Shirley Geok-lin Lim, "Not an Academic Memoir"
(page 5 of 5)

I had titled the first talk I had written for this conference "A Woman's Life, Writing, and Dying." Carolyn Heilbrun brought these three different terms together powerfully in her work and life. My first meeting with her was in her 1988 book. Her suicide in 2003, however, forcefully raised that other third of the equation. Her death should not overshadow her life; at the same time, our celebration today of her enormously influential life should not diminish the meaning and significance of her death. There is something about the death of a feminist heroine that is devastating for many women. The deaths of certain women - women who had served as models for the emerging identities of women writers - are like the death of a mother; so bleak a personal loss that there is no place for schadenfreude, because with such figures we have made a genetic identification. In 1982, teaching exhausting classes in an upstate New York community college, oppressed by my passionate attachment to my two-year-old son and wholly adrift from my decades-long desire for writing, I had embarked on a quest to read all the books by contemporary women writers that I could find. Who were they? What could they teach me? How did they make a life of writing out of the daily, wasting drudgery of being women in the world, and did their struggles show in their novels, stories and poetry? I drove from my remote exurban home to the Katonah public library and began picking up books by women authors, beginning with A and moving gradually through the alphabet. Then came the good fortune in the summer of 1988 to participate in Nancy Miller's NEH Summer seminar on feminist writing; soon after, I came across Heilbrun's Writing a Woman's Life, coincidentally published also in 1988.

Heilbrun's book answered many of the questions that in my own unrigorous, chaotic manner I was attempting to answer, questions that were driving my unhappiness, as well as driving me unhappy. Post-Miller and -Heilbrun, I stopped my compulsive reading out of inchoate misery and began to pull myself together as a more or less coherent but fully entitled subject of my own inquiry. Heilbrun's book, among other feminist texts I read that summer, confirmed what I had intuited from childhood: writing can be the legitimate and worthy pursuit of my life, and women's lives can meaningfully, richly, be the subject of writing. Heilbrun's thesis on this doubling of the being of woman's life and writing, brilliantly mirroring in a clarifying reflection my own murky, obsessive relationship with writing then, offered me an analysis through which I could interpret my own past and make sense of my psychological misery, and thus showed me how to move into a writerly future.

So what does her death say about Heilbrun and about writing a life that her book had illuminated for me and for thousands of women like me? How should I now address this figure, so generously generative in the last, whose dying poses an enigmatic message not only to those who knew and loved her but also to women like me whom she had influenced but never met? A mother's death signifies more largely than other deaths in many civilizations. Her death is a passing into history of an original point; the vanishing of this origin for identity is absolute - yet the loss is also a moment of transmission of identity of origin from mother to daughter. The irony of a mother's passing away is the inauguration of familial origin on to the daughter. The mother is dead; the daughter is now the mother of her family. Heilbrun's death, I believe, repeats to us something deeply ancient - the ways in which the old accept a construction of nature as the inevitable giving way to the young, the recognition that one's useful time is past and so must one also pass away. But because she chose to die so deliberately, the act rather than her writing speaking uncharacteristically for her, we readers are left with the radical indeterminacy of such action. Perhaps paradoxically her death is a wholly relevant statement on the status of the irrelevance of the old - and this statement must trouble all of us in so far as it reproduces the values of cultures that had constructed an ecology of life in which the old, having lost social purpose and usefulness, deliberately die to leave a life-affirming space for the young.

Although I reject the apparent message in Heilbrun's dying - that her life was of no more social use - I do not say that she was wrong, only that she was mistaken about the schedule. What do I learn from Heilbrun's authorizing of her death? I learn acutely that I must write in the shadow of dying and death. At sixty I am only a dozen years away from the date Heilbrun selected for closing her life story. This is very little time remaining for writing. Heilbrun's life lies open to us in its scholarly content as tenured professor, its creative fictionality as Amanda Cross, in the solidarity her writing imagined for women writers and readers. But also, crucially, we might wish to read the pathos of her unlived years. Her pioneering and brave rhetorical positionality in the 1980s and her deliberate dying at the beginning of the twenty-first century are both part of a feminist tradition - the first is no longer viewed as transgressive, having by now become the norm for young women in black swarming through the interview rooms at the MLA convention. The second, still largely unexamined and uncritiqued because too recent and too painful, is still profoundly transgressive, shockingly scripting upon an almost invisible, tabooed and ancient text the story of when we should die. The communication I hear is that there is no perfect death, only death perfected. Heilbrun had speculated on the pioneering women writers, "These women had no models on which to form their lives, nor could they themselves become mentors since they did not tell the truth about their lives" (WWL 25). But she had also written, "For women who have awakened to new possibilities in middle age, or who were born into the current women's movement and have escaped the usual rhythms of the once traditional female existence, the last third of life is likely to require new attitude and new courage" (WWL 124). I keep turning to Writing a Woman's Life for an answer to the enigma of her departure. Do we hear a motive when she notes, "Few women think of old age and power as compatible ideas for them" (WWL 128-29)? Is there already a hint of the defiant, inventive feminist scripting her own destiny: "In choosing among biographers and biographies, we choose among counterfeit integrations. Perhaps in choosing the lives we lead, we do the same" (WWL 50)? Death is no counterfeit integration, but any of the stories we can tell about Heilbrun's passing can only be but a counterfeit integration of her life.