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Janet Mason Ellerby. Intimate Reading: The Contemporary Women's Memoir. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2001. xxi + 221 pp. ISBN 0-8156-2886-2, $49.95 cloth; ISBN 0-8156-0685-0, $19.95 paper.
Intimate Readingbegins with Janet Mason Ellerby's own memoir: a poignant rendition of the secret kept by her family for thirty-five years, a history of the memory that continues to shape her life and to mark all her relationships-including those with other memoirs and memoirists. Although she will return again and again to the sorrow she feels over giving up for adoption the daughter she bore at sixteen, it is the elaborate set of lies created almost instantly by her parents to spare the family shame-and to make her real life a secret-that draws her to read and to write about the memoirs of other contemporary women who decide to share their secrets.
Ellerby links her secret to two others which serve as proof that her family engaged in thoroughgoing denial and secrecy: a suicide three generations earlier on her mother's side, and her paternal uncle's murder-suicide. But it is her own story, the stoiy of "bearing Sorrow" (the name she has assigned her daughter, following Tess of the d'Urbervilles), that is her obsession.
After the two-chapter memoir, Ellerby turns to seventeen other memoirs by American women to demonstrate the practices of "intimate reading," which she has described, briefly, in her introduction. While she names several recent feminist critics of autobiography as significant influences-most notably, The Intimate Critique (Duke UP, 1993), edited by Diane Freedman, Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphy Zauhar, which theorizes and demonstrates a female critical practice that is relational, even conversational, and generative-Ellerby explains the genesis of intimate reading as a process she...