New Books

Columbia University Press / 160 pages

Nancy K. Miller's new book is an elegant and witty meditation on the nature of self-knowledge--particularly for women. It should be read by all of us who are struggling, in these strange, loudly postfeminist times, to make sense of our stories as they have been interpolated by post-World War II America. I am thinking of at least three generations of struggle with identity, agency, and powerlessness--and the promises and disappointments of reading and writing the world differently.

First and foremost, But Enough About Me tells the story of how Miller became a well-known feminist critic and teacher, how she "gave up worrying about men and started worrying about my work." The revealing middle chapters of her book prove that history cannot do without memory. Miller takes us on an entertaining romp through the mysteries of her self-described middle-class/Jewish/white coming-of-age in the 1950s; the tragicomedy of her coming to consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s; and the intense excitement of her and others' complicated, less and less universal feminist reading/writing/teaching practices in the 1980s. She also makes very real for us the disappointment and confusion surrounding the f-word in the 1990s.

But self-identification with Miller's story is not required to enjoy this book. In fact, its intriguing first section is, above all, a timely and skillful defense of the memoir as a powerful interaction between self and other, an excellent antidote to personal narcissism and historical soliloquy when experienced as disidentification. Miller notes that memoir was the most popular genre of the 1990s but also, simultaneously, the least respected by the literary establishment. (She asks if this might be in large part because so many highly literate--and often highly feminist--women became interested in it at the time.) Indeed, the memoir has come under wrathful attack over the past decade for being hopelessly self-absorbed, indulgent, solipsistic--especially, it seems, when written by those only recently allowed access to the literary scene.

Miller shows brilliantly that, on the contrary, reading memoirs involves a back and forth between oneself and others, a process of discovering what in your life, through its difference from other lives, really matters. As Miller writes, "Another's text can give you back your life." It is "a rendez-vous with others" that can give you more stories to tell. Yes, of course, she wants to tell the stories of what she shared with an entire generation of literary women in the academy. Yes, of course, she is preserving cultural memory through a kind of "group biography." But through her (often hysterically funny) readings of other women's lives from the same generation--Joyce Johnson, Hettie Jones, and Diane di Prima--Miller is also arguing for an ethics of disidentification. She points out that in examining the narrative of someone else's memoir to make sense of your own past, you are in part disidentifying with that person, taking serious note of where your paths diverge. This requires courage. It calls for not being afraid to discover your ignorance about what is truly important in your own life, thus leading you to gain perspective that is uniquely your own.

The last, longest, and, in many ways, most moving section of Miller's book is a meditation on women aging, or, rather, on how stories change our lives and how our lives change the stories we tell ourselves and others about aging. Miller moves with nary a flinch among a collection of brutally honest meditations on women's aging bodies: from Sheila Solomon's auto-portraits in bronze to the still publicity shots of Gloria Steinem and Catherine Deneuve; from Mira Schor's painterly insistence on public images of women's private parts to Simone de Beauvoir's stoic descriptions of her wrinkling face; from Jo Spence's and Matuschka's visual chronicles of their metastasized pain to Annie Ernaux's relentless observations about her relationships to others.

Miller asks what it takes to coincide with one's own story, to live inside of it, truly present, without that feeling of belatedness so common to all those whose stories have been narrated by others, or have only begun to be told. Her father comes to her thoughts as she pursues her own Jewish immigration narrative, the one to which she had never been able to give much thought. She ends up with a cigarette case, some photographs of immigrant relatives she never knew, some hints that her father's life was perhaps more complicated than she liked to imagine, and some inspiring looks to the future for us all.

Alice Jardine is a professor of romance languages and literatures at Harvard and the author of Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Cornell University Press, 1985).

Return to New Books