While a French major at Barnard [I explain], I go to Middlebury summer school where one signs a pledge not to utter a word of English for six weeks, under threat of expulsion, and makes a vinaigrette for one’s dinner companions once a week. At Middlebury summer school where I have signed up to “perfect” my spoken French, I discover the irresistible, if not fatal, attraction between French and sex (or at least French professors and American girls). This lasts a long time. I go to Paris after graduation from college . . .. I get involved in speaking French, eating French and having French health . . .. I say “euh” when speaking English, which I speak as though it were a foreign language . . ..
After six years of trying to be French, I return to the States, my life a shambles (“The French Mistake,” 54).
In “Decades” the narrative of my becoming a feminist critic involves exiting from the story of my early twenties, in which I exhibited very bad taste in men, including my choice of husband (I married an Irish-American expatriate, living in Paris), and going to graduate school in French at Columbia, where I wrote a dissertation about the fictional destinies of women in the 18th-century novel, who shared, if not inspired, my foibles. Looking back from the turning point of age represented by the number 50 at my graduate student existence, I saw myself in retrospect as leaving behind the tendency of my younger self to copy the heroines of novels in which the women were victims, in order to become a different kind of heroine; renouncing the plots of seduction and betrayal to embrace what Carolyn in Writing a Woman’s Life called a quest – writing myself into a new narrative.
In the summer of 1993, I felt the need to take a break from the project I had been working on about the memoirs of dead parents – Bequest and Betrayal – in which I described the experience of witnessing my parents’ illnesses and death. I very quickly wrote a 30-odd page autobiographical essay that I called “Wars of Independence,” in which I told the story of the marriage and the Paris years, invoking the winding down of the Algerian War. I almost published it in a small literary magazine – an editor wanted to call it “Confessions of a Feminist Masochist” – but a writer friend convinced me that I should try and develop it into a full-fledged narrative. I put the “Confessions” in a drawer, and instead finished the “dead parents” book, as I always thought of it, in which I experimented alternating critical and autobiographical writing, putting the personal narrative in italics. The challenge of the book had been to place the autobiographical passages in dialogue with the critical ones. But even friendly readers often confessed sheepishly that they only read the parts in italics. I tried to smile.
When the book came out, I was on sabbatical in Paris and eager to put the subject behind me. I returned to my only slightly more cheerful feminist confessions to see whether I could expand the essay and tell the story as a straight memoir, minus the penetrating critical passages that my readers had so endearingly skipped. My parents had saved all the letters I had written to them from Paris. I set out to try and document my sentimental education from the letters, returning to all the places I had lived in, taking pictures, eating again in restaurants where I had eaten almost 30 years earlier (most were still there), checking memory against evidence, including the archive of the letters home. That year I wrote 100 pages that everyone on my informal reading committee suggested I put back in a drawer.
When I returned from my sabbatical, I decided to write a different sort of book, a book that would integrate the voices of autobiography and criticism, abandoning both the memoir and the strategy of setting off the personal in italics I had used in Bequest and Betrayal. I would write instead a defense of the memoir form by showing what it could do. In particular, I wanted to look at a coming of age story – the trajectory of coming to feminism that I had already sketched out in various places. In two of the chapters of the new book, “But Enough About Me: What Do You Think of My Memoir” and “Circa 1959,” I pieced together yet another version of that narrative of feminism. Naturally, I also revised “Decades” itself and an essay about women and aging I had also already published.
(Reader, do you see a pattern here? I realize that I’m telling a story about how I can never let go of anything, or let anything alone. I think my obsessive-compulsive disorder has something to do with the insecurity of immigrants transmitted to me from both sides of my family: saving everything and fixing whatever you’ve managed to hold on to. I’m not sure there is a drug for this condition. If there is, I haven’t found it.)
