Eating Apples: Knowing Women's Lives

Barbara McGregor is an associate of Duncan’s English Language
Consulting Ltd. in Edmonton.

Women’s desire to know and be known is the focus of this collection of
43 autobiographical essays. The essays are grouped thematically to
illustrate the many sources of women’s knowledge: “Working
Knowledge” tells what we learn about the world through repeated daily
activities; “Forbidden Knowledge” is about more oblique, intuitive
learning, generated sometimes by painful memories; “Relative
Knowledge” emphasizes shifts in perspective; “Body of Knowledge”
stresses the fact that the body is where all awareness begins and ends;
“Book of Knowledge” shows that through language there is
realization; and “Tree of Knowledge” accents the spiritual
connectedness that can be achieved. Each section is prefaced by a rather
pedantic editorial. More welcome are the short biographies or
autobiographical comments that follow each essay. These essays cover an
amazing spectrum of experience—birth, death, rape, in-laws, illness,
motherhood, skating, working in a meatpacking plant, apprenticing as a
carpenter, fantasizing about an affair with a baritone at a Pro Coro
Christmas concert.

Some of the contributors are award-winning authors, while others have
never been published. This gives the collection a certain unevenness,
but all the essays share a pleasing sense of commonality and community.