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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. By Susanna Egan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 275 pages.
The memoir boom of the nineties has left a lasting imprint on life writing in and beyond the Americas. Some memoirs of trauma have been sensational, riveting reads--such as Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss (1997) and Michael Ryan's A Secret Life (1995)--telling formerly unspeakable stories of sexual abuse and incest. A memoir narrating political trauma of the Holocaust, Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1996), was revealed to be fictitious, but questions about its compelling witnessing of brutality persist. Life narratives during this period also examined the permeability of boundaries formerly regarded as firm. Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women And The Rest Of Us (1994) is the best-known male-to-female transgender narrative, but by no means the only; its critique of the "rules" of gender identity and their transgression is performed on and through the story of Bornstein's bodily transformation. The 1990s also saw an outpouring of new-model narratives of illness and disability: stories of lives forever altered by HIV, such as David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives (1991), of a partner's narrative of a lover, Paul Monette's Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988), or of a family member's story, Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother (1997), served as both personal memorials and calls to political action. In the nineties, memoirs of illness and disability critiqued the notion of "normalcy" itself. Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (1993) indicted the 1960s Establishment for institutionalizing her. The narrative of debilitating anxiety in the lives of young women was continued in Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation (1993), which also confessed to the excesses of drug management, as did William Styron's Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990). Marya Hornbacher's Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia (1998) testified to her harrowing experience of anorexia but also to her hunger for readers' attention. The many kinds of crisis narrated in 1990s memoirs resonate with the complexity of contemporary life, addressing readers' experience of the everyday and urging re-examination of the boundaries of the institution of literature.
Susanna Egan's Mirror Talk takes up several kinds of "crisis lives" in exploring what autobiographical narration has become, as many people who would not have been considered "great authors" a century ago turn to telling their lives,...
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