And then there are the daunting hurdles set by publishing houses and editors: because they have organized their catalogues by alphabetized and prioritized categories, anything hybrid in form can be summarily rejected out of hand. Even established authors, I am here to testify, may find it difficult nowadays to get into print work that fails to conform to prevailing and fairly rigid definitions of scholarship (though I am happy to say that Rooms of Our Own will be published by the University of Illinois Press this year). Quite a few editors at prestigious university presses have recently suggested in print that specialized investigations should appear in article form, that the authors of books need to address a more general audience; however, these same editors frequently turn down projects because their “boards” resist or oppose unconventional efforts. Whether or not approached through the mediations of an agent, trade press editors – at the risk of sounding petulant, let me exaggerate here to express my distress – often dismiss proposals deemed highbrow, insufficiently dumbed down for the dimwits they take to be their targeted customers. Needless to say, these minefields will detour some, but inevitably (and luckily) fail to deter others.
Despite daunting inhibitions, it seems to me that feminist critics have much to gain by exploring some of the techniques of memoir – and perhaps of the lyric, the novel, biography, satire, and drama as well – not just as an alternative to literary criticism but also as an effort to transform it. This, I feel, is an avenue open to pretty much anyone interested in traveling it, for when was the last time you could name a book of feminist literary criticism that you simply had to read, couldn’t put down, purchased for your friends, and raved about to your aunt? When was the last time your goddaughter phoned you to say she had just ordered two copies of XX or XY on amazon.com, a book you simply had to discuss with her so you both could understand what you had been trying to understand for lo all these many decades? Is it just the nostalgia of older age that makes me think that there was such a time and that it was bliss then to be alive? If those at the Columbia conference who read from memoirs I already owned made me want to pull their books back off the shelves for a second look, as they definitely did; if those who read from accounts I had not known about made me want to run out and purchase their books directly, as they definitely did; if the few still working on their autobiographies made me hope that they would complete them with dispatch and publish them quickly – well then, couldn’t some of this excitement also go into the vitalization of other feminist forms?
The pleasures of reading, but also the pleasures of writing, seep through the paragraphs I marked and flagged in the surgical waiting room, reminding me of two essays I thoroughly enjoyed drafting and revising precisely because they used autobiographical details and fictionalized characters. Emboldened by the introspection of the memoirists, I recalled then, as I do now, the delight I took in composing “Eating the Bread of Affliction,” where I approached the relationship between feminism and Judaism through three stylized renditions of three consecutive Seders in my own family; and the sheer fun of taking a conduct-and-comic writer’s stance toward the baffling personal and professional complexities of stressful midlife careers in “The Graying of Professor Erma Bombeck.” The book in which they were finally collected, Critical Condition, called for less staid, more surprising linguistic strategies for feminist critics, but I was still partly unconscious then of all the various motives behind my own efforts to practice them.
