We live in perilous times. But I feel especially terrified because I’m female. It’s not just the dystopian prospect of women losing the right to control our own bodies. It’s the implication that loss could have for what women’s bodies can do besides reproduce, like speak our truths in public spaces without getting shouted down or silenced. Reading Rebecca Solnit’s 2020 memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, recently brought out how that’s yet another battle we’ve been fighting forever despite the feminist gains of the last 60 years.
In 1984, a semester after Solnit graduated from the Berkeley School of Journalism, I was unlearning academic objectivity and embracing the power of own first-person narrative voice in a women’s studies class on the other side of the same university campus. Acknowledging subjectivity was an act of radical integrity. A small but necessary rebellion against that insidious thing called patriarchy. A child who grew up in a home “where everything feminine and female …was hated,“ Solnit no doubt understood this idea, though she had yet to find her way to her own maverick brand of feminist-inflected cultural criticism.
I’d be lying if I said I came to writing my own memoir with the same feminist intention so clearly evident in Solnit’s book. Feminism was not even on my mind; that only came later, when I realized how so much of my life had been deformed by the abuses of sexism. I wrote to break nearly half a century of silences I thought would protect me but only suffocated, I wrote to save myself, my sanity and my soul. Which I suppose, in this brewing home-front war against women, amounts to more or less the same thing.
Solnit keeps me company in this plastic-elastic space of memoir that I inhabit. But she and I, the journalist and the ex-academic, we’re not alone. One 2015 article estimates that seventy percent of those who enroll in writing programs that specifically teach the craft of memoir (and its elegantly compact twin, the essay), are female. I’ll wager that’s at least the percentage of memoirs written by women I read as a professional book critic. Modern memoir, it would seem, is a “women’s” genre. But why the draw?
First-person narrative beckons with the promise of truth-telling. The straight shit. And in a world tending more and more towards enforced homogeneity, that’s powerful. If you can’t be yourself enough to tell your truth in the world, you can do it between the covers of a book. Memoir is about emotional honesty, the act of voicing difficult emotions, like rage, despair, disgust. But also celebrating the unabashed joy of being who you are, flaws, weaknesses, quirks and all.
For women, that emotional honesty is critical. Almost as critical as experiencing the intimacy of reading the details of someone’s else’s life. Whether innate or learned or both, intimacy is something girls learn—and learn to appreciate—from childhood. I think of the secrets shared between girls. Whispered in ears. Written on sheets of notebook paper, then passed in class. A female-authored memoir is another kind of note, one that not only offers escape into the privacy of another woman’s internal world. But also the opportunity for other “secret sharers” to find each other and create bonds among themselves.
A memoir is therefore as public as it is private. All writers want others to know their words; but for some writers, achieving that goal is critical, less for the spotlight, and more for the light it casts on subjects not discussed. Not only about the details of one’s life. But also to shed light on subjects beyond the standard fare of the mundane. The subjects deemed taboo: Trauma. Abuse. Rape. Incest. Mental illness. Addiction. “Deviant” (non-binary) sexuality. And have others bear dignify truths through the act of witness.
I am a member of a virtual collective of memoirists. It numbers in the thousands, and membership is only open to women and non-binary people. All members must follow a strict code of conduct, which means respecting all differences like gender, race sexuality and age. This may sound like an absolutism of political correctness. But there are reasons for these rules. Reasons like the #Metoo movement that showed the world just how widespread sexual abuse—and the myriad micro- and macro-aggressions that go alone with it—was.
I can say nothing specific about our discussions; only that members speak of struggles and successes, ask questions of or help from the collective. The group reminds me of the no-boys-allowed clubs of childhood. Back then, girls separated from boys because boys carried an invisible disease we called cooties. But now those boys have become men vested with the kind of damaging power wielded by a lying, orange-haired lech of a president. And by a now imprisoned Hollywood mogul who also thought that he could grab as much pussy and wreck as many lives as he wanted without consequences.
That’s how it is for women/non-binary people living under a patriarchal regime. We all know that any of us can become targets at any time, both in the real and virtual worlds. Of bullying. stalking, gaslighting, shaming. Anything and everything that might possibly silence us, make us question ourselves and our own self-worth. Because we are women/non-binary people who speak rather than hold our tongues like children told to be seen but not heard. Because what we do and say often involves others who have a vested interest in keeping us silent. But more than that, to maintain a status quo that has rewarded the defenders of male privilege from blotting everything that differs from truths they call “universal” and “sacred.”
Sometimes I revel in that hiddenness, that shelter that allows for open exchange. Yet I am also profoundly bothered that such a space even needs to exist. Or that women who speak about female experiences under patriarchy still find themselves the targets of mansplaining males who will not listen and seek only hear the sound of their own voices. Like Rebecca Solnit. who remembered how one conservative commentator who said “to go fuck [your]self” for speaking out about the many ways professional men—some of whom had far less expertise —had dismissed, ignored, belittled her.
Whether it’s about reversing laws that respect female autonomy or forcing women’s voices back into their throats, the endgame of patriarchy is the same. But since my days in that Berkeley classroom forty years ago, too many consciousnesses have been raised. The wheel will not stop moving forward. How dare you, said our current Vice President this past month to conservative lawmakers supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Though never having borne children herself, this Vice President still lives in a female body. A body that made her the target of a man who unquestioningly served the orange lech almost to the very end. And who, in his ignorant arrogance, claimed to speak for 62 million unborn children and their grieving mothers: How dare you, Madame Vice President?
To which I reply. Oh, yes Mr. ex-Vice-President. How dare WE.