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10 s I N G U l A R AU T H O R I A l O f f e R I N G s Lifestories, Literacy Narratives, and the Shatterbelt Great stories are the ones you’ve heard and want to hear again. You know how it ends but you want to know again. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things We know already! But that is a foolish thought. Anybody can know the story. To have been there is the thing. Thomas Mann, Joseph the Provider The dust cover for Melanie Thernstrom’s The Dead Girl centers on a three-quarter view of the victim’s face. Although the artist relied on a photograph of Roberta Lee, reproduced on page eight of the book, there is a striking difference between cover and photograph. Through cropping and especially through reshaping of the right eye, Lee’s Asian features are effaced. This westernization of the author’s Asian American friend may disturb readers for a number of reasons. Were the publicity experts at Simon and Schuster attentive to the history of United States’ journalism, in which murders of young Anglo girls seem to prove more newsworthy than murders of young minority girls? Or were the publishers participating in the avoidance, common throughout the United States’ marketplace, of race and racial conflict? (The erasing of race, of course, may be an act of racism itself.) There is a third reason to question the altering of the book’s contents by the book’s cover, one that most readers will not think of. That is the way the cover rejects an offering that the author is making to the memorial of her dead friend, and more fundamentally the way it strips the author of one of her own contributions to the story of Lee’s death. As the previous chapter notes, in the climactic scene of the book Melanie Thernstrom discovers that she has not forgotten Roberta’s face. The “vision” comes back to her with the clarity and luminosity of real life: “I see her face. The real thing, not a photograph: her face” (1990, 428). This is a unique experience, happening once to her and her Singular Authorial Offerings 157 alone, by herself in the dead of the night. This particular “real thing” is her own memory and no one else’s, a singular construction from the many years she and Roberta grew up together as close friends. Her narration of the late-night event in The Dead Girl serves as one of her personal offerings to the memory of Roberta. It is not different than the signed wreaths at the funeral or the single flower that Roberta’s mother gives Thernstrom at the reception. Thernstrom’s offering, however, is suppressed by the cover artist’s doctored image of Roberta. It is not an inconsequential cover-up, since the counter-image on the cover will be the first impression readers have of the author’s friend. As a memoir, The Dead Girl is naturally packed full of such unique offerings by the author—personal memories, descriptions, stories, ideas, and stylistic turns that Thernstrom must have thought of as belonging only to her, now given to the reader. They are a fixture of the genre. But every other discourse genre also has room for textual constructions that authors can rightfully believe bear their own stamp. Such discursive space, such opportunity for the author to include in the text something uniquely of the author’s own, is central and necessary for authoring itself. The space devolves from the ubiquitous fact of singularity. Yet it is another energy of authoring that English teachers can suppress in their students. And teachers are in a position to do a much more thorough job of suppression than that of Simon and Schuster’s cover artist. Evident in nearly every piece of real-world text teachers lay their eyes on, and cited by many working authors as a part of their experience of authoring (see Chapter 1), the room for singular offerings may be shut off to students in the kind of writing genres teachers assign, in the ways the assignments are shaped, and in the way they are composed and evaluated. In this chapter we will consider the space for authorial offering in a genre that has been privileged for over a decade now in English classes, the literacy narrative, and contrast that space in a genre that has not been privileged but should be...

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