This is the first time in a long career that I've found myself writing and radically rewriting, then yet rewriting a talk for a conference. The reason, obviously, is that I am not comfortable with the conference topic; I am the wrong speaker to invite for this particular subject, "Academics and Their Memoirs," because up to the moment of the invitation I had never associated my memoir with the life of an academic.

Yet, perhaps it is inevitable the memoir should have been so categorized; after all, it was written in response to an assignment and was published by a quasi-academic press, the Feminist Press, housed in the City University of New York. Florence Howe, then publisher of the Press, was also a CUNY professor, and in assigning the memoir to me at an MLA convention, she had turned to Tillie Olsen, whom she had just introduced me to, to say, "Tillie, Shirley will write her memoir for us." This dramatic announcement made it impossible for me to reject Howe's assignment, for Olsen was and still is a highly reverential figure for me and for multiples of women readers to whom her book Silences paradoxically motivated us to break silence and to write. Would my memoir possess its feminist articulations if it had been written for another publisher and without taking dictation from Olsen's collective indictment against women's silencing?

If my memoir has a formal and ideological source, however, it was neither Howe nor Olsen but Carolyn Heilbrun's text, Writing a Woman's Life, and Nancy Miller, that served as its tutors. Miller, in her role as an NEH faculty mentor, had said to me in 1988, impatiently, in response to my hesitation at coming out as a scholar and writer, "Well, what are you waiting for?" And once I had received my assignment from Miller, then from Florence Howe and Tillie Olsen, I found in Heilbrun's 1988 text explicit directions on how to write my woman's life.

Permission, legitimation, direction: these conditions prevail in academia as the student embarks on her studies; so, yes, indeed, how else to think about Among the White Moon Faces but as the memoir of and by an academic?

And yet, at a fundamentally ontological level, I refute that characterization. I am mortified, horrified, to be read as an academic. Gertrude Stein, in Everybody's Autobiography, observes, "That is really the trouble with an autobiography you do not of course you do not really believe yourself why should you, you know so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right. You are of course never yourself."

So the memoir's author, that academic self you all thought you would be listening to this afternoon, is not here, is in fact a fake. However, when Stein says so memorably, "You are of course never yourself," of the autobiographical inscribed subject, I would also disagree to say that in writing Among the White Moon Faces I was not so postmodern as to interrogate the concept of self or to view it as partial or fragmented. On the contrary, in the memoir, I was struggling toward construction of a historically situated, formally narrated, living subjectivity, with claims to an authentic past, a relationship to real experience and exterior scenes and persons, that a postmodern consciousness might critique as rising from discursive modes of imagination that are naive, inadequate, antiquated, and inauthentic. The memoir's desire was in contradistinction to the intellectual deconstructive currents of postcolonial theories; a strong authorial motive, as I can vividly recall now, was to seize in prose those uncertain moments yet certainly surviving as embodied traces that up to 1994, when I first began writing the memoir, had continued to emerge, involuntarily and in spasmodic fashion, through the years. Those memories, a term that cannot fully connote the independent disrupting violence of these mental acts, I had understood for a long time, defined a subject, "me," that was as different as a thumbprint is from anyone else's. Yet, while the contents of these mental disturbances were fully private, freighted often with pain, shame, guilt, strange pleasures, mélanges of mixed, confused feelings, they were also subject, continuously and particularly at the moment of writing, to the pressure to understand, the public and social resources from reading, study, debate, the systemic apparatuses of exteriorized thought. I knew historical accuracy was important, that stories about others would be checked against other witnesses, and that lying was a different utterance from the inevitable slipperiness of restricted point of view, partial recall, self-interest, narrative omission, and any number of other strategic writerly decisions resulting in less than full reporting, total veracity and verisimilitude. Ah, but as the author, that was what I had set as my goal, veracity and verisimilitude, not as in reporting but as in poetry. In short, I saw my memoir not as a feminist memoir written by an academic but a feminist memoir written by a poet.

I apparently satisfied this goal so badly that at one point late in the writing, Howe called me in Santa Barbara to complain that nowhere in the memoir had I addressed how I came to be a poet, at which point I did then insert some material on the writing and reception of my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula. Still, I think now that Howe was mistaken. In retelling my life, a major thread from early childhood to motherhood was the ways in which the body was the conduit to imagination. The body: subjected to and subjecting others to violation and violence. The body: itself enraged and violent. This body formed an interior consciousness of self, literally interiority itself - the secretive, private, individualized, rankling sensibility - from which came the poems. Poetry had everything to do with the familial, public violence that shaped the content of those involuntary mental images we call memory.

This was how I described the very first of such memories:

(The following excerpt is reprinted from Among the White Moon Faces, page 10, with permission from The Feminist Press.)

Before there is memory of speech, there is memory of the senses. Cold water from a giant tap running down an open drain that is greenish slime under my naked feet. My mother's hands are soaping my straight brown body. I am three. My trunk is neither skinny nor chubby. It runs in a smooth curve to disappear in a small cleft between my two legs. I am laughing as her large palms slide over my soapy skin which offers her no resistance, which slips out of her hands even as she tries to grasp me. I do not see her face, only her square body seated on a short stool and a flowered samfoo that is soaked in patches.

The same open area, the same large green-brass tap above my head, only this time I am crying. My anus hurts me. My mother is whittling a sliver of soap. I watch the white Lifebuoy grow sharper and sharper, like a splinter, a thorn, a needle. She makes me squat down, bare-assed, pushes my body forward, and inserts the sliver up my anus. The soap is soft, it squishes, but it goes up and hurts. This is my mother's cure for constipation. I cry but do not resist her. I do not slide away but tense and take in the thorn. I have learned to obey my mother.

This learning to obey my mother, rising from the instruction of penetration, is clearly traumatic, and prepared me early to understand all deep learning as a form of trauma - what shakes the mind and body most, what penetrates deepest, what separates the subject most violently from another and splits her within. The lesson also initiated the girl-child to the act of submission, to obedience in compliance with powerful others, and to violence in the name of protection and love.

Another such memory has to do with the father. Here the narration takes a turn to the abstract that may be said to mark the academic mind, the mind that objectifies, removing to a distance in order to study a thing. Still, on re-reading this passage, it appears to me that these incidents had lingered mentally, like the impression of lights on one's retina from the powerful flash of bulbs exploding just before one's eyes, only lasting for decades, because of the oddly depersonalizing, even impersonal nature of the violence witnessed. From the flash of the light, the violence enacted, the mind is able to visualize both darkness and light, as in this passage, the autobiographical author attempts to understand the father as a lightning rod of abuse through the frames of hate and love.

(The following excerpt is reprinted from Among the White Moon Faces, pages 31-34, with permission from The Feminist Press.)

I remember one splendid Sunday morning when we four children, Beng, Chien, Jen, and myself, clung to each other's shoulders, and Beng hung on to Father's, who swam out to the horizon, unafraid that the four of us might drop out of each other's grip into the salt waves. Father was a strong swimmer. As a boy he had jumped off the bridge into the Malacca River in weekend play, and his love of the sea blinded him to the danger he was leading us through. The water rushed like a living current over us; we were suspended above the drowning element by the power of my father's body.

Were we seven, six, five, three? All four of us did not add up to my father's years, although he was still a young man. Remembering his body, I need to count to materialize it out of the myth of muscle and salt water. A man of twenty-eight, lean, muscular, bearing on his shoulders the exposed naked slippery bodies of four children, each destined to grow larger than he, whose little fish bodies he could have so easily shrugged off, dropped over the horizon's edge, to return unencumbered, a free male. Instead I feel his calves kick, his arms arc and flash in a flight through welcome space. His teeth gleam white, a father shark, as he turns his handsome head, laughing at our squeals, taking pride in our fearless faith.

Because my father loved his children, I have kept faith with him, through the years of living with his pursuit of women, his gambling, and his rages. The bond I sewed tight between my father and me was illicit. In a Chinese family, perhaps in every family, daughters must be weary of their love for their fathers. We are constrained as daughters; the ties that strain us to our fathers are tense with those constraints. A vast because fearfully crossable boundary must separate girl-child from male parent. I wonder if all daughters suffer a revulsion about their fathers' bodies, instinctively reacting to save themselves from unacknowledged dangers.

As a child I adored my father's body. When I slept with my parents, before even more children arrived to remove me to a newly purchased iron-frame bunk bed, it was my father's body I reached out to touch when I roused in the night. He was warm and solid; it made me happy to touch his flesh lightly with my fingers, then drift back into sleep. So in that serpent-like familial swim, with a brother gripping me around my neck, clinging to another brother as he clung to another who clung to my father's confident body, all of us children extruded from my father like grown sperm, links in an unbreakable, undrownable chain, the meaning of my father's life made manifest to him.

My father was so ordinary that his name appeared in his lifetime in only those two pieces of paper testifying to his King Scout status and his passing the Overseas Senior Cambridge Exams. After the age of nineteen, he left the world of testimonials, of the seen and acknowledged, and entered a world of breeding, of feeding hungry mouths, of struggle and failure, small pleasures, and modest hopes. His life remained undocumented, unrecorded, and therefore unvalued and unsaved. I write to make my father's life useful. To do that, I have to explain my love for him.

My father beat me on many occasions. Every time he slapped me, raised the cane and cut me on my legs, my shoulders, my back so that the raised welts were also deeply grooved and bloodied, I hated him. My eyes would blank and hurt and in my ears I heard the chant, "I hate you, I hate you."

That silent chant gave me an enormous sense of secret power. I never begged him to stop beating me, never cried, although my throat burned with stifled feeling, and my head spun from the violence of his slaps. The rattan's whipping cuts were like knife-tongues of fire that licked the flesh and stayed and stayed. I hated him as much for humiliating me as for the pain. I felt public shame, for he beat me in front of anyone, my brothers, the neighbors, visitors, and relatives. I never asked then what drove him to these maddened episodes. I knew it wasn't me. He beat me viciously once for dropping a spoon and breaking it; on another occasion, when he thought a hawker had cheated me.

The only time I felt private shame when he beat me was the first time. A five-year-old stay-at-home, I was fascinated by my older brothers' sophistication, the news they brought home each day from school. They said different words, played different games, and owned large shiny books with photographs and drawings and stories in them. I felt my chest tighten with the desire to possess what was in their mouths and heads. My brothers shared a secret joke that galvanized them with mirth. I stood outside the circle of two and spied. They whispered, pretending not to see me. They formed circles with the thumb and first finger of their right hands, a secret sign that haloed them as partners and insiders. It was an understanding that they shared, and they slyly glanced at me to see if I had caught it from them, then yelled, "Go away!"

I ran outside into the evening air with their secret. I was elated, for I understood the sign, I knew how to form that circle and how to penetrate it. I ran to my father who was just closing up the shop. He was moving yet another wooden plank into its grooved position, completing the wooden wall that shut the shop each night and transformed it into a home. There was no one else for me to play with; I tugged at his arm and showed him the secret I had just mastered.

But his face reddened. His eyes took on the crazed glower, only this time, for the first time, it was directed at me. I was horrified, but it was too late. He put the plank against the wall, went inside, dragging me with him, and caned me. I do not remember how many times the feather duster descended. Perhaps, because it was the first time, the switch came down from only three cuts, perhaps it was more. After that evening I knew I could not count on my father's love.

Later, as I approached ten and eleven, I understood the meaning of the sign, and the memory of his rage shamed me. The shame is unspeakable. I am covered with confusion. Did I, five years old, know the power of the sign? What secret was I breaking open as I tugged at his arm, smiling? Why am I still ashamed? Am I ashamed by his uncontrolled use of power over my small female body, his displaced, repressed fears? Or by my child's desire for him, the man whom I had approached as my playmate, my partner, with whom I wanted to share the secret of the circle?

When my father beat me for the first time, the horror that filled me as I sobbed through that evening was not simple horror at pain, the sting of the rattan switch on my buttocks. It was also the horror at the knowledge of the break, that he had forcibly set me aside from himself, asserting a presence so alien that it could turn the lithe pliable rod on my flesh and cut me. My father became a fearful stranger to me then; as he gripped my arm, cursing in the growing darkness, and brought the rattan down on me, he appeared simultaneously to melt away, to lose his familiar contours, and to harden, to loom as a featureless man to whom my screams and tears signified nothing. My lifelong sense of the evening as the hour of abandonment, when one looks out into the world and it overcome by one's aloneness, begins with the beating.

And the shame. For I understood clearly that it was what I had done that had changed this man from father to monster. Something in my desire for him, that tug on his arm, the sharing of a sign, had toppled something in him. His rage was inexplicable otherwise. The shame was like a hot stone I had swallowed, different from the pain of the caning. It was inside my body, it went bruising, slowly, down my chest, and settled in my stomach. For days after, I felt slow, draggy, as if the stone were weighing me down. The buoyancy of the five-year-old girl looking up into her father's eyes as she showed him the sign she has just learned from her brothers never returned. I can mark that moment as the consciousness of another self, a sullen within, hating the father who beat me.

Hate does not explain love, but it sharpens love, in as much as it gives us the power to see the fragilities of the object of our hate. From the moment my father beat me, I became aware of his weakness rather than of his power. While I feared the pain of his canings, I never came to fear him; instead I came to acknowledge the depth of my responses and the interiority of my feelings. His blows drove me inwards into misery that cannot be spoken. I felt the power of my unhappiness, and therefore the power of my personhood. I learned to love my father again because I pitied him, and I pitied him because he gave me the power to hate him.

In this passage, again I would argue that the growth of the poet's mind is being more than covertly suggested in lines such as "That silent chant gave me a sense of enormous power"; "[T]he evening as the hour of abandonment, when one looks out into the world and is overcome by one's aloneness." In "The Prelude," Wordsworth traces the growth of the poet's mind to the introjection of an external power into the still-pliant imagination of the boy who steals a boat and finds himself stalked by the magnificent shapes of the natural world. I suggest this afternoon that in my memoir I was tracing the early development of interior consciousness in response to exterior violence, the growth of such interiority being inseparable from the growing operations of the imagination.

Such violence, the memoir goes on to narrate, is not merely familial but also communal and political, with colonial agents, postcolonial riots, and the mayhem of New England Vietnam-era conflicts and New York crime scenes all composing the memoir's world. But it is in the violence of motherhood that to my mind the memoir has its most overt feminist manifestation. Never mind the usual violence of childbirth - in this woman's life, a caesarean operation, "When the anesthesiologist crammed the plastic apparatus into my throat like a giant obscene penis" and when "at that moment, I felt the cold swab of the anesthetic-soaked cotton like the curve of a scimitar across my abdomen and lost consciousness" (290). The most difficult story I told about my life was of my own physical abuse of my infant son. The temptation to not tell that story was very strong; I had stopped shaking and slapping him when he was around two. What was the point of leaving him a memory he did not himself possess, and one in which I was so clearly the wicked witch of the East, when I had been long reformed? My commitment to a feminist ideal of social transformation finally convinced me to tell on myself. In confronting that past I understood in full the horrible legacy of abuse, which leaves its memory on the body, a body inscribed, as with a recipe for violence, to reproduce that violence on yet another body.

(The following excerpt is reprinted from Among the White Moon Faces, pages 200-203, with permission from The Feminist Press.)

Violence, like racism, imprinted from childhood, can never be totally eradicated. My rage at my baby was all the more terrifying to me in contrast to my usual intimate protectiveness. He was so small and weak, but he struggled to have his way. The shame I suffered when my father beat me was the same shame I felt when I hit my son, only fourteen months old.

Barely walking, Gershom had already learned to say no. "No" was like his fist which he waved before the mirror and which rang the bells. He beat us with it. "No, no!" he shrieked, even when he meant yes. It was the lever that pulled his mother back and forth, back and forth. He was terrified when this lever did not work, as if he could no longer see himself in the mirror. With this word he commanded us to turn back from the front door, like a fast rewind of a videotape, and to reenact the earlier scene, erasing the action that has so offended him. He believed time was plastic and recoverable, that he could control events, even to playing them exactly the way he wanted them to be. When the television cartoon displeased him, he yelled, "No!" then cried because the television set would not replay for him the cartoon he had in mind. He regressed from godlike power to mere human frustration; his rages went on for months.

Like him I too was suddenly enraged. One night, after I had tried unsuccessfully to get him to sleep by himself, I shook him hard and roared, "Go to sleep, damn you, go to sleep!" He gave me a look, then threw up, the white-spotted vomit splattering my face, his sheets, the carpet. Once, hurrying someplace, burdened with his bags, his obstinate weight, I heard him whine. He wriggled, protesting at our errand, and the bags fell. My slap left a red palm print on his cheek, and he wailed. I did not admit my guilt. He was bad, bad, bad. But I remembered my father's anger, and I was afraid of myself.

Then I slapped Gershom in front of Jane and Milton. It was true that Jane and Milton, who came up to northern Westchester every weekend, escaping the West Side, were comfortable people to be around, pleasant because safe. Some weekends they would invite us to drop by their country home, a convenient mile away. Their son, Ferdie, two years older than Gershom, was fascinated by a creature even smaller than himself. I looked forward to visiting their home, a cozy jumble of small dark rooms, set among several acres of brambly blackberries, pines and overgrown rhododendrons, a wilderness which Jane's grandparents had bought just before the Depression as an inexpensive summer cottage to escape the city's dangerous polio-ridden streets.

That afternoon, the October Sunday streamed blue and gold outdoors. We sat in the one sunlit room, an expanded kitchen, around the scrubbed kitchen table. Gershom was babbling in the highchair while we waited for the kettle to boil. He was familiar with Jane and Milton, and at fourteen months, his confidence was overweening.

The cup of herbal tea steamed up my face, raising a different kind of gold in the kitchen. A placid boredom filled the cluttered kitchen, where every counter space was taken up with brown shopping bags from Waldbaums, packed tight with coffee, sodas, carrots, cabbages, toilet paper, cereals, packages of matzos and bagels, honey jars, and assorted cookies, combustibles that Jane and Milton carried off every Sunday to their Manhattan apartment to see them through the week. Gershom, smiling in the highchair, beat my arm with his fist as I leaned, elbows forward, to inhale the dusky steam.

"Chinese children do not hit their parents," I said. By the kitchen Jane was pouring the water for her tea bag, and Ferdie, his nose dripping from a cold, was tugging at her skirt for an ice-cream cone they had just refused him.

Bang! Again the pudgy fist hit out. It didn't hurt, but I felt myself flush. "Don't do that!" I warned. "Children should never hit their mothers!"

I suddenly imagined him an adult. There was a panic that if I could not stop him then, make him obey, everything would be lost. "Chinese children must respect their parents," the tape played in my head. A few minutes later, as I listened to Milton, elbows on the table, and blew on my mint tea, Gershom slapped my arm a third time, and chuckled as my elbow gave way. I did not think; my arm flew across the table, and the slap left red finger bruises on his face.

Milton stopped talking and raised his eyebrows. I heard Jane saying, "All right, Ferdie, if you'll come outside I'll give you your ice cream," and the sound of the kitchen door opening and shutting.

Strangely, Gershom didn't cry. Perhaps it was Milton's presence at the table, the adult's sudden wary silence and look of surprise, that stopped him. He lowered his head, bit his lip, then pretended to eat his cookie. I saw a shame in Milton's averted glance. In that moment, I saw through Milton's eyes the scene of my own childhood; it was excruciating. The shame prevented me from picking the baby up; it spoke in a stifled insistent voice, "Chinese children do not hit their parents!" It forced me to stay in my chair sipping the flat mint tea, while Jane and Milton politely talked about Ferdie's ear infections, and led me home, where I cuddled my baby tearfully, because I hadn't meant to slap him.

The shame did not prevent me from hitting him again. Sometimes it was a smack on a diaper-cushioned bottom; or a slap on the hand, sharp enough to cause a pucker and a wail. Each time I felt shame and defiance, mixed with panic: panic that he was not me, he was hatefully not me; defiance against the shame that insisted that what I was doing was wrong.

The last time I slapped him, it was in front of my husband. Not yet two, Gershom was fussing about putting on his shoes. "Hold still while I put on your other shoe!" I said. Sitting on the stairs, he continued to wriggle. His foot slipped out of my hands and the tiny sneaker fell down. As unreflecting and as quick as a branch in a wind storm my hand went up. Whap! Startled I watched the vivid shape on my palm print on his cheek turn crimson.

Charles stood at the top of the stairs, a calm presence. "I'll put your sneakers on for you," he said, and reached down for the baby. A few minutes later we were out of the door, nothing discussed.

The red finger marks on the cheek faded after an hour, but in that silent hour I rehearsed the scene through Charles's eyes, seeing with no excuses my adult size, the actual littleness of my baby, and finally that I was repeating those very scenes of brutality that my father had wreaked on me.

There were no more slaps after that morning, although I continued to struggle with stubborn outbursts of rage, an adamantine insecurity that would turn my child into my enemy were my reason less supported by my love for him. Once started, the cycle of family violence may never end. Only the consciousness of one's own precarious position in the cycle can contain the violence. To change the blow to a caress, the sharp and ugly words to careful explanation, the helpless choking rage to empathy, that is my struggle as a mother: to form a different love.

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.