[In the following essay, Braham underscores the unorthodox and personal nature of the memoirs of Sarton, Nancy Mairs, and Audre Lorde.]

Scholars working within both the humanities and the social sciences are beginning to challenge the male, white, upper-class model of “achievement and quest” dominating the field of biography and autobiography until the last twenty years. Whose lives, they ask, have been studied as exemplary and what enlargements of our understanding of human experience can occur when “different” (women, blacks, working-class, disabled, gay) life experiences are included?

Some women's personal narratives reveal what their authors believe they are supposed to feel; their formulas acknowledge the conformist power of the dominant culture. Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, for example, documents exactly the sunny, uncomplicated and uneventful childhood her fiction disputes. Sylvia Plath's Letters Home testify to the terrible power of the myth of the All-American Girl: dutiful daughter, summa Smithie, perfect wife, fulfilled mother; a portrait not even her mother to whom they were addressed and a powerful ally in the myth could believe. Other women's narratives speak of ways the dominant culture marginalizes those not conforming to its conventions and assumptions. May Sarton, Nancy Mairs, and Audre Lorde offer life experience that counterpoints the dominant melodic line. Their very defiance of the “rules” reveals aspects of the system they wish to challenge or enlarge.

Sarton, Mairs, and Lorde, who began their careers as poets, see the sharing of their life stories as a crucial part of their literary mandate. Sarton has written nine journals for publication over a period spanning twenty years; the last, At Eighty-Two, was published posthumously in 1995. Mairs's memoirs and personal essays include Plaintext (1986), Remembering the Bone House (1989), Carnal Acts (1990), and Ordinary Time (1993). Audre Lorde's personal narratives include The Cancer Journals (1980), Zami (1982), Sister Outsider (1984), and A Burst of Light (1988), published shortly before she died on November 17, 1992, after a fourteen-year struggle with cancer.

In addition to sharing maverick status, that is, writing from a position outside the dominant culture (lesbian, chronically ill, black), these poet-memoirists habitually advance meaning via metaphor. Since their reliance on metaphor allows meaning to complete itself associatively rather than linearly, they are able to engage a wide variety of readers. Metaphoric meaning—with its pluralistic possibilities reverberating in any given reader—is a means of moving many readers in a similar, if not absolutely identical, direction. Arguably, then, the movement from poetry to memoir is a natural one: the power to speak to a wide readership may be effected through metaphor's power to universalize and particularize simultaneously.

The truth value in these self-inscriptions is far from harvested “objective fact,” but rather is encoded and revealed in the metaphors, images, and extended analogies that make their scripts vibrate with meaning. If, as Susan Stanford Friedman argues, the female autobiographical self is a “grounding of identity” through “linking with another consciousness” (55-56), Jane Marcus identifies this consciousness as the reader's: “If we agree that the writer resurrects herself through memory, then the reader also resurrects the writer through reading her. This collaboration is a reproduction of women's culture as conversation. It does not occur in the male model of individualistic autobiography, where the reader is not expected to take such an active role” (“Invincible” 137).

The story of one woman's life provides a script the reader enters, resignifies, and in some collaborative sense makes her own. The personal narratives of Sarton, Mairs, and Lorde create exciting new playing fields, ones that redefine traditional roles, challenge societal expectations, and refigure the obligations of the artist. In using the published journal as an honest seismograph of their own feelings, Sarton, Mairs, and Lorde offer crucial testimony to an engaged reader.

May Sarton has acknowledged, at first grudgingly and then enthusiastically, the importance of her journals as one continuous means of telling the story of a human life satisfying to a huge readership. Although insisting they are not “autobiographies” or “memoirs,” Sarton's journals constitute a form of personal narrative at once fragmentary and discontinuous enough to satisfy poststructuralist ideas about the vagaries of the “self,” and powerful enough to link a reader's consciousness to the author's testimony. Each of Sarton's journals was composed on the heels of personal crisis when self-assessment was crucial for restoring emotional balance and spiritual health. Journal of a Solitude (1973) marks the end of a powerful love affair; House by the Sea (1977) is precipitated by the move from Nelson, New Hampshire, to York, Maine; Recovering (1980) emerges from a year of crisis involving cancer, a broken love affair, and frustration over mixed reviews of her work in fiction and poetry; At Seventy (1984) records the credits and debits of old age; After the Stroke (1988) describes the effects of a stroke suffered shortly before her seventy-fifth birthday; Endgame (1992), published in her eightieth year, documents illness that requires “learning to become dependent.” Encore and At Eighty-Two record the triumphs of a huge readership, genuine critical acclaim, and the struggles of failing health.

Though rooted in idiosyncratic experience, Sarton's journals seek to connect with a wide readership by revealing the need to create order out of chaos, reentry out of withdrawal, health out of illness. Her efforts to define “self” and “values” within a communal context are, in part, supplied by readers' responses.

As Carolyn Heilbrun has suggested in Writing a Woman's Life, artists like Sarton who speak about aging and death, about homophobia, about the narcissism of the academic and publishing worlds—who create new narrations from the raw data of life experience—free others to imagine conditions by which they may live. Age and the authority of many books, says Heilbrun, confer a “bravery and power” and writers like Sarton (and Heilbrun herself) can exercise that authority by continuing “to take risks, to make noise, to be courageous, to become unpopular” (17-18).

The process of collaboration with the reader is a gradual, cumulative one in Sarton's journals. Journal of a Solitude and At Seventy, although written eleven years apart, are triggered by similar impulses. Sarton casts herself as a character in her own story, re-creating significant life experience, pondering its shape, discovering its outcome. Much like the novelist who discovers her characters beginning to exert wills of their own, Sarton sets her plot in motion, discovering its significance in the retelling. Simultaneously she deepens meaning by concentrating on a few repeating images (home, animals, significant friendships) that function as poetic metaphors shimmering with collective content. Her awareness of audience widens from the reader-over-the-shoulder peepsight of Journal of a Solitude to the much more direct address of At Seventy.

Journal, spanning the year from September 1970 to September 1971, retells the story of her own artistic imprisonment figured by the claustrophobic enclosure in Nelson, New Hampshire. She begins with the need to “break through into the rough, rocky depths to the matrix itself” (12). Since she declares she “can think something out only by writing it,” this journal becomes an inspection, largely self-motivated, by which she hopes to understand a failed love affair, a writer's refuge that became a prison, and the serious depression that followed.

At Seventy is a direct invitation to an audience. Moved by the physical beauty of her “house by the sea” in York, Maine, Sarton captures moments, “essences” as she calls them, that link landscape with consciousness. As she explores the cycle of the seasons, the reader is invited to ponder growth and death. As she records the antics of her birds, squirrels, “wild cats,” and Sheltie dog, the reader examines loyalty, dependence, and the value of trust. She struggles with the censor who sits on the shoulder of all who write with the expectation of publication, insisting that honesty is the only path to “the bedrock of truth”: “Forgiveness cannot be achieved without understanding, and understanding means painful honesty first of all, and then the ability to detach oneself and look hard, without self-pity, at the cause for violent behavior” (At Seventy 196). Reading Journal and At Seventy together reveals a process of value formation. Each creates a context for the other, extending and deepening the meaning of Sarton's struggles with age, literary recognition, sustained love relationships. In Women's Ways of Knowing (1986), Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule call such referential building of insight “constructed knowledge”:

Most constructivist women actively reflect on how their judgments, attitudes, and behavior coalesce into some internal experience of moral consistency. More than any other group, they are seriously preoccupied with the moral and spiritual dimension of their lives. Further, they strive to translate their moral commitments into action, both out of the conviction that “one must act” and out of a feeling of responsibility to the larger community in which they live.

(150)

As Sarton arrives at an insight worked and reworked through the fabric of a “reconstructed life,” so does her caught and connected reader.

A revision of life is precisely what triggers Journal of a Solitude. It is written, Sarton suggests, in part to correct an earlier rendering of her Nelson experience in the memoir Plant Dreaming Deep. Published in 1968, Plant Dreaming Deep tells the story of a woman who, at forty-five, takes the risk of buying, renovating, and deciding to live alone in a house geographically and emotionally removed from friends and the artistic community of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The tale is a triumphant one, the story of a great adventure that succeeds. Missing are accounts of the destructive forces Sarton meets en route: a literary agent who fears the candor of her lesbian novel, a wrongheaded review of her selected poems, the grinding loneliness of geographic isolation, the first awareness of physical deterioration. Journal revises that other “script,” retelling both the Nelson story and current life experience with rage, isolation, and depression factored in.

When one chooses solitude as a condition of life, “there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression” (Journal 16). Keeping a daily record allows Sarton to stitch emotional fragments into a pattern, one that reduces the emotional vulnerability of the moment. Journal also corrects the “myth of a false Paradise” perpetrated in Plant Dreaming Deep. The house in Nelson that had begun as a refuge for the artist who wanted to withdraw from the clutter and demands of her life in Boston becomes, in “revision,” a trap, a place of “anguish and unrest.”

Home is a metaphor in all of Sarton's writing, so her move from an inland village house in New Hampshire to a spacious rambling coastal house in Maine is crucial. “Wild Knoll” in York, with its magnificent grassy path to the sea, pulls the writer's focus outward. New geographical space has its parallel in new interior space. Solitude becomes a condition analogous to the ebbs and tides of the sea, and identity and values emerge from connection rather than withdrawal: “one does not ‘find oneself’ by pursuing oneself, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through some discipline or routine who one is and wants to be” (House by the Sea 180).

In York, Sarton begins the reciprocal explorations common to her next three journals but most vividly rendered in At Seventy: What connections and what separations are healthy for the artist to maintain? How does one preserve the “primary intensity” necessary for art while still meeting obligations to friends, neighbors, and the large literary and intellectual community responding to the work? How does one maintain self-reliance and still acknowledge the fears attendant to old age, physical deterioration, and flagging energy? In At Seventy, the writer's relationship to her “home” is still at the vital center, but fear is recognized, weighed, and credited with its proportional cost. And frequently the ritual of writing in the journal is a tool for recovery, providing, as it does, the discipline necessary for renewed concentration and perspective.

At Seventy balances the anxieties of old age (an irregular heart, a cancer scare, the death of “dearest love” Judy Matlack) with the celebrations of “growing into age” and its earned rewards: a huge and growing appreciative audience, excellent book sales, the financial security to support worthy friends and projects she believes in deeply. Here May Sarton's most vital values resonate: balance, commitment, connection. As her journal opens she assesses seventy years of life experience: “If someone else had lived so long and could remember things sixty years ago with great clarity, she would seem very old to me. But I do not feel old at all, not as much a survivor as a person on her way” (At Seventy 1).

Surely much of what Sarton knows about attachment comes from her relationship with Judy Matlack, a figure always a presence in Journal of a Solitude but fully fashioned in At Seventy. Judy first appears in a wheelchair, the victim of Alzheimer's disease, reduced to a baby “for whom food is the only real pleasure” (At Seventy 147). Although Sarton visits her in a nursing home in Concord and bravely arranges short trips for her to York, most visits carry a high price tag.

Only after Judy's death (when, Sarton says, Judy “begins to live again”) can Sarton remember:

—Judy is the precious only love with whom I lived for years … only Judy gave me a home and made me know what love can be. She was the dear companion for fifteen years, years when I was struggling as a writer. We were poor then. … But strangely enough I look back on those years as the happiest ones. And that is because there was a “we.”

(At Seventy 217)

Although Judy is the primary example of a “we,” Sarton's inventory of her life is packed with “connections.” Friends of her youth, visiting artists, Mr. Webster (who fixes the pipes), Eleanor Perkins (who cleans the house), Nancy (who makes order out of the chaos of the files), Sister Lucy (who plows and builds at the commune H.O.M.E. in rural Orland, Maine) crowd the pages. Sarton clearly acknowledges the growing community of readers who buy and read her work, line up for book signings, send her pounds of mail monthly, and turn out in staggering numbers at her readings. This community of response leads her to write, “the answer is not detachment as I used to believe but rather to be more deeply involved—to be attached” (At Seventy 12). The “self” in At Seventy is defined by connection to others and values become luminous in what Saul Bellow described as “the company of others attended by love.”

In Writing a Woman's Life, Heilbrun documents how few women of Sarton's generation acknowledged their debts to other women. She includes in this debt not only literary apprenticeships but the forgotten or unacknowledged support of female friendship. She describes one startling exception by retelling the story of Vera Brittain's and Winifred Holtby's (schoolmates at Oxford, post-World War I) lifelong and life-giving friendship. Holtby anticipates much of what gender theorists now document and in her book, Women and a Changing Civilization (1935), she ranges over issues everywhere apparent in Sarton's narratives. Heilbrun quotes her:

I think that the real object behind our demand is not to reduce all men and women to the same dull pattern. It is rather to release their richness of variety. We are still greatly ignorant of our own natures. We do not know how much of what we usually describe as “feminine characteristics” are really “masculine” and how much “masculinity” is common to both sexes. Our hazards are often wildly off the mark. We do not know—though we theorize and penalize with ferocious confidence—whether the “normal” sexual relationship is homo- or bi- or hetero-sexual. We are content to make vast generalizations which quite often fit the facts enough to be tolerable, but which—also quite often—inflict indescribable because indefinable suffering on those individuals who cannot without pain conform to our rough-and-ready attempt to make all men [and women] good and happy.

(Heilbrun 106)

Sarton's script speaks to those who, as Holtby phrases it, “walk more delicately” among definitions. Its authority rests with those who celebrate “their richness of variety” and who may find in her texts liberating validation.

To read Sarton's Journal of a Solitude juxtaposed with At Seventy is analogous to experiencing the series of remarkable self-portraits Goya painted in his late years. The portraits move from self-enclosure, the artist locked in the self-contemplation of a windowpane, mirror, or canvas to a figure in three-quarter turn, looking outward toward the audience as if to check in its response the authentic outline.

Audre Lorde's Cancer Journals, a slim volume of seventy pages first published in 1980, offers in place of May Sarton's slowly exfoliating story, a life experience with cancer that delivers a swift upper-cut to the consciousness. Lorde announces her purpose in keeping and deciding to publish the journal in the introduction:

Each woman responds to the crisis that breast cancer brings to her life out of a whole pattern, which is the design of who she is and how her life has been lived. The weave of her everyday existence is the training ground for how she handles crisis. Some women obscure their painful feelings surrounding mastectomy with a blanket of business-as-usual, thus keeping those feelings forever under cover, but expressed elsewhere. For women, in a valiant effort not to be seen as merely victims, this means an insistence that no such feelings exist and that nothing much has occurred. For some women it means the warrior's painstaking examination of yet another weapon, unwanted but useful.

I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use. … I have tried to voice some of my feelings and thoughts about the travesty of prosthesis, the pain of amputation, the function of cancer in a profit economy, my confrontation with mortality, the strength of women loving, and the power and rewards of self-conscious living.

(Cancer Journal 9)

The journal entries begin about three months after her modified radical mastectomy and extend into the process of “integrating this crisis into my life” (10). Lorde's journal, though nominally about cancer, the unique threat and paralyzing fear it evokes, has a second subject, a “deep subject”: a challenge issued to women who choose “prosthesis in order to seem ‘the same as before’”; and in so doing deny the opportunity to examine the life-altering crisis. Lorde sees social conformity as the greatest victimizer of such women: social customs that urge silence in the face of loss, pain, grief; cosmetic devices to conceal cancer's amputations; conventional wisdoms that tell women to “look on the bright side” when such euphemisms are actually “used for obscuring certain realities … dangerous to the status quo” (74).

Lorde's journal ultimately addresses what recovery is by subtracting what it is not. It is not wearing a false breast. It is not adopting a positive frame of mind since negativity may be imagined to “have caused cancer in the first place” (74). It is not the refusal to examine pain, mutilation, as another reality powerfully present in life. Recovery is using the cancer experience as another strategy to combat oppression: against passive victimhood, against the threat of diminished sexual attractiveness in women, against silencing, or censoring, or inhibiting honest emotions from finding their appropriate modes of expression.

The journal is composed of entries, usually short, impressionistic ones that document what it feels like to be biopsied, prepared for surgery, undergoing an operation that “looks death in the face” (47). Joined to these entries, often as their natural consequence, are assessments about the experience. In both types of writing Lorde speaks directly to a reader. Sometimes that reader is “generic woman,” she who may, through ignorance or fear, allow cancer to go undetected. At other times Lorde speaks especially to blacks and/or lesbians using the denials and distortions in cancer's appearance as metaphors for pervasive cultural and social oppression. This position climaxes in a scene Lorde describes where she is visited by a well-intentioned but obtuse volunteer for the Reach for Recovery program. The volunteer, herself a survivor of a radical mastectomy, shows Lorde the exercises necessary to strengthen arm and chest muscles, brings her a white lambswool prosthesis, and goes into her prepared speech about coping with the fear of diminished attractiveness:

As a 44 year old Black Lesbian Feminist, I knew there were very few role models around for me in this situation, but my primary concerns two days after mastectomy were hardly about what man I could capture in the future. … My concerns were about my chances for survival, the effects of a possibly shortened life upon my work and my priorities. … A lifetime of loving women had taught me that when women love each other, physical change does not alter that love. It did not occur to me that anyone who really loved me would love me any less because I had one breast instead of two, although it did occur to me to wonder if they would be able to love and deal with the new me. So my concerns were quite different from those spoken to by the Reach for Recovery volunteer, but not one bit less crucial nor less poignant.

(56)

Ultimately, Lorde sees in the cancer experience the attempt by medical practitioners, volunteers for “Recovery,” counselors and the like, reinforcement of “society's stereotype of women … our appearance is all, the sum total of self” (57). The missed opportunity is the examination of one's interior life that occurs with acute physical and emotional trauma. When this is not denied, when death is permitted to exert its full claim on consciousness as a possible coequal with life, then our pact with life is altered. As women open themselves “more and more to the genuine conditions” of their lives, they grow “less and less willing to tolerate” controls over identity or values. “Once I face death as a life process, what is there possibly left for me to fear? Who can ever really have power over me again?” (61).

As Lorde's insistence on examining the interior life revealed through suffering and authentic “recovery” links her journal to Sarton's journals, so her insistence on sharing what is private links her to Nancy Mairs. As Mairs suggests of personal experience, “Beneath its idiosyncrasies lie vast strata of commonality, community. … Our stories utter one another. … I invite you into the house of my past, and the threshold you cross leads you into your own” (Remembering the Bone House 11).

Nancy Mairs, the author of four collections of autobiographical essays (Plaintext, 1986; Remembering the Bone House, 1989; Carnal Acts, 1990; Ordinary Time, 1993), as well as a prize-winning collection of poems (In All the Rooms of the Yellow House, 1980) uses the strategy of direct assault initially to shock, then to intrigue, and finally to bond her reader to her text. As a twice-attempted suicide, an agoraphobic, a depressive, and for the past twenty years a victim of multiple sclerosis, she possesses the heavy artillery necessary to blast a reader out of conventional expectations, polite reactions, or the avoidance of the ugly and painful. The ugly and the painful are precisely what she forces a reader to examine: because they appear with tormenting regularity in her life and because confrontational tactics free her from the emotional repressions she was taught to practice as a daughter, a woman, a wife, and a mother.

Remembering the Bone House is particularly clear in itemizing the damage of polite avoidance. Perhaps because it connects with a through-running narrative the crises of attempted suicides, abortive love affairs, chronic depression, and MS (she even refers to this volume as “memoir,” though its divisions into segments, each with a thematic focus, are as clear as Plaintext's essay format), a reader learns the high price of burying one's emotions. Emotions resurrect themselves in psychological and behavioral symptoms that impede but never entirely terminate her life.

Mairs finds emotional suppression a learned response. In her family “you may prattle (indeed should prattle in order to fill silence that might otherwise turn awkward or productive) all you like, but you must not express emotionally troublesome thoughts” (90). Life, even within a loving family sensitive to others' needs, becomes increasingly bottled up within emotional prohibitions.

[W]e never confront these tensions. … In order to ward [tension] off, we have our several outbursts, get over them as best we can, and resume our routines as though nothing had happened. On the whole this process works and we all remain functional, I suppose because we persist in loving one another despite our differences. But the wounds fester. At least mine do. I can't speak for anyone else because they never told me. I wind up with emotional abscesses sealed away under scar tissue which will one day poison the lives of those in the new household I establish: the consequence of refusing permission to speak.

(94)

More than the family refuses Nancy Mairs permission to speak; life as a dutiful daughter, one abandoned by a father's premature death, is reinforced by education in the 1950s that “forced compliance and docility” (97). Teachers, even the best intentioned in good Massachusetts public schools, used their authority to smooth out irregularities (that might be creativities), to encourage “good citizenship,” and to supervise even play periods into a series of appropriately gendered games (jump rope for girls, competitive marbles for boys). Outwardly compliant, Mairs is subversive inside. The battle between how she is instructed to appear and what she in fact feels, makes her an early loner, a watcher of those who seem to mesh with cultural expectations more easily. “This watchfulness [which] will grow excoriatingly keen throughout childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood … will turn me into a writer” (45).

If writing is the strategy Nancy Mairs employs to uncover the emotional layers family and culture prohibited, her essays assault the reader with a ferocity unmatched in contemporary letters. Plaintext delivers each of these confrontational punches in tight, relentless, and unforgiving essays. A reader is required to stand there and take it. Absorb the punches. Look at the pain. Assess the damage. And by the by, as the reader enters a pact with writer, decide which aspects of Mairs's life experience illumine her own.

Plaintext is a diet not everyone finds palatable. As one who has tried this volume in the classroom with two separate groups of gifted students and who has naively recommended it to friends and family, reactions have ranged from the wary to the downright offended. To my chagrin, I could not predict who would have what reaction to Mairs. A profoundly hearing-impaired student in one class, whose bravery had brought her to a western Pennsylvania college ill-equipped to handle special-needs students and whom I expected to embrace Mairs's honesty, hated this passage:

I am a cripple. I choose this word to name me. I choose from among several possibilities, the most common of which are “handicapped” and “disabled.” … People—crippled or not—wince at the word “cripple,” as they do not at “handicapped” and “disabled.” Perhaps I want them to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates/gods/viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her existence squarely … “cripple” seems to me a clean word, straightforward and precise.

(9)

A family member, herself skeptical of American culture's much-ballyhooed “joys of motherhood,” balked at Mairs's characterization (in “Ron Her Son”) of a difficult foster child brought home from husband George's Tucson school for emotionally disturbed boys:

Lest anyone be tempted to sentimentalize the situation (and many have), to exclaim about our generosity in taking him in or his good fortune in being taken in, I must make clear that much of what followed was painful and maddening and exhausting for all of us. George and I were faced with sole and full responsibilities for a troubled fifteen-year-old in whose upbringing we had had no hand, whose values and attitudes were alien to us, whom, all in all, we could love all right but didn't much like. Anne and Matthew, then nine and five, were faced with a jealous big brother who tormented them in ways limited only by his imagination, which luckily wasn't very resourceful. And Ron was faced with an established family, whose rituals and demands were often beyond him, and whose motives for incorporating him remained obscure and baffling.

(45)

In addition to exploring Ron's foster care and its effects on their home, Mairs details transactions with a loathsome father who finally abandons all responsibility for Ron, the way Ron's rudimentary skills have been dulled by years of television watching, and her own family's anxiety for the future of one “with marginal skills and even poorer initiative” (51). Mairs ends the essay admitting ruefully that she probably would not “do it again, knowing what I know now … such ventures seem now, in the wisdom of hindsight, to demand a woman of more than my mettle” (54).

In assessing why my student and my family member reacted negatively to Mairs, I discovered that her brutal honesty was not offensive, but rather what they felt to be the exploitation of her subject. In speaking for herself, Mairs had every right to exorcise the demons too often repressed by social conditioning, they reasoned. But in characterizing Ron as a “dilemma,” a “test case” in which the sentimentalities of foster care were forever put to rout, his personal integrity was somehow violated. He became an object—just as “crippled,” her forthright “badge of courage,” signified for my student a stigma she had worked for years to erase.

Mairs has found out that readers who touch her incendiary essays often come away with burned hands. In the preface to Remembering the Bone House, she says self-consciously:

It is one thing to expose one's own life, taking responsibility for the shock and ridicule such an act may excite, and quite another to submit the people one loves to the same dangers. I can't resolve this dilemma to anyone's full satisfaction. But I have tried to keep my focus tight, speaking only for myself. The others all have stories of their own, some of which differ radically from mine, I'm sure. I hope that you'll remember and respect the reality of those differences.

(xi)

Accordingly, the essays in Remembering the Bone House allow the reader greater distance and the context of one continuously unfolding life. While Plaintext's essays—stripped of their narrative context—threaten to become polemics, manuals of instruction for those of us still ducking the big issues of disease, infidelity, social and psychological oppression, Remembering the Bone House throws a net over the life Mairs has lived. You may live here, too, Mairs says. If not, at least I do. Mairs widens the applicability of her life experience by several strategies: extended metaphor, places invested with personality, and stop-action photographs (freeze frames), arresting a moment of action in the narrative so that its details, closely examined, can represent the whole.

The most visible metaphor in Remembering the Bone House is the succession of houses that give shelter to the young Mairs, and that she learns to live within. Often they are physical edifices that represent certain kinds of nurturing space: the yellow house in Maine, where she remembers her mother and father's greatest happiness; the house in Exeter, New Hampshire, where her adolescence and schooling took place; the cottage at Hampton Beach peopled by Garm, Pop, and Granna; and the farm—the wonderful retreat occupied by Aunt Jane and Uncle Kip to which she returns after the disappointments of her first year at Wheaton College and where she first begins to write. These physical places come alive not only as spaces with certain dimensions, furniture, and architecture, they also become, by a metaphoric extension reminiscent of May Sarton, the interior space vital to the growth of her individual sensibility.

A house once loved can never be lost. Never. Sold, yes. Moved out of. But not left behind. The house builds itself somehow into your tissues. Its floor plan, the color of its walls, its smell of fir and candied orange peel at Christmas, the summer light banding the kitchen floor, the chill of September that strokes its way up under your nightgown when you throw back the covers etch themselves into the whorls of your brain. It belongs to you in a sense no title can confer. You have metabolized it. It lives in your bones.

(5)

The bone house is Mairs's extension of metaphor to the body itself, its confinements, its releases, its internal dwelling: “The body itself is a dwelling place, as the Anglo-Saxons knew in naming it banthus (bonehouse) and lichama (bodyhome), and the homeliness of its nature is even livelier for a woman than for a man” (7). Mairs quotes Hélène Cixous's words, which suggest that when woman is forced to function as man's other she is alienated from herself, her body: “she has not been able to live in her ‘own’ house, her very body … they haven't gone exploring in their house. Their sex still frightens them. Their bodies, which they haven't dared enjoy, have been colonized” (7).

Mairs intends to “explore her own house,” for she feels that “through writing her body, woman may reclaim the deed to her dwelling.” That exploration is often a painful one to read since Mairs has been plagued by a succession of physical and mental disorders that include years of excruciating menstrual cramps, hemorrhaging, and migraine headaches; depression that leaves her inert for days at a time, panic attacks that make her reel with anxiety and unspecified fear (indeed, she once spent eighteen months in a mental hospital). And MS appears by the time she is thirty, equipped with its very specific fears.

It is hard to imagine, then, how Mairs's body can also be a source of pleasure. But it is. She explores her early erotic experiences with loving attentiveness and humor, just as she does not shy away from describing extramarital affairs, a single lesbian experience, and the erotic accommodations one makes to degenerative disease. That last fact of her body puts all else in perspective. She learns to remember when the body worked better, just as she learns to take the measure of pleasure by defining its edges of pain.

Memory when interrupted by tragedy and crisis has peculiar capacities to stop and start. Time, for Mairs, is often measured in quantities Before and After the onset of MS. She remembers a moment several years before the diagnosis of MS when she felt her left foot suddenly turn under—a sign, a prediction of what was to follow, or a moment a year or so later when she first experienced the blurred vision characteristic of that disease. Sometimes an episode in Remembering the Bone House will start with a narrative voice that moves forward and backward in time, pivoting on the phrase “I have three more years of good health left.” These aren't, however, observations made by one in the valley of the shadow. They are not even the gaping wounds hung out on the taut line of essay to bleed, as in Plaintext. Disease, the inexorable failure of the body, is wrapped in the gauze of narrative in Remembering the Bone House. As the exterior capacities of the body's dwelling deteriorate, interior space expands. For example, her relationship with her husband George, the ever-patient, always accommodating husband to whom both Plaintext and Remembering the Bone House are dedicated, is caught in this freeze frame of the wedding: “On our way up the right-hand aisle, I catch my toe in my hoop and start to trip. You can see it in the picture: both of us laughing, the bulge of my left foot behind the hem of my dress, my upper body canted forward, George's arm tensed underneath my clutching fingers to stop my fall. All the other photographs, the ceremonies and silliness of that day. This one depicts the way our lives are going to be” (181).

Similarly poignant moments occur in the birth of her first child, a daughter Anne, who arrives after protracted labor and who floods her with a love not of the sort she expected:

I was waiting for some surge, a tidal wave of maternal adoration, the sort of suffusing emotion you see depicted on the faces of all those Renaissance madonnas painted by men like Bellini and Caravaggio. This love doesn't over-whelm me. It undermines me, gets me from below, as though I were a tree, and Anne were another tree, whose roots put out tendrils that wrap themselves around my roots, down there, out of sight. I'm suspended, sustained, in a vegetable tangle. A thicket of love.

(198)

And it is within this thicket that the last episodes of Remembering the Bone House occur, scenes that chronicle the birth of her son, her struggles with “a body in trouble,” her wish to divest her husband of the sainthood she feels she's conferred on him in Plaintext, the public successes of her writing, and the relentless march of MS within the context of the “stubborn love of family” (198). Balanced as all Mairs's texts are between pleasure and pain, she concludes:

No end to my degeneration is in sight. I'm afraid. I'm afraid. … And yet … suddenly … I am washed utterly by satisfaction. Odd, that as my physical space contracts to the span of a few staggering steps, the inside of my head should grow this light and large. I am happier now, like this, than I have ever been before. Such episodes tend to be fragile and transient. If this sense of serenity and fulfillment vanishes, as forty-five years have taught me it is likely to do time and again, I hope I'll at least remember—while lamenting a child's long absence, maybe, or grieving at the death of a parent, bemoaning the failure of a book, sitting at George's deathbed, confined myself to a bed in a nursing home—that I have been, at least once, and in truth many times, happy clear through to the bone.

(273)

If Mairs practices autobiographical narrative with a vigor and drama peculiar to her circumstances, Sarton and Lorde have also seen in its capacities for metaphoric extension and vivid detail the perfect vehicle for their observations. The autobiographical narrative becomes in Barbara Myerhoff and Jay Ruby's definition, a reflexive form, one with the capacity to “turn back on itself,” to “refer to itself” so that “subject and object fuse” (35). And since self-referential texts diminish the distance between the page and the reader, they function as instruments of discovery for the reader as well as the author.

One does not read Sarton, Lorde, or Mairs serene in the expectation of epistemologies of growth, or tales moving to higher and higher moral ground. Sarton's journals, for all their cumulative insights, teeter on the edge of suppressed rage and display periods of what some might diagnose as chronic depression; Lorde's insistence on making visible what many readers wish to avoid—the cost of being black and female and lesbian in America, as well as the costs of recovering from life-threatening disease—force one to examine the dead ends of racism and homophobia as surely as the hope of recovery; Mairs's insistent, perhaps courageous, self-exposure may also eviscerate and exploit others whom she purports to love and trust. In short, each of these life experiences explores painful, often “censored” material, and each writer positions herself in complex, even risky relationship to her audience.

Artists and poets have always provided us with insurrectionist views—glimpses into fresh ways of looking into human nature. Sarton, Lorde, and Mairs cast a deep vertical shaft of light on the primary personal necessities of their lives. Each has, consciously or unconsciously, a target reader in mind: with Sarton, often the aging woman living alone, or the lesbian for whom militancy is not the answer; for Mairs, often the middle-class housewife who has experienced the collapse of many of the sunnier family values, either by attrition or the slow erosion of serious disease; for Lorde, the “doubly disenfranchised” reader—the black lesbian disfigured by cancer who belongs to “every minority there is.”

The journals of Sarton, Lorde, and Mairs put us on alert. Through the deployment of extended metaphors that allow readers to enter their texts imaginatively, they invite us to pursue our discoveries, arrive at our own truths. They remind us that the essential transaction between reader and author is not in simply grasping the alternative script the author extends, but in using it as a “lens of empathy” (see Bateson 5), a window flooding our own lives with light.