Women's Life Writing and the Practice of Reading: She Reads to Write Herself ed. by Valérie Baisnée-Keay et al. (review)

This volume presents eighteen essays exploring the intricate relationship between life writing, the practice of reading, and the practice of writing. The introduction by Valérie Baisnée-Keay sets the theoretical and historical contexts for the essays that follow. Baisnée-Keay points out that the canonical terms "autobiography" and "biography" have tended to screen out the wide range of modes of presenting a "life"—memoirs, journals, diaries, anthropological life histories, oral narratives, graphic novels, photographs, and other visual texts—that have been employed particularly by women and other marginalized groups. Following Donald Winslow, Marlene Kadar, and more recently Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, she favors the more capacious term "life writing" because it is more conducive to exploring these forms and the theoretical issues they present.

The focus on women's life writing entails attention to gender—the differences not only in the life experiences of women and men, but more specifically in the ways these differences are expressed in their reading and writing practices. In turn, awareness of gender leads naturally to the awareness of race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other categories of social and cultural difference, and to the power/ knowledge structures that shape them.

The scholarship on reading of the last sixty years has made it clear that readers are active participants in the production of meaning. There are different views about the balance between the reader's freedom and her responsibility to the text, but the consensus is that the meaning-making work of readers is an important area for literary and cultural studies. Feminist theories of reading form an important context for the essays in this collection. I note in particular the feminist idea that reading is a double-edged instrument. It is a way for women to express and to cultivate their own subjectivity, and at the same time, it is a means through which they are interpellated into gender norms.

The book is notable for its diversity of perspectives. The volume features scholars from France, the United States, Britain, Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Romania. The essays examine the representation of reading and writing in a wide range of texts: autobiographical texts by Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Hélène Cixous; essays by Virginia Woolf; the poetic memoir of Maxine Hong Kingston; the diary of Alice James; slave narratives by Hannah Crafts and Harriet Jacobs; two autobiographies by Louise Erdrich; Anna Jameson's narrative of her travels in Canada; the autobiographical trilogy of New Zealand writer Janet Frame; Patti Smith's "autobiographical biography" of Robert Mapplethorpe; Jeannette Winterson's memoir of her working-class youth; "auto-fictions" by Nancy Huston and Ruth Ozeki; Janice Kulyk Keefer's family memoir of migration from Ukraine to Canada; culinary memoirs by Joyce Zonana and Molly Wizenberg; and autobiographical essays by Native American women writers.

The first essay, "Contrapuntal Reading in Women's Comics," is written by prominent lifewriting scholars Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. They offer a complicated account of how Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Ellen Forney's Marbles use scenes of reading depicted in comics form (drawings and texts) to "drive the story of emerging queer artistic identity," as well as to invite readers to engage in a "contrapuntal" hermeneutics directed at the norms that define female identity.

In "Plunged in a Book," Ann Jefferson finds a distinct gender difference in the life writing of twentieth-century French authors. In the works of male authors (e.g., The Words by Jean-Paul Sartre), the emphasis is on the representation of self as a writer, and on the experience and problematics of writing. We know that Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Hélène Cixous are accomplished and committed writers, but in the works Jefferson discusses, none explicitly represents herself...