AutobiographyTerrific autobiographies!
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One Writer's Beginning by Eudora Welty
Warner Books, 1984
Autobiography 114 pages
Eudora Welty treats words with respect nearing idolatry. Her study of Latin taught her love of grammar, the "alliance with word." As she listened to her family's stories, she became a privileged observer and learned to write as a listener. Sitting back and absorbing words, however, was hardly a passive activity for, as Welty says, "movement must be at the very heart of listening." Her story of a writer's beginning is a story of wisdom and humor, not how it is to be a writer, but how it is to be a lover of life. J.M.
Excerpt
At around age six, perhaps, I was standing by myself in our front yard waiting for supper, just at that hour in a late summer day when the sun is already below the horizon and the risen full moon in visible sky stops being chalky and begins to take on light. There comes the moment, and I saw it then, when the moon goes from flat to round. For the first time it met my eyes as a globe. The word "moon" came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth the moon became a word.
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Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987
Memoir, 204 pages
In Fierce Attachments Vivian Gornick looks back on her life and the women who gave it shape to "understand how much of them I understood." Her memories of growing up in a largely Jewish tenement in the Bronx go a long way to explain the ambivalent feelings a woman can have toward her mother-from animosity, hurt and disgust to compassion, respect, and love. Interspersed among the memories are present-day conversations, by turns combative and healing, between mother and adult daughter as they walk the streets of Manhattan. Lively and intense, these conversations entertain as they further dissect the mother-daughter bond. Gornick's look at human behavior (including her own) is candid and unflinching, her insights piercing and astute. While this book may be of particular interest to women who wish to understand the influence of childhood experience on adult choices, it has much to say about the human condition and is highly recommended to all readers. C.W.
Excerpt
I hardly remember the men at all. They were everywhere, of course-husbands, fathers, brothers-but I remember only the women. And I remember them all crude like Mrs. Drucker or fierce like my mother. They never spoke as though they knew who they were, understood the bargain they had struck with life, but they often acted as though they knew. Shrewd, volatile, unlettered, they performed on a Dreiserian scale. There would be years of apparent calm, then suddenly an outbreak of panic and wildness: two or three lives scarred (perhaps ruined), and the turmoil would subside. Once again: sullen quiet, erotic torpor, the ordinariness of daily denial. And I-the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image-I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me thirty years to understand how much of them I understood.
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Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman
Penguin Books, 1989
Memoir, 280 pages
As a 13-year-old girl, Eva Hoffman emigrates with her family from Poland to Vancouver, British Columbia. In Lost in Translation she reflects on the significance of this move in her life, with particular emphasis on the way language relates to experience and contributes to the immigrant's sense of alienation. As a gifted child acutely sensitive to language, Hoffman notes how words tie her to everything she knows. To her, it is the Polish word for "river" that signifies riverness and all her experience of riverness; the English word for river seems removed from what she thinks of as a river. This detachment from English and the inadequacy of her beloved Polish in the new culture leave the young Hoffman feeling untethered to experience. As she masters English--for her a long and ever-conscious process--she comes to understand the American character, and observes it in English that is as fine and precise as language can be. C.W.
Excerpt
Loss is a magical preservative. Time stops at the point of severance, and no subsequent impressions muddy the picture you have in mind. The house, the garden, the country you have lost remain forever as you remember them. Nostalgia-that most lyrical of feelings-crystallizes around these images like amber. Arrested within it, the house, the past, is clear, vivid, made more beautiful by the medium in which it is held and by its stillness.
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Black Boy by Richard Wright
Originally published 1937
Autobiography, 285 pages
Black Boy is an autobiographical account of Richard Wright's childhood and early adulthood in the South of the 1910s and 20s. First abandoned by his father, then virtually orphaned when illness made an invalid of his mother, Richard was repeatedly uprooted and always accompanied by poverty, hunger, and cruelty. We see signs of the writer he would become as he discovers and puzzles over questions of racial identity; as he learns to fear and then hate white people; as he articulates his experience of religion as tyrannical and manipulative. Against all odds, Wright recognized and maintained his sense of personal integrity and entitlement at the core of his being, refusing to accept a status that would prevent him from tasting the full range of human experience. C.W.
Excerpt
I was in my fifteenth year; in terms of schooling I was far behind the average youth of the nation, but I did not know that. In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and, without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the bells and the screams that filled the air.
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In My Mother's House by Kim Chernin
Ticknor & Fields, 1983
Autobiography, 307 pages
In My Mother's House is a "tale of transformation and development-the female reversal of that patriarchal story in which the power of the family's founder is lost and dissipated as the inheriting generations decline and fall to ruin." It is the story of four generations of women: Perle, who immigrates from Russia and is never able to adjust to life in America; Perle's daughter, Rose, who joins the Communist Party in the 1920s and rises to prominence as a passionate and effective organizer as well as a party secretary; Kim, Rose's daughter, whose disillusionment with communism and desire to become a poet are seen as betrayals by her mother; and Kim's daughter, Larissa, whose life is made possible by the sacrifices and strivings of her foremothers. Many of the stories are narrated in Rose's voice, but Kim also reflects on her own experience growing up as the daughter of such a remarkable woman. Interspersed among the tales of family history is the story of growing intimacy and reconciliation between Kim and her mother, a healing made possible through stories, as mother and daughter each tell the truth about their own lives. C.W.
Excerpt
"Daughter," she will say, in a voice that is stern and admonishing, "always a woman must be stronger than the most terrible circumstance. You know what my mother used to say? Through us, the women of the world, only through us can everything survive." An image comes to me. I see generations of women bearing a flame. It is hidden, buried deep within, yet they are handing it down from one to another, burning. It is a gift of fire, transported from a world far off and far away, but never extinguished. And now, in this very moment, my mother imparts the care of it to me. I must keep it alive, I must manage not to be consumed by it, I must hand it on when the time comes to my daughter.
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