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the changing profession
The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir
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NANCY K. MILLER is Distinguished Pro- fessor of English and Comparative Lit- erature at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her most recent books are But Enough about Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives (Columbia UP, 2002) and the coedited collection Ex- tremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Com- munity (U of Illinois P, 2002). She coedits the journal WSQ.
At left: Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Boston: Houghton, 2006) 203.
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So, I’m just like everybody else. I go to the book- reading list: “:e autobiographical pact is the store. I pick out a book I love. If it says memoir, I engagement that an author takes to narrate know that—that maybe the names and dates and his life directly (her life, or a part of it, an as- times have been compressed, because that’s what a pect of it) in a spirit of truth” (Signes 31). memoir is. A spirit of truth? :at sounds perilously —Oprah Winfrey on Larry King Live, close to what Steven Colbert dubbed “truthi- 11 January 2006 ness” on #e Colbert Report: “the quality by which a person purports to know something I wanted the stories in the book to ebb and flow, emotionally or instinctively, without regard to have dramatic arcs, to have the tension that all to evidence or to what the person might the the changing profession great stories require. I altered events all the way conclude from intellectual examination” through the book. (“Truthiness”). As it turned out, Colbert was —James Frey, New York Times, 2 February 2006 reinventing a word that already existed in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it still garnered Sometimes the facts threaten the truth. the award from the American Dialect Society —Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness as the “2005 Word of the Year.” While Colbert had launched truthiness on Comedy Central Of course it is impossible to tell the truth. For ex- to mock the rhetoric of contemporary politi- ample, how does one know it? I will not belabor the cal discourse, the word was quickly seen to di!culty by telling you how hard I have tried. And apply to the Frey controversy. In his column if compulsion forces me to tell the truth, it may also “Truthiness 101: From Frey to Alito,” Frank lead me into error, or invention. Rich connected the dots linking the politi- —Kate Millett, Flying cal and the literary and underlined the dan- gers of living in “the age of truthiness”: “:is Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true? Is it isn’t just a slippery slope. It’s a toboggan into "ction if parts of it are? chaos, or at least war. . . . It’s as if,” Rich ob- —Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons served despairingly, “the country is living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief.” IT WOULD BE HARD TO BE SMARTER THAN Whether or not one shares Rich’s despair over the condition of our national cultural OPRAH. IF PHILIPPE LEJEUNE, OUR REIGNING values, the =urry of controversy generated by autobiography guru, were to appear on Larry A Million Little Pieces raised questions about King Live to discuss James Frey’s best-selling the reading, writing, and reception of auto- memoir A Million Little Pieces, I don’t think he biography that might seem familiar to MLA would disagree with Oprah’s logic. When you members as a discussion, if not of Coleridge’s go to the bookstore and pick out a book that “poetic faith,” then of genre (a word rarely says “memoir” on it, you expect to be reading used by media commentators). the truth, even if, being a sophisticated mod- :e problem is not, as one might imag- ern reader, you also realize that some of the ine, restricted to the literature of popular cul- details might not stand up to Googling. :at’s ture. On the heels of the Frey furor, Oprah still the deal, what Lejeune called in 1975 “the announced that Elie Wiesel’s Night would autobiographical pact” (On Autobiography 13) be the selection to follow A Million Little and recently updated for the bene;t of lycée Pieces. Oprah and Elie traveled to Ausch- students, in response to their many e-mails witz together (a video of the trip is available asking for clarification, now that the bio- for $12.95 from Oprah’s Book Club). At the graphical was an o
Despite the many pages of front matter that tolerate a few pages of metacommentary on play with the reader—including the ultimate genre in a ;ve-hundred-plus-page book?S dismissal: if you don’t like it, “HIJKJLM NK’O Oz opens with a question in almost the PNQKNRL” (xxiv)—the writer, having exploited same terms as Barry’s in One Hundred De- all the potential contradictions of the pact, mons: “Basically, what is the part of autobi- can’t help bowing to the rules of the genre or ography and ;ction in my narratives?” And at least to its spirit. answers with heavy sarcasm: “Everything is Is it impossible to say that a fiction autobiography: if one day I were to write a writer lies? love story between Mother Teresa and Abba Some novelists, like Amos Oz, object to Eban, it would no doubt be autobiographical, the the changing profession the fiction label on those grounds. Shortly but it wouldn’t be a confession. All my work before the publication in English of A Tale is autobiographical, but I’ve never confessed.” of Love and Darkness, Oz discussed the book Oz’s investment in the distinction becomes with David Remnick, who visited the author even clearer in the next line when he turns in Israel. “Much of it,” Remnick states, “is to the behavior of readers: “The bad reader clearly the result of memory and memory wants to know all, immediately, ‘what really reconstructed from reading and conversa- happened.’” :e bad reader for Oz is like the tions with older relatives. . . . Using the evi- journalist who asked Nabokov on television dence, but also the liberties of a novelist, Oz whether he was “really so hooked on little tries to portray things as hidden to him as girls” (in English). Like Nabokov, whom he his father’s love aAairs and his mother’s tor- evokes with obvious sympathy, Oz feels per- tured inner life.” Immediately following this secuted by the bad reader and rude journalists account of the author’s project (earlier in the who want to know, for instance, whether his piece Remnick unhesitatingly calls the book wife was the model for the character Hannah a memoir), Oz himself jumps in. “I don’t like in the novel My Michael. :e bad readers are to be described as an author of ;ction. Fic- relentless in their unseemly and dumb curios- tion is a lie. James Joyce took the trouble, if I ity: what really is your book about? (Histoire am not mistaken, to measure the precise dis- 39). Can’t they read? tance from Bloom’s basement entrance to the What would be better? :e mistake the street above. In Ulysses it is exact, and yet it bad reader or the nosy journalist makes is is called ;ction. But when a journalist writes, looking for the “heart of the story in the in- ‘A cloud of uncertainty hovers . . .’—this is terstices between the creation and its author.” called fact!” (Remnick). :e better path would be to look in the space :e author’s irritation about what’s truth that connects the text and the reader (41). and what ;ction, what’s fact and what inven- The chapter concludes with Oz’s advice to tion, explodes in an early chapter of A Tale those who wish to become good readers of of Love and Darkness, but the reader of Oz’s his books. “Don’t ask if these are real facts. memoir in English is spared the outburst. :is If it’s what happened in the life of the author. ;ve-page chapter was deleted from the English Ask yourself the question. About yourself. translation, though it appears in the French, As for the answer, keep it to yourself” (43). and directly precedes the chapter that begins :is seems fair enough advice to the reader with the sentence I’ve quoted in my epigraph: of a novel. But why has Oz inserted this user’s “Sometimes the facts threaten the truth” (32; manual into his memoir, a book about the life ch. 5 in English). Was the chapter deleted of the author? But is it a memoir? :e French because the publishers deemed that English- translation, which features on its cover the language readers, unlike the French, could not same photograph of mother, father, and Amos +,,., ] Nancy K. Miller h cagn profession changing the that appears in the pages of both the English new feminist detective novel. Spots new biog- and the Hebrew editions, also bears the clas- raphy of X, looks closely at front cover, reads si;cation “roman”—novel or ;ction. :e back blurb on back cover, =icks through a page or jacket of the English edition is labeled “Biog- two, then goes to centre eight pages of pho- raphy and Autobiography.” tographs and scrutinises each with care and concentration. Reviewing a memoir about a mother’s death, A. O. Scott dissects the hostility be- Although Stanley describes here the eAect of tween writer and reader of the sort that Oz photographs in auto/ biography on the woman displays in the missing chapter: “How is this in search of a good read, I want to link pho- any of your business? Why are you telling me tography and the pleasure that comes from this?” Readers have their standards, if authors genre satisfaction in my eAort to understand don’t. “And so, in a way that novels rarely are,” what it is that readers seem to look for in life Scott observes, “memoirs are governed—and stories: “lives-with-meaning” (20). As Adri- frequently constricted—by considerations of ana Cavarero expands on Stanley’s fable, “We tact. :e writer must judge how much expo- are in a bookstore. :e editorial horizon that sure, of self and others, is appropriate.”V Like envelops us means that the narration does speech acts, memoirs perform eAectively, fe- not appeal to the protagonist of the story, licitously, as J. L. Austin’s phrase goes, only as though it were a personal giW, but rather on condition of common cultural consent, to the reading public” (71). We do not know but writers oWen misjudge how much expo- “what she has found,” Cavarero says of the sure is appropriate. :is might explain why questing reader, but “we know fairly well what memoirs are so oWen subjected to the criti- she was seeking” (74). cal police. :is we want to hear, that we don’t. A woman, Oprah, any member of the Too much information, as people say now. “reading public,” enters a bookstore and scans Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on not an in;nite cornucopia of books but a se- your taste, autobiographers don’t really care. lection of those that already make sense in “I am well aware that the reader does not re- terms of the “editorial horizon.”X Or, as Scott quire information, but I, on the other hand, describes the display: feel impelled to give it to him,” Rousseau an- nounced early in his Confessions, revisiting a Like any other widely practiced kind of writ- childhood scene (31). ing, the memoirs that crowd the front tables The distinction between forms matters of your local bookstore sort themselves into to readers. How else did Oprah know that she distinct if not always mutually exclusive sub- was going to love Frey’s book before she read it? genres. Every person is diAerent, of course, She knew because the book jacket identi;es the but the accounts that our utterly special fel- genre and subgenre to which it belongs: a mem- low citizens give of their lives and families oir of addiction and recovery. Oprah, like her nonetheless tend to conform to certain rec- audience, warms to the story of redemption. In ognizable templates. this tendency to preselection, she behaves like many women and feminist readers of what Liz Recognizable, yes—but also now cultur- Stanley designates auto/ biography: ally in=ected. It’s not only “our utterly special fellow citizens” whose psyches are on oAer for Woman enters bookshop, browses along our perusal as we cruise the aisles of Borders shelves. Stops, picks up and quickly puts or Barnes and Noble. We are witnessing a fas- down collection of essays on Hegel and femi- cination with Islamic life stories, not so sur- nism. Moves on, picks up and reads end of prising in the century of September 11, and The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir [ PMLA
with the longer United States history with (Rousseau 17). How would Augustine fare in Iran. Whitlock’s So$ Weapons studies con- the truthiness department? As the biographer temporary life writing about the Middle East, Nancy Milford wonders, “What fact-checker analyzing in particular the ways in which the on earth would dare try to validate St. Augus- lives of women behind the veil, recorded in tine as he confesses and confesses?” memoirs like Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita :e question of truth and autobiography in in Teheran, seem to fascinate huge numbers millennial times intersects with another salient of Western readers, most of whom probably concern, in the United States and in France: the have never read Nabokov themselves (161–85). question of genealogy.Z Patricia Williams links Memoirs from sites of danger provide a safe the the changing profession genealogy, family history, and truth: space for readers to ponder the nightmare of contemporary global relations, even as the In the past week there has been an interest- pages display the extreme di his books) and on the childhood game: “But Ashes and, earlier, Michael Ondaatje’s re- in the tricky reverse narration that impels our turn to Sri Lanka in Running in the Family. entwined stories, he was there to catch me :e quest to understand the self in relation to when I leapt” (232). As Bechdel draws these family and place is exempli;ed most recently strands together, she re-creates memories in by Daniel Mendelsohn’s extraordinary ac- which the force of attachment generates the complishment in #e Lost, a book of hybrid structure of the memoir itself. structure in which the history of one’s bonds The power of attachment, particularly with others drives the narrative. Perhaps it is in the face of loss, also characterizes Joan time to understand the question of relation to Didion’s #e Year of Magical #inking, which the other—to others—as being as important, the the changing profession won the National Book Award for non;ction foundational, to the genre as the truth condi- in 2005. Didion’s memoir exempli;es the no- tions of the “autobiographical pact.” Not the tion, argued persuasively by feminist theo- exception but the rule. Put another way, in rists, that the female autobiographical self autobiography the relational is not optional. comes into writing, goes public with private Autobiography’s story is about the web of en- feelings, through a signi;cant relation to an tanglement in which we ;nd ourselves, one other. Feminist critics have been making the that we sometimes choose. case for the model of a relational self at the #e Year of Magical #inking is the story heart of the autobiographical project for over of a couple, a marriage, and describes the blow two decades. Most famously, Mary Mason to its author, the wife—Joan Didion—when challenged the standard of the autonomous her husband suddenly keels over before her self in her groundbreaking essay “:e Other eyes: “You sit down to dinner and life as you Voice,” beginning with early-period examples know it ends” (3). :is is a book about grief, of women’s life writing, in which the other about loss, sudden loss, and about how what provides the authorizing conditions for self happened changed all Didion’s ideas “about production. As Susan Stanford Friedman put life itself,” which is also to say about writing. “I it in her critique of autobiography’s shibbo- have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, leths, “Isolate individualism is an illusion. It even as a child, long before what I wrote began is also the privilege of power.” Autobiogra- to be published, I developed a sense that mean- phers who are women and members of mi- ing itself was resident in the rhythms of words norities, Friedman further argued, can’t help and sentences and paragraphs, a technique knowing that they also intimately share in a for withholding whatever it was I thought or “collective identity” (39). More recently, Leigh believed behind an increasingly impenetrable Gilmore described the “task of autobiogra- polish” (7). :e shock of her husband’s death phy” as sorting out precisely “how selves and leads Didion to wish for a mode of writing milieus ought to be understood in relation to that violates her writer’s credo. each other” (12). While #e Year of Magical #inking of- :e way I write is who I am, or have become, fers a striking, contemporary instance of yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, that relational structure, I’d like to consider equipped with an Avid, a digital editing sys- the degree to which what’s true for women tem on which I could touch a key and collapse writers is also true to the form.BD Eggers’s A the sequence of time, show you simultaneously Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the all the frames of memory that come to me now, story of two brothers (and a few other fam- let you pick the takes, the marginally diAerent ily members), certainly demonstrates these expressions, the variant readings of the same qualities—as do Frank McCourt’s Angela’s lines. :is is a case in which I need more than +,,., ] Nancy K. Miller h cagn profession changing the words to find the meaning. This is a case in rich and interdisciplinary domains of memory which I need whatever it is I think or believe to studies, trauma and testimony, law and eth- be penetrable, if only for myself. (8) ics, illness and disability, ethnography, per- formance, and visual culture—photography, A form of writing that keeps less, gives more. video, graphic memoir. Life writing as a genre This you, the reader, becomes the guest in- is also crucial in the understanding of ethnic vited in, the unknown, self-selected other literature, world literature, area studies, race whose response matters. I wish I could show theory, and social justice. :e rubric remains you what’s going on inside me—an invitation open to new departures as critics and scholars to intimacy we do not associate with Didion. respond to the proliferation of self-narration :e longing to be “penetrable” may in the end and self-portraiture in both popular and high pertain only to herself, but autobiographers culture modes. Academics have risen to the need readers—particularly to share their loss. occasion with refreshing inventiveness. :at invitation is what makes the reader want Given the extraordinary elasticity of auto- to take the autobiographer up on the pact. biographical experimentation, it’s not surpris- #e Year of Magical #inking was the ;rst ing that the cadre of scholars devoted to the book Didion wrote that John Gregory Dunne genre should prove to be vast and varied. My would not read. But writing about him, telling sense of the ;eld is necessarily partial, how- their story, brought the writer a world of pas- ever, and so what follows re=ects my personal sionate readers. :e reader, ;nally, as Didion’s favorites and investments. I’d like to mention a metaphor suggests, is the autobiographer’s small number of books that have enriched and most necessary other. In a way, this need and shaped my thinking, some of which I cite in its limits are the burning core of autobiogra- the essay. I would ;rst single out the remark- phy—as much a matter of life and death as life able anthologies of the 1980s (in alphabetical itself. You conjure the reader to prove that you order by their editors’ names): #e Private Self are alive. Life itself, Roland Barthes decided af- (Benstock), Life/ Lines (Brodzki and Schenck), ter the death of his mother, would not be worth Women’s Autobiography (Jelinek), Autobiogra- living—it would be a life “absolutely and en- phy (Olney), #e Female Autograph (Stanton). tirely unquali"able (without quality)” (75). But, These collections—all feminist in inspira- like Didion, faced with the loss of everything tion except for James Olney’s—staked out that mattered, he sat down to write a book. the territory with the excitement of pioneers and with an attention to form and genre that Autobiography studies is a young and many of the editing scholars built on success- rapidly expanding field, which means that fully in subsequent decades. In the 1990s, an- this essay could have been given distinctly thologies continued to push the geographic diAerent emphases. I’ve told only one story and literary boundaries of autobiographical about autobiography, and certainly this one texts. I’m thinking in particular of Autobiog- doesn’t pretend to be a master narrative of the raphy and Postmodernism (Ashley, Gilmore, ;eld or the genre. I would, however, venture and Peters), De/Colonizing the Subject (Smith that despite the beating the genre regularly and Watson), and Women, Autobiography, takes from journalists and critics who seem #eory: A Reader (Smith and Watson). :ese to keep hoping that the age of memoir is over, collections, along with a staggering number autobiography may emerge as a master form of major monographs, make teaching autobi- in the twenty-;rst century.BE ography a singular pleasure. :e expansion of autobiography studies It would be hard to miss the contribu- includes dramatic developments in the equally tions of Sidonie Smith and Paul John Eakin. The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir [ PMLA Over and above the numerous anthologies tion of fact to ;ction in life writing: “auto;ction” (a coin- that Smith has edited with Julia Watson (and age approved by Lejeune [Eakin, Fwd. xii; Lejeune, Signes 25]). And we had Audre Lorde’s “biomythography.” occasionally others) is the work of Smith her- 3. Wilsey observes, “It’s odd that [Bechdel’s] memoir, self. She continues to map the territory, always a work of meticulous personal reportage, is referred to as discovering new forms and domains of the a ‘graphic novel’ in the accompanying letter from its pub- autobiographical, always attentive to the par- lisher. . . . Depressingly, memoirists now seem compelled ticularities of women’s life writing. :e com- to pre-emptively defend the factuality of their works, un- der the assumption that it will be questioned. Memory plexities of the genre could not have a more is no longer entirely credible in the genre of memory.” thorough or subtle guide than Eakin. Espe- For details about Bechdel’s archival process, see Hillary cially in his most recent work, which extends Chute’s interview with Bechdel. the the changing profession its literary meditations to neuroscience and 4. In their analysis of contemporary autobiographical philosophy, as well as law and ethics, he asks performance and generic innovation, Smith and Watson observe that Lejeune’s pact continues to oAer a “kind of only questions that resist easy answers: “What decorum” and to provide a “guarantee of the narrator’s is the good of life writing, and how, exactly, reliability.” Experiments such as those of Dave Eggers can it do harm?” (“Mapping” 1). In addition and the installation artist Tracey Emin, they argue, “both to his own immensely important and foun- maintain and breach these terms in order to renegotiate dational work, Eakin is responsible for intro- what is permissible in the name of public presentation of one’s past” (“Rumpled Bed” 11). On Lejeune’s preoc- ducing Philippe Lejeune to the anglophone cupation with “truth value” and the implications of his world. About Lejeune I have not said enough assumptions for women autobiographers, see Domna here. It would require an article in itself to do Stanton’s early feminist critique in “Autogynography: Is justice to the scope of his accomplishment the Subject DiAerent?” (10). beyond the pact, notably the practical appli- 5. Indeed, following a settlement among Frey, his pub- lisher, and readers “claiming they had been defrauded,” cation of his interests, which take him out of dissatis;ed buyers of A Million Little Pieces are now en- the academy and into the world, or at least titled to get their money back on the grounds that “they the world that is France. In closing, I’d like would not have bought the book if they knew that certain to congratulate the editors of a/b: Auto/ Biog- facts had been embroidered or changed” (M. Rich). raphy Studies, Rebecca and Joseph Hogan, for 6. I learned from Bella Brodzki that the missing chapter had appeared in the French translation. I’ve also having had the energy and foresight in 1985 bene;ted from the insights and information available to to create a journal devoted to autobiography Israeli readers of Oz thanks to the generosity of Tamar that remains ever interesting and engaging. Hess. See her “:e Confessions of a Bad Reader” for an analysis of the reception of A Tale of Love and Darkness in relation to the Modern Hebrew canon. 7. On the ethics of this delicate subject, see Eakin, “Mapping.” OTES 8. “:e predilection for auto/ biographical texts obvi- N ously does not concern only women,” Cavarero writes, I’d like to express my gratitude to Gina Herrmann and “and neither does it con;ne the pleasure of readers to a Massimo Lollini for inviting me to speak at their gradu- circle of writers or heroes of their own sex” (74). Gillian ate seminar in Romance languages at the University of Whitlock too is attracted to what she calls “the bookshop Oregon, which gave me the opportunity to begin think- metaphor” and notably what the display of books reveals ing about the ;eld of autobiography for this essay. I also about the status of minority writers. “Bookshops—real want to thank the wonderful students in my seminar Ex- and virtual—are a reminder,” she writes, explaining her perimental Selves (Graduate Center, City University of theoretical position, “that critics of the contemporary New York, fall 2006) for their collaboration in reading must hold things together: books on the shelf, production autobiography and their excitement about its possibili- and consumption, addressee and addressor, and our own ties. Unattributed translations in this essay are mine. imaginative work of self-identi;cation” (15). 1. On the stakes of Wiesel’s “self-correction,” see 9. France has had a long tradition of distinguished Suleiman. autobiographers, particularly in the modern period. :e 2. Long before the challenges posed by the mix of image work of Annie Ernaux, who moved from novel to memoir and text, we had the French taxonomic solution to the rela- and who has also published diaries, has become part of the +,,., ] Nancy K. Miller h cagn profession changing the lycée curriculum—always a sign of cultural acceptance. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Re%ections on Photogra- At age seventy-six, the critic Gérard Genette published phy. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, 1981. a long dictionary of the self, an alphabetical, intellec- Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Bos- tual repertoire set under the sign of Montaigne but more ton: Houghton, 2006. closely resembling Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes. :e ———. “An Interview with Alison Bechdel.” With Hillary memoir genre is also extremely popular in Britain—al- Chute. Modern Fiction Studies 52 (2006): 1004–13. most as much as it is in the United States. :e same is true Benstock, Shari, ed. #e Private Self: #eory and Practice of genealogical research (see the BBC Web site www.bbc of Women’s Autobiographical Writings. Chapel Hill: U .co.uk/ history/ familyhistory/, as well as ancestorsonboard of North Carolina P, 1988. .com, a microsite, powered by ;ndmypast.com, that of- Brodzki, Bella. Personal communication. Aug. 2006. fers information about long-distance voyages leaving the Brodzki, Bella, and Celeste Schenck, eds. Life/ Lines: British Isles from 1890 to 1960). However national in in- #eorizing Women’s Autobiography. Ithaca: Cornell =ection and style, autobiographical forms seem to have UP, 1988. a global reach and transnational appeal. For example, Cavarero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Fusami Ōgi draws connections between Nakazawa Keiji’s Selfhood. Trans. Paul A. Kottman. London: Rout- Barefoot Gen and Spiegelman’s Maus. ledge, 2000. 10. Gates tells the story more than a decade earlier in Charles, Gilbert. “Généalogie et génétique: Tout savoir his memoir Colored People. sur nos origines.” L’express 15 June 2006. 30 Dec. 2006 11. Typical of this preoccupation is the cover of a ——— . Signes de vie: Le pacte autobiographique 2. Paris: Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. #e Confessions. Trans. J. M. Co- Seuil, 2005. hen. New York: Penguin, 1953. Lionnet, Françoise. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gen- Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. 2 vols. New York: Pantheon, der, Self-Portraiture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989. 2003–04. Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Tru- Scott, A. O. Rev. of #e A$erlife, by Donald Antrim. New mansburg: Crossing, 1984. York Times 18 June 2006: 10. Mantel, Hilary. Giving Up the Ghost. New York: Henry Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. De/Colonizing the Holt, 2003. Subject: #e Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiog- Mason, Mary. “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of raphy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. Women Writers.” Brodzki and Schenck 19–44. ——— . Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpret- Mendelsohn, Daniel. #e Lost: A Search for Six Million. ing Life Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. the the changing profession New York: Harper, 2006. Milford, Nancy. “:e False Memoir.” Washington Post, ———. “:e Rumpled Bed of Autobiography: Extravagant 5 Feb. 2006: BW10. Washingtonpost.com 25 Dec. Lives, Extravagant Questions.” Biography 24 (2001): 2006