Sunday, October 12, 2014
In Between
In the book “Telling Women’s Lives” Wagner Martin is trying to explain how as a writer we can become great biography writers, and as readers how to find a great biography and autobiography. However the purpose is not to teach step by step but by giving non-stop examples and showing evidence of it. On page 70 there is an example used about a character in the Lillian Hellman’s Memoirs which represents the unknown character in her lifetime. The author purposefully creates this character to confused the reader. The confusion isn’t about who the character is, or where it came from, but what it represents. Is it someone in the writer’s life? or is there fiction being created in a biography. But the real question Wagner Martin focuses on is whether fiction is allowed in a biography or not. The example of this story connects to my life existence by questioning my dreams and the meaning they have in my life. Because no one else sees them, and don’t appear in real life would it be adding fiction to your life? pretty crazy in some sense. Wagner Martin quickly changes her focus on fiction in biographies to family and reflection they show on authors biographies and autobiographies. She says, “Women are reflection of family”(page100). At first it intrigued me because it made me think about the things i’ve learned through my family but then she gave an example about another writer and it changed my concept about that phrase. She used writer Catherine Bateson and Mother Margaret Mead as a focal point for this section. Both mother and daughter write memoirs however the mother writes about her life before, during and after a divorce. Mead doesn’t write about the struggles but the passage and phases she went through because of the divorce, she tries to write out her daughters perspective without asking but just noticing. However Bateson later writes about her perspective as an adult on the situation. She goes from the guilt she felt, the shame and the sadness to the actual feeling of understanding. Both mother and daughter got the learning experiences from one life even that included them both in two different roles. I think this intrigued me because it must have been challenging for Mead to write through the eyes of her daughter and how Bateson must have felt while writing her memoir while not trying to contradict her own feelings.
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It sounds to me that this book can really relate to your own life. You mentioned how this book made you think about the dreams in your life and what your family has taught you. You didn't really describe what these things were but I think I understand. I've read several books that made me think about what I was doing with my life. The best example I can think of would be "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck. I think we all had to read this book last year, but for whatever reason, It really made me look at how easy my life is in comparison to the people in the story, which sort of forced me to reevaluate my future and what I want to do. From what you said, this book also seems similar the Stephen King's "On Writing", or at least the parts of it we read for this class. In both books, the author appears to be giving the reader advice of better writing. My only question I think is why the name of the book is "Telling Women's Lives"? Is this book specifically centered on the biographies of women? If so, does that seem at all biased to you? Should men be represented as well? I'm sure their are plenty of books that focus on biographies of both men and women, but my problem with books that seem to focus on one group is that there is little match up to other examples of writing. Although you did say in your previous posts that biographies of both men and women are compared at the start, so maybe there's no problem.
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