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How do we tell our life stories--as tragedies or as comedies? Are we heroines changing the world or victims being acted upon? Do we use an active or a passive voice? In When Memory Speaks, Jill Ker Conway, an excellent writer and thinker as well as a scholar and memoirist in her own right, focuses on the gender conventions that shape narrative and on what writers leave out. Once you read this outstanding book yon will never again think of or tell your or anyone else's life story the same way.
Conway begins by discussing the archetypal life scripts for men and women in western cultures. As we know, the hero surmounts tests in an outer or inner journey and his defining characteristic is action. In contrast, the heroine is preoccupied with romantic life, marriage, and family and her defining characteristic is an emotional response. When women finally got access to education in the second half of the nineteenth century, their public silence was belied by their private diaries and letters. Even those who...