Exploring autobiography: Getting lost and finding myself.
By Sylvia Wilson

Perhaps it is in the doing that we find (our)selves when we feel lost, in the doing that we lose (our)selves so something can be found (Norman, 2001, p. 138).

             Autobiography can teach us many things. It can be a way of making sense of our lives, a means of constructing meaning, and an opening to understanding others’ worlds. It can be a way of speaking the silences, illuminating dark places, and revealing hidden understandings. It can be both an expression of a life and a representation of a life which shifts and changes with each writing. It can also be a means of constructing self and shaping and forming identity.
             It is through the writing (or imaging) that we can discover what it is we want to say and meanings emerge through the process of writing and creating. For the author, autobiography is a process of discovery with self-knowing and self-becoming closely interwoven, for as we author our own lives and take charge of our own storylines we can effect change and create openings for personal transformation.
             This paper began by exploring autobiography as both a representation and construction of a life. I thought at first that this inquiry would be more straightforward than I found it to be. It was in fact, much like Gilmore’s (1994) description of reading women’s autobiographies as a map for getting lost. As I read more and considered multiple perspectives, I found that notions of representation and of self-construction were not mutually exclusive or distinct. Autobiography can be a simple re-presentation of a life as in a story that relates events and happenings and tells a “this is what happened to me” story. However, I found that even these autobiographies fill silences and spaces and in so doing construct new understandings. For example, in autobiographies of women, of illness, loss, and trauma, and other previously silenced or transgressive narratives, autobiography does more than simply re-present a life as such narratives also contribute to the social construction and collective understandings of what it means to live as humans in this world.
             I found also that I had to re-think an initial reading of Nesaule’s (1995) book, A Woman In Amber, as I realized that in the absence of narratives, her story was a powerful and important one. For example, I could read plenty of linear histories of wars and events, but there were very few personal stories from a woman’s perspective of war, and even fewer about the effects of this war in particular. Initially I had found her book to be pale and disappointing. Yet, I thought about it constantly and over time saw how it resonated again and again with my own life. I couldn’t find any other stories written about women living in the Baltic States during the Second World War and Nesaule’s story began to feel very important. One voice speaking out, breaking the silence, disrupting history, validating and echoing what I knew about my mother and her experiences, gave me hope and courage to continue to tell and construct my own autobiographies. I gave the book to my mother when I saw her last and afterwards realized I had done something terrible. I had transgressed the rules of silence that had governed my mother’s war experiences. Yet this is exactly what women’s autobiographies should do – transgress the silences that have characterized women’s lives and impart hope and courage to other women to speak their stories.
             I spent most of the writing of this paper feeling lost, wondering how to find my way out to having something conclusive to say. In the end I found that the central questions I was asking through this inquiry were really about the generative aspects of writing (and reading) autobiographies and how autobiography can be a life giving, life affirming, life-extending act. It has been a somewhat muddled journey, winding along barely marked pathways, through dense forests, and unfamiliar terrain. The map through women’s autobiographies has been like a map for getting lost. This paper mirrors this journey and although I’m not sure that it’s answers that I’ve found, I have realized that to write is a necessary life-saving act.

Mothering Stories
             As part of a class assignment I wrote an autobiographical episode relating to the events surrounding my son’s move into a care home. I wove my story in with my daughter’s words describing how she had been angry with me. It was an unsettling and uncomfortable story told without justifying the reasons for my son’s leaving or minimizing my daughter’s anger. As I read the story in class and received back mixed responses, I wondered why it is that a mother’s love must be pure, boundless, unspoiled by anger, and always enough – as in images of the Virgin Mary, always smiling, lovingly holding a serene baby, fingers held up in a perpetual blessing as a cultural icon of romanticized motherhood, dividing mothering into good mothers who fit this stereotype, and bad mothers who don’t.
             In the morning newspaper for example, I read stories of good mothers who love their children, pack healthy lunches, and help out at school. Of heroic mothers who sacrifice everything. Of bad mothers who accidentally perhaps drop their babies over bridges, who drown their children in bathtubs, who keep big snakes and endanger their children. Of foster mothers who mother bad mothers’ children making things right, doing what those mothers couldn’t do. But who tells stories of other mothers? Who writes of how it is to live with and mother children who are chronically ill and disabled, who don’t sleep, who are loved dearly, but cry endlessly? Who tells stories of the mothers who would do anything, and who have done everything, but still their children cry? Who tells the stories that disrupt the script of mothering?
             I read one such story once in a few sentences underneath an image of a quilt. In a few quiet words the artist explained how the quilt was made in response to her young daughter’s disabling illness and her move into a long-term medical care facility. Yet the turmoil in the images said far more than she dared to say. Another was told to me by my son’s first caregiver, whose youngest son had been born with cerebral palsy. She told me how 20 years earlier she, like other parents of severely disabled children, had to go to court and ask the provincial government to assume custody of her son so she could get some help and a night’s sleep and he could get the wheelchair he needed. Her son died quietly in the night in someone else’s care and no one phoned her until two days later to tell her. She told me the story hesitantly, explaining her choices to me (as if I wouldn’t understand) and to herself so she could hear again that there were reasons for such a difficult choice. Such stories are filled with shame and excuses, as if mothers had to justify their limits, and still remain absent from the dominant cultural narratives of mothering.
             Paradoxically, narratives of mothering as well as the narratives of women in general are marked by absence. Brandt (1993), in her book Wild Mother Dancing, documents the absence of mother narratives in Western literature. Anderson (2001), Gilmore (1994), Norman (2001), and others write about the absence of women’s autobiographies in literature. Throughout history, from Augustine, to Rousseau, to Freud, autobiography has told stories of men’s lives (Anderson, 2001). Silences compound silences so that the pathway in to finding women’s stories (and mothers’ stories) is hidden and confusing.
             In a powerful story of silence to voice Chaffee (1998) describes writing as the means of discovering and asserting the right to be heard. Like narratives by other women, her autobiographic writing was an attempt to fill up the silence with words (Lu, 1998) and represent self where women’s representations were absent. This is a very important function of autobiographic writing. Not only does it illuminate lives of individual women (both to themselves and to others), it also serves as a collective representation, challenging dominant understandings. Schmidt (1998) asserts that personal authority, agency, and authorship are closely interwoven and that the need to find one’s own voice and to create “life-saving” (p. 6) stories through autobiographic writing is typical of many women’s writings. We write to save ourselves, to survive, to be seen and heard, to leave a mark, and to resist silence. We write to assert our presence and to re-present our selves and our lives.

Storying Selves
             In my wanderings and readings, I became interested in how an individual is both represented and constructed through autobiography. Bruner (2001) writes that not so long ago autobiography did not concern itself with the process of self-creation. Autobiography defined itself as writing about a life and the “essential self” rather than the process of constructing self or a life. Current writers of autobiographies however, claim that the process of constructing a self-story is also one of creating new understandings of self (Frank, 1997; Lather and Smithies, 1997). This is particularly evident in stories of trauma, illness, loss, and difficulty. In these stories autobiography does much more than simply re-present a life and an individual’s experiences. Although my focus was initially on women’s autobiographies, I found that illness narratives were rich sites of understanding and opened possibilities for re-writing, re-defining, and re-creating self. I began to read these narratives in order to understand how significant traumatic events can be turning points for writing new understandings of one’s self.
              Illness narratives are about the disruptions of the disease and its effects. A commonly told story is that of the author overcoming the effects of the illness in a survivor’s tale of how he/she conquered the illness and overcame the disruption to his/her life (Frank, 1997). The self may be disrupted and thrown into chaos for a period of time, yet in the end returns to equilibrium and stability as it was before. The disruption is essentially externally driven, with the disease (or other traumatic event) itself the source of that disruption. Frank (1997, 1999), however, situates himself within postmodernist understandings of illness, which recognizes that people may return from “deep” illness (as in potentially terminal conditions where the individual may survive but may never be fully released from disease as in cancer in remission, diabetes, or certain heart conditions), but things may never return to what used to be normal. The self is the life disrupted. A postmodern journey through illness is about that disruption.

The illness story begins in wreckage, having lost its map and destination. The story is both interrupted and it is about interruption. In the illness stories what begins as the breakdown of narrative – life’s interruption by illness – is transformed into another kind of narrative.
(1997, p. 164)

Lather and Smithies (1997) acknowledge this disruption as they write:

People make sense of their lives via story lines or narratives that are available at particular cultural moments. No life fits neatly into any one plot line and narratives are multiple, contradictory, changing and differently available…some help us tell our lives well; some break down in the face of the complications of our lives and times. (p. 125)

             New narratives must be written to replace the old. The self is both told and formed in that storying as it is through the process of constructing new narratives that the self is re-constructed. As Frank writes, “the self-story is not told for the sake of description…the self is being formed in what is told” (p. 55). Narrative then is understood as reclaiming. Remaking begins as the author opens his/her story to others. The writer or teller of that story involves him/herself in “the creation of a coherent self-story, the re-creation of memory, and the assumption of responsibility” (p. 65-6) so that autobiographical work becomes a means of repair and a performance where the self becomes the product or effect of the story.
             The reader of that story is invited to enter in to the space of disruption allowing him/herself to be disrupted too. As in Lather’s and Smithies’ (1997) book, Troubling the Angels, where there is no easy reading of that story and entering in requires effort. The reader is asked to enter as a participant and step into the space where the AIDS runs its course through women’s lives. Frank writes, such “autobiographical work is not a spectator study but a relation” (1999, p. 22), a dialogic relation of self and other.
              Wortham (2001) describes how self is constructed in this relation. The interaction of self and reader creates a place for the self to be performed. Narrative self-construction depends on this interrelationship of enactment and representation. That is, the self that narrates the story, and the self that is enacted through the narration are in relation. This performative interaction of the life lived and the life written produces a new understanding of one’s place in that life and allows for new constructions of self.
             Difficult experiences are openings then, to writing new stories and new selves. For when we tell stories about our lives, “the point is to make our lives not only more intelligible, but also more bearable” (Wortham, p. 50). Gilmore (2001) describes trauma as representing a “wound to the soul” (p. 25) and not just a physical or physiological wound. Writing can both expose and mend one’s soul. And as we write the unbearable becomes bearable.
             Then, finally, at the end of my journey, when I thought I was truly lost, I found a small treasure. In Gilmore’s book, The limits of autobiography: Trauma and testimony, she quoted Kincaid speaking about her autobiographical writing in response to her brother’s life and dying:

When I was young, younger than I am now, I started to write about my own life and I came to see that this act saved my life. When I heard about my brother’s illness and his dying, I knew, instinctively, that to understand it, or to make an attempt to understand his dying, and not to die with him, I would write about it. (cited in Gilmore, 2001, p. 119)

             I finally realized that to write is to save one’s self. Kincaid writes to ensure that she is not lost along with her brother. I write so that I no longer have to live in silence without a voice, so that I stay alive. When the familiar stories are no longer useful, when the stories of mothering no longer reflect my lived stories, when I can’t find the stories I need to help me understand my life, I write my own. I create new images and new narratives. And at the end of this journey I realize that it is myself I have found along the way.

References

Anderson, L. (2001). Autobiography. London and New York: Routledge.

Brandt, D. (1993). Wild Mother Dancing. University of Manitoba Press.

Bruner, J. (2001). Self-making and world-making. In J. Brockmeier and D. Carbaugh (Eds.). Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Chaffee, K. A. (1998). Voicing my self: An unfinished journey. In J. Z. Schmidt (Ed.). Women/ writing/ teaching. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Frank, A. (1999). Illness and autobiographical work: Dialogue as narrative destabilization. Paper presented at the Narratives of Disease, Disability, and Trauma Symposium, University of British Columbia, 1999.

Frank, Arthur (1997). The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gilmore, L. (2001). The limits of autobiography: Trauma and testimony. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Gilmore, L. (1994). Autobiographics: A feminist theory of women’s self-representation. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Lather, P and Smithies, C. (1997). Troubling the angels: Women living with HIV/AIDS. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers.

Lu, Min-zhan. (1998). From silence to words. In J. Z. Schmidt (Ed.). Women/ writing/ teaching. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Nesaule, A. (1995). A Woman In amber: Healing the trauma of war and exile. New York: Soho Press.

Norman, R. (2001). House of mirrors: performing autobiography(icall)y in language /education. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Schmidt, J. Z. (Ed.). (1998). Women/ writing/ teaching. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Wortham, S. (2001). Narrative in action: A strategy for research and analysis. New York and London: Teachers College Press