Welcome to A Reader’s Place–a resource for readers of memoirs and narrative nonfiction–well, fiction, too. In addition to blog posts (below) and reviews, there’s a special section devoted to memoirs. Click on the Memoirs tab above or the links to the right and you’ll find Reading Lists, Award Lists, quotes, and other interesting information about the genre that keeps on giving. Please feel free to comment, make suggestions, or contact me about speaking.
My book, a readers’ guide to memoirs and autobiographies–Read On…Life Stories: Reading Lists for Every Taste—was published by Libraries Unlimited/ABC-CLIO in 2009. It seems like everyone is writing memoirs these days and we’re all reading and talking about them. Read On…Life Stories will help you find memoirs you’ll enjoy reading, thinking about, and discussing with friends. The book can be ordered from the usual places.
For the past several years I’ve been working on another book, a history of women in the U.S. literary community since colonial times. A collaborative effort, the genesis for the idea came from the Women’s National Book Association, which celebrated its centennial in 2017. The book is titled Women in the Literary Landscape: A Women’s National Book Association Centennial Publication. It was published in March by C&R Press and I’m delighted with the physical book and its contents, which trace the contributions of women in all aspects of the book world. Several posts from the summer of 2018 will give more information about the contents.
There’s no use in avoiding the topic that has taken over the news in the last year: the revelations that sexual harassment is a common occurrence for women. It can prevent women from moving forward in their careers and lives and it’s a phenomenon that’s ingrained in a number of cultures, making women an underclass. The result of the squelching of women is that we all lose the benefits of their contributions. I feel similarly about lack of opportunities for both men and women who live in places and cultures where they are denied opportunities. We are a much poorer society for those losses.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the countercultural movement, in its anti-establishment wisdom, pushed librarians to question library-work-as-usual. For example, librarians began to investigate–and change–the way things were named in our catalogs, making subject headings more authentic and relevant. (Now, of course, keyword searching, tags, and other techniques have made all that head-banging work almost irrelevant.) Since the library profession is largely female, Second Wave Feminism shook things up as well.
In the July 15th New York Times Book Review, in a review of Alexander Chee’s book How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, J.W. McCormack writes: “In Chee’s telling, the writer’s life always lurks just beyond the page…” I’m always interested in the writer lurking just out of reach and the relationship of the book to the writer’s life. I don’t mean that I expect incidents to reflect personal experience or characters to be modeled on friends and family. There’s a much more subtle relationship that I’m interested in.
Last week I wrote about the book I co-authored, Women in the Literary Landscape, which contains an overview of the role of women in various fields related to books. One of the joys of doing the research was discovering Madge Jenison, known as a “minor novelist” and the co-owner of the Sunwise Turn Bookshop, which opened in New York City in 1915. Madge wrote a memoir about her bookselling experiences, called Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling. Her personality shines through on every page: warm, buoyant, idealistic and exuding positive energy. Jenison felt that putting the right book in the hands of the right reader might just save the world. One of my favorite lines from the memoir is, “Books– do I made too much of them?”
