When Memory Speaks

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Summary: Autobiography, Feminism, and the Self of Modern Fiction
Review: 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.