Finding “A Life of One’s Own“
Book by Joanna Biggs
Review by Camilia Cenek
Harper Collins Publishers
Publication: May 2023
272 pages
ISBN: 978-0063073104
On my first solo trip since having a fourth baby, after beginning a new career as a writer in midlife, I entered a corner bookshop in Alexandria, Virginia, deliciously alone. There I stumbled upon and purchased a copy of Joanna Biggs’s literary memoir A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again. The title beckoned for obvious reasons and hinted at answers to questions spinning through my overloaded maternal mind: “How to carve out space for myself as a writer as I simultaneously inhabit the roles of woman and wife and mother” had recently become the chief project of my existence.
Indeed, the imperative against and amidst existential midlife panic.
The alluring title spoke directly to my inner urgent, terrifying quest: to delineate the borders separating me from my offspring and social load-bearing. To discover how to thrive both within and outside of the walls of maternal responsibility. Who the hell am I anyway? And how can I write in all this noise?
In this, her first literary memoir Biggs lays her cards down, too. A transplanted divorcee grieving the loss of her marriage as well as the decline of her mother, Biggs found herself bewildered and deeply depressed. Her revelations chronicle the painful sloughing off of what she thought was expected of her, what she had believed would make her happy and satisfied. As she sheds an old life and gradually grows a new one, she charts what it can mean to live as a free feminist woman in the 21st century.
Alongside her self-assessment, Biggs profiles the parallel trials of eight prolific women writers who also once groped through life and love and work. Her study insists that all three of these strands are inextricably entwined, informing everything about an author’s process and confidence. Biggs takes encouraging familiarity with her author-subjects, titling each section by the author’s first name: Mary, George, Zora, Virginia, Simone, Sylvia, Toni, Elena. (If you don’t immediately know to whom each name refers, familiarity with each is helpful but not a requirement.) In doing this, Biggs draws these foremothers closer, forces them and us readers into close proximity that exposes their (and our) vulnerabilities, fears, and failures. In insistently setting aside the canon, the literary feats, and the patriarchal surnames, Biggs arrives at each person beneath: the fully realized woman, her name, her self.
The literary genre where A Life resides also needs a name, what I call bibliophilic critical literary memoir, a realm of writing that I discovered only recently. The term describes memoir specifically centered on love for and experience of a particular book(s) or author(s) and explored through an informed critical lens. The previous title I encountered in this genre was Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch which, I discovered on Goodreads, and inspired intense debate about the nature of the as-yet (to my knowledge) unnamed genre. For instance, the book was downgraded by some readers as not adhering to its own proposed formula: it had Middlemarch, it had Eliot, but the author’s life that the title promised it had not. Although by my accounting Mead admirably disclosed interweaving stories of her youth, parents, graduate studies, and personal awakenings, for some readers her biography was not baked into the book in sufficient proportion to the subjects of her study.
But to me, Mead’s My Life and Biggs’s A Life were more than a little successful–rather, they were indescribably influential. They cracked open a new way of reading, of seeing, of writing for me, a fellow writer-reader, a fellow feminist. Biggs’s book takes the next natural step beyond Mead’s, evolving from Mead’s case study of one colossal, perennially beloved and admired novel (George Eliot’s Middlemarch) to a longitudinal study of the biographies of a lineage of women writers, each of whom (Eliot included) birthed colossal, canon-forming, canon-breaking works in an array of literary genres and historical-political moments. Each writer, Biggs contends, stood on the shoulders of the sister-mother-writer-teacher (friend) who came before. And each surmounted (or didn’t) the obstacles of love, loss, self-doubt, lack of education, childrearing or childlessness, death, and suicidality that plagued them. Their struggles, like ours, were universal–prescriptive even–for women. Yet the particulars were utterly unique.
Like Biggs and Mead, I too aspire to complete a particular memoir, one that I began years ago about the life and death of my mentally ill, suicidal mother and her impact on me. One might note that my premise sounds familiar–other notable titles in what I call the mother memoir genre include Daughter of the Queen of Sheba by Jacki Lyden, Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman, and recently, the provocatively-titled I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeannette McCurdy. Why on earth, you might ask, do we need yet another mother memoir, another recounting of the personal revelations of a daughter who strives to make sense of her mother’s illness? The answer is that my story is both universal and unique. Perennial and particular. I stand on the shoulders of the other feminist memoirists who came before, and who light path markers for me. Women writers don’t crowd each other out with exclusivity; instead, we usher the next one in. As Biggs shows me and other readers in A Life of One’s Own, charting one’s path through a feminine and feminist existence in this world is all of many things: fraught, fragmented, disappointing, unfair, bewildering, terrifying, exciting, and mundane. It does not, though, have to be lonely. We women writers and readers are in good company.
On occasion, Biggs’s reverence for our mother-authors can seem gullible (such as when she takes at face value Toni Morrison’s claim that she would happily jettison her career if a young single mother with aspirations to perform brain surgery needed a nanny). Yet her humane, patient, painstaking perusal of each writer’s biographies, writings, notebooks, manuscripts, archives, and letters is breathtaking. In the end, and throughout, I am grateful to Biggs and her excellent project. Her landmark bibliophilic critical literary memoir offered a soul-nourishing, sisterly walk arm-in-arm through the lives and hearts of accomplished women writers and readers, including the ones who came before, herself, me, and – I hope – you, too.
“A Life of One’s Own“ is available now, from Harper Collins Publishers.
About the reviewer:
Camilia Cenek is a poet, writer, and editor. She has BA and MA degrees in English as well as a BA in Psychology. She once lived in France and in South Korea and now makes her home in Wisconsin. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Madison Magazine, The Sunlight Press, and Creative Wisconsin Anthology. She is currently developing an essay collection about growing up with her mother’s mental illness. When not writing, she makes snacks and crafts with her four young children. Find her at camiliacenek.com.