Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women

Margaret Conrad is Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at
the University of New Brunswick. She is the author of Atlantic Canada: A
Region in the Making, and coauthor of Intimate Relations: Family and
Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1

Author of a path-breaking study of Canadian women’s autobiography,
Mapping Ourselves (1993), and a fine volume of memoirs, Memoirs from
Away (1999), Helen Buss is one of Canada’s leading scholars in the
rapidly evolving field of life writing. Positioning herself at the
intersection of literary and feminist theory, she makes the argument in
this book that the memoir has emerged in recent decades as a major
vehicle for women’s “self-performance.” Unlike autobiography,
which tends to be constrained by a romantic focus on the public and the
exceptional, the memoir, Buss argues, has an elastic form that invites
self-knowledge and integration—of the personal and political, the self
and the significant other, the imaginative and the factual.

Buss makes her case for women’s contribution to and benefits from the
genre through reference to her own memoirs and those of such
internationally renown writers as Jill Ker Conway, Maxine Hong Kingston,
Carolyn Steedman, and Janice Williamson. Citing a wide variety of
theorists, she probes issues of balance, mother–daughter
relationships, trauma, and academic memoirs as significant themes in the
evolution of English-language memoir writing. As with most scholarly
monographs, which attempt to advance a field of study, this one can
sometimes make difficult reading for those not up on their theory, but
the analysis is happily leavened by the author’s determination to
integrate her own subjectivity into the discussion and by her engaging
scholarly passion. With the growing popularity of memoirs, Buss fears
that women’s contribution to the genre may well be minimized, leaving
women on the margins of memoir, just as their 19th-century diaries and
personal letters were ignored until 20th-century feminist scholars
called attention to them. She is concerned not only because such a
development would once again render women less visible, but also because
it would narrow their access to a literary form that she convincingly
argues is a powerful vehicle for women’s agency.