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This clear-cut distinction between the two forms is, of course, highly dubious, and Conway is quick to acknowledge the rather porous nature of autobiographical "truth." In fact, she argues, all memoirs tend to conform to certain narrative patterns. What's more, Conway classifies these patterns along gender lines: men produce epic adventures, in which the testosterone-driven protagonist battles against nature and society for control of his fate, while women are quicker to record the trials of domestic life and evolving consciousness. Conway draws on the entire history of autobiography for her discussion, from Saint Augustine and Germaine Greer to Vanessa Bell and Frank McCourt. (But what happened to Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, a title Conway echoes in her own?) At times her subjects stubbornly refuse to conform to the appropriate, his-and-hers pattern--suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst's My Own Story, for example, has the manly sound of "a series of communiques from a general in the field." Yet Conway's trawl through the history of the genre is full of brilliant insights as well as less known autobiographical gems, and no memoir-mad reader will want to miss it.
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. J ill Ker Conway, one of our most admiredautobiographers--author of The Road from Coorain and True North--looks astutely and with feeling into the modern memoir- the forms and styles it assumes, and the strikingly different ways in which men and women respectively tend to understand and present their lives.In a narrative rich with evocations of memoirists over the centuries--from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and George Sand to W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, Frank McCourt and Katharine Graham--the author suggests why it is that we are so drawn to the reading of autobiography, and she illuminates the cultural assumptions behind the ways in which we talk about ourselves.Conway traces the narrative patterns typically found in autobiographies by men to the tale of the classical Greek hero and his epic journey of adventure. She shows how this configuration evolved, in memoirs, into the passionate romantic struggling against the conventions of society, into the frontier hero battling the wilderness, into self-made men overcoming economic obstacles to create an invention or a fortune--or, more recently, into a quest for meaning, for an understandable past, for an ethnic identity.In contrast, she sees the designs that women commonly employ for their memoirs as evolving from the writings of the mystics--such as Dame Julian of Norwich or St. Teresa of Avila--about their relationship with an all-powerful God. As against the male autobiographer's expectation of power over his fate, we see the woman memoirist again and again believing that she lacks command of her destiny, and tending to censor her own story.Throughout, Conway underlines the memoir's magic quality of allowing us to enter another human being's life and mind--and how this experience enlarges and instructs our own lives. Focusing on writers over the centuries, the author explores the continuing popularity of autobiographies and accounts for the differences in form and style in men's and women's narratives. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780679766452
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