using examples from the autobiographies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, David Livingston, Conway shows that men's stories typically involve the self-made hero who creates his life in conflict with social or natural forces. In men's memoirs, she says, the male hero reveals himself as acting upon the world in order to give it the shape and meaning he chooses.

Conway argues that until very recently, women's memoirs have shown quite a different pattern. They reveal the autobiographer as a "romantic heroine" who is acted upon, who seems to believe that she lacks control over her destiny and tends to censure her shaping role in her own story in order to satisfy her readers' expectations. Conway shows, for instance, that Jane Addams developed the the Hull House project after several active and energetic years of careful study of European social reform--and yet she writes about her idea in the passive voice, as if she were its agent, rather than its creator. In this way, Conway says, "Addams is able to conceal her own role in making the events of her life happen and to conform herself to the romantic image of the female...shaped by circumstances beyond her control" (p. 49). And, Conway points out, even such assertive feminists as Germain Greer (in Daddy, We Hardly Knew You) and Gloria Steinem (Revolution From Within) reveal in their memoirs the difficulty of redefining ourselves as heroes of our own stories.

Conway's book is valuable for its deep and thoughtful discussion of the history of women's stories, compared to and contrasted with the autobiographical stories of men. But it is also valuable for what it has to say about the memoir itself, as a way to help us understand ourselves and our past experiences. If we recall the past as a chaos of random bits of good and bad luck that shaped us willy-nilly, we are likely to be victims of a similar future. If we see the past as the product of our choices and actions, we are better able to shape our futures:

"We travel through life guided by an inner life plot--part the creation of family, part the internalization of broader social norms, part the function of our imaginations and our own capacity for insight into ourselves, part from our groping to understand the universe in which the planet we inhabit is a speck. When we speak about our memories, we do so through literary forms that seem to capture universals in human experience--the quest, the romance, the odyssey, the tragic or the comic mode. Yet we are all unique, and so are our stories. We should pay close attention to our stories. Polish their imagery. Find their positive rather than their negative form. Search for the ways we experience life differently from the inherited version and edit the plot accordingly..."

As women memoirists, committed to understanding our stories and getting them straight, we need Conway's book. I hope you will read it, not just once but several times. It will help you to see which pattern your own story fits into: that of the woman who actively shapes her plot and chooses her response to the world, or that of the woman who waits to see what sort of plots life is going to dish out to her.

by Susan Wittig Albert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviewsorg
reviewing books by, for, and about women

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