Writing From The Body: Memoirs By Women

Reneé E. D’Aoust,. Body of a Dancer.
Wilkes-Barre, PA: Etruscan Press, 2011. 167 Pages, Paper, $15.00.

Cheryl Strayed,. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.
New York: Knopf, 2012. 338 Pages, Hardcover, $25.95.

Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water: A Memoir.
Portland, OR: Hawthorne Books, 2011. 293 Pages, Paper, $15.95.

In the mid-twentieth century, Beryl Markham wrote a harrowing account of flying solo across the Atlantic, Isak Dinesen (a.k.a Karen Blixen) recalled the perils of life in the Kenyan wilderness, and Martha Gellhorn reported from war zones. In the past few decades, memoirs by women, including Mary Karr, Lucy Grealy, and Audre Lorde, have tended to feature more intimate and psychological dangers: abuse, addiction, and illness. With the phenomenal success of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, and the recent publication of two other excellent memoirs by a dancer and a competitive swimmer, perhaps a new subgenre is emerging: narratives in which women explore their physical as well as their emotional power.

Like Wild, Reneé E. D’Aoust’s Body of a Dancer and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water are, at their cores, accounts of how their authors became writers. In each case, the physical challenge the woman sets for herself serves as a metaphor for the writing process. But it’s not only a metaphor. These books detail mangled toenails, damaged spines, chlorine-burned hair—and sex. Their strength lies in the fact that they never stray far from the body.

Wild has already received much well-deserved attention, including in Fourth Genre, so just a brief mention here: Grieving her mother’s death and her broken marriage, lacking outdoor skills, adequate fitness, and enough money, Strayed undertakes an 1,100-mile trek on the Pacific Crest Trail. Along the way, she endures chafed skin, sore muscles, horniness, and insane thirst. She comes to understand that the sensory intensity of the hike is inseparable from its meaning, from the story she will one day write about it. Fittingly, she has this revelation at trail’s end, while licking a gigantic ice cream cone.

D’Aoust’s Body of a Dancer, also ends with an epiphany about writing, and sugar. D’Aoust, who’d dreamed from childhood of being a dancer, eats pain au chocolat in Paris after a pilgrimage to Isadora Duncan’s grave. Duncan, who died in 1927, was the founder of modern dance, in which D’Aoust had hoped, but ultimately failed, to find an artistic home. Eating the pastry represents neither D’Aoust’s resignation to her aging and widening body nor defiance against the years of self-denial that dance demanded of her. Rather, it’s a pleasure she savors in the moment and alone—the kind of pleasure more accessible to a writer than to a dancer.

D’Aoust, now a memoirist, dance critic, and writing teacher, leaves tell-alls about the dark side of dancing—anorexia, drug abuse, backstabbing prima donnas—to others (including Gelsey Kirkland, in Dancing on My Grave). Instead, Body of a Dancer is a fascinating and original account of how D’Aoust makes sense, through writing, of the labyrinth of ironies with which dance presents her: joy achieved through pain, passion experienced by denying sexuality, expression though voicelessness.

D’Aoust moved from Montana to New York City in 1993, hoping to earn a place in the Martha Graham Company. Trained from age eight as a ballerina, by 25 she’s tired of ballet’s rigidity, its demands for impossible thinness, the injury it inflicts on young bodies. Still, she loves “to jump. To leap. To fly to the sky and never land.” The looser style espoused by Graham—the flowing hair and bare feet, the tolerance for fuller breasts and thicker thighs—seems to promise D’Aoust a freer expression of her passion for movement. She heads to what was still known, two years after its founder’s death, as “Martha’s House of Pelvic Truth.”

But the truth D’Aoust finds is...