“Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.” (Salman Rushdie, “One Thousand Days in a Balloon,” New York Times, December 12, 1991)
This is the power that Jeannette Walls gained when she wrote The Glass Castle. In publishing her book, in the commitment and hard work she put into her book tours, she encouraged her readers to do the same: retell, laugh, cry it out, think new thoughts and change. This is why I want to give The Glass Castle on World Book Night April 23rd.
The above quote was the opening to a book entitled The Story of Your Life by Mandy Aftel. I chose this book to read on the craft of memoir for a course I took years ago entitled Women’s Lives. I really had no idea what it was about. I knew it would involve writing and women and a well-loved teacher named Polly Glover. That was enough for my nineteen-year-old self but I still reap the benefits of this course over ten years later.
There are so many women writers who have shared, who have bared all, blazed new trails, who have opened the door to discussion on many taboo topics, who have created community through their words. Maya Angelo, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Jeannette Walls, Virgina Woolf, Anne Moody, Alice Walker, Mary Karr. They are mothers and sisters and friends and mentors when there is a space to be filled, their words wait for the open door.
Sometimes, when I have something tough to do and when space allows (no, an e-book won’t do), I put the only thing I have tangible from these women in my bag, Maya Angelou’s Letter to my Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Prime of Life, Alice Walker’s The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart and In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. Like Karr writes, it is some sort of mini-village I carry with me, a group of women who feed a confidence and bravery to move forward. The essayist Kennedy Fraser expresses a similar need:
“I felt very lonely then, self-absorbed, shut off. I needed all this murmured chorus, this continuum of true-life stories, to pull me through. They were like mothers and sisters to me, these literary women, many of them already dead; more than my own family, they seemed to stretch out a hand.”
Step Up to Hand Out . . . Become a Giver Today.
There are thirty books to choose from. See the full list here.
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