The everyday routines of my personal life often feel rather boring, alas, but my interior life with feminism and its approaches to the cultures we encounter inside and outside the university – well, that’s another series of stories altogether. Not everyone who reads the memoirs of the participants included in “Writing a Feminist’s Life” will set out to compose a memoir, but many might use the personal, particular, anecdotal, and associative strategies of the memoirists in the criticism they undertake to produce. Literary criticism usually means criticism about the literary, but it might also suggest a criticism aspiring to produce the resonant effects of literature on its readers.
Perhaps the hunger I had experienced at the printer in my office had something to do with the surgical waiting room in which it was satisfied. We feminists, I mused as I considered all the ills flesh is heir to, are aging, and so now we will follow in Carolyn Heilbrun’s footsteps, bringing into focus the manifold ways in which gender impinges on that later part of women’s life cycle. It was Carolyn, I recalled (after a nurse informed me that my friend was coming out of anesthesia), who in her sixties made conscious decisions about her hair, clothes, diet, exercising, housing, and family, which she discussed with me over innumerable meals that fulfilled our common desire for not just intellectual intimacy together. Famished in my office and now gratified as I read straight through what would have otherwise seemed a very long stretch of time, I thought about those lively suppers and about my abiding hunger for (of all things) hunger. Did my craving for the printed pages in the envelope have something to do with my more general longing for the insatiable appetites I had had in the past, for all those feminist books, XY or XX, I had relished over the years with Carolyn, with my ill-fated friend (now undoubtedly struggling back to consciousness of a wounded hand), and with so many others?
When Elizabeth Bishop read “right straight through” a copy of National Geographic in a dentist’s waiting room, she had been surprised by a cry from within, and then by a shocking realization about her “foolish, timid” aunt – that “it was me: / my voice, in my mouth . . . I was my foolish aunt.” Was it the pains of the memoirists or the aches to which my friend was awakening that made me wonder now why Aunt Consuelo seemed so “foolish, timid” in Bishop’s poem? Always before, I had assumed she simply appeared so through the eyes of the six-year-old Bishop was recalling. But perhaps it is the expression of another’s pain – “Suddenly, from inside, / came an oh! of pain” – that shocks the child into disavowal and identification (“I was my foolish aunt”), not unlike the disavowals and identifications I felt toward the memoirists, toward Carolyn, and toward my cherished but now bandaged friend (she had attended Carolyn’s memorial service with me); and so I marveled along with Bishop, “Why should I be my aunt, / or me, or anyone?” as I considered the strangeness – “I knew that nothing / stranger could ever happen” – of the voluntary, prized, but diaphanous connections between me, Carolyn, Mary Jo, and the conference participants with their international geographies. As Bishop did then, I asked myself the foolhardy question: “What similarities” – one dead, one Catholic or Islamic, another a rape or cancer or suicide survivor, yet others from this or that region of the mind – “held us all together / or made us all just one?”
Perhaps at 60, as at 6, we are still “In the Waiting Room,” anticipating and dreading the arrival of whatever stage is next, losing a tenuous sense of self while reading and hearing others whose expressions reconfigure a new but just as tenuous self. Reading or hearing each others’ writing, we experience the tug of our commonalities, but also our resistance, our need to find ourselves distinctive, unabsorbed, unique, itself an urgency we paradoxically share. The war was still on outside, as the surgeon beckoned me for post-op instructions and I made Bishop’s hope my own, that we would dare vertiginous fears to look and see and write about what we have become and exactly how such “unlikely” similarities continue to hold us, different as we are, all together.
