Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography (review)

Reviews 69 WORKS CITED Antler, Joyce et al., eds. The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1992. Ashley, Kathleen, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters, eds. Autobiography and Postmodernism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994. Bell, Susan Groag, and Marilyn Yalom, eds. Revealing Lives: Autobiography , Biography, and Gender. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990. Chamberlain, Mary. Writing Lives: Conversations Between Women Writers. London: Virago, 1988. Epstein, WUliam H., ed. Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography and Biographical Criticism. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1991. Iles, Teresa, ed. All Sides of the Subject: Women and Biography. New York: Teachers College/ Columbia UP, 1992. Mandell, Gail Porter, ed. Life into Art: Conversations with Seven Contemporary Biographers. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1991. Meyers, Jeffrey, ed. The Craft of Literary Biography. New York: Schocken, 1985. Pachter, Marc, ed. Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art. PhUadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1981. Personal Narratives Group. Interpreting Women's Lives. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. [See the following review.] Stanton, Domna C, ed. The Female Autograph. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Zinsser, WUliam. Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography. New York: American Heritage, 1986. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds. Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.415 pp. $19.95, ISBN 0-8166-2490-9. It is interesting to ponder the connections between autobiography and the literary canon, and to note the historical phases of their interaction. Initially, the two would hardly have been mentioned in tandem with one another: autobiographies were simply not a part of the trinity of the epic-lyric-dramatic world of Uterature. And when autobiographies became vaUd textual artifacts worthy of consideration , the bourgeois subjectivities whose formation they represented were only narrowly interpreted, mostly as the accounts of the lives of white/European bourgeois men. But times and interests change, and 70 Biography 21.1 (Winter 1998) power becomes more diffused, and with the onset of social critical movements such as Marxism, feminism, and cultural studies—with the ref ocusing of the critical lens on other groups, that is—the autobiographies of those others also began to emerge and to become a part of the larger critical discussion that has continued to chaUenge the assumptions of the literary canon. Of course, nothing is simple, as this book constantly points out—for once postmodernism and its skepticism concerning the unified self launched a major, perhaps fatal attack on the still extant remnants of Enlightenment thinking, it appeared as if the autobiography, at least in its traditional form as the presentation of a Self, would perhaps retreat again into obscurity— outdated, clearly invalid, and needing to be discarded. What Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson accomplish in their newest anthology is, however, a paradoxical response to such negativism, in such a differentiating way that one cannot say that they have either re-centered the autobiography (as in "The Autobiography") as a subject worth critical investigation, or that they, despite their postmodernist framework, have contributed to its demise. What they have done instead is to broaden the discussion of the form itself, expanding its meaning and enriching its implications for the ways in which it influences our everyday lives. The result is a quite remarkable collection of essays treating a great variety of autobiographical possibiUties in coherent, engaging, and immensely interesting fashion. The sheer wealth of the approaches and ideas evident in their collection is exciting, but at the same time, one of the great strengths of the book is its consistency: every piece appears to have been carefully and thoughtfully edited to conform both in style and language to the whole. It is thus a book that I was able to read through without feeling disrupted as I moved from chapter to chapter, making my own connections along the way, gathering specific information but also getting a wonderful sense of the entirety that is presented. For this is not just a book about autobiographies and their use in everyday life. It is also...