Columbia University
Creative Writing (fiction and nonfiction
Abstract for "Autobiography as Mirror and Shadow: The Seductions of the Self"
Thoughts on An Unruly and Surprising Literary Genre
What follows is an overview of my involvement in and with the genre
of autobiographical writing and teaching, creative nonfiction and memoir.
The remarks and thoughts represent probably my first tentative efforts
to comprehensively examine the role that this particular kind of writing
has played in my life. Writing this brief narrative, of course, I faced
just how much autobiographical had in fact shaped life-my concept of it,
others' views about it, the public consumption of it. There are a host
of questions raised by this narrative-How much violence or distortion does
the writer do unto their life in creating the mythology that memoir becomes?
Why is the genre so irresistible and have such a strong hold on the imagination
of would be and even established writers? What is the meaning of the imagined
and recreated self for those who "consume" that self. I do not
seek to answer all those questions, but am grateful for this brief narrative
response as a prelude to a longer and larger discussion I will write some
day. Among the things of which I am certain and which do not exist as questions
for me are that autobiographical writing has allowed me as a woman and
as an African American to position my identity in a much more complex,
dimensional and useful (to all readers) way than it is generally constructed
by the culture. For me autobiographical writing becomes a way of resisting
the continuing aggression against my identity inflicted by the culture
in nearly all its forms-high, low, popular and "unpopular." Every
time I write a sentence that interprets my reality and shapes it, I am
refuting stereotype and a legacy of partial truth and untruth codified
and embedded so deeply in the culture that we all become unwitting upholders
of this canon if we are not careful. I write about my life to rescue it
from those to whom it means nothing and who casually destroy it because
they think they own it.
Full Text of "Autobiography. . ."