When Jane Gleeson-White鈥檚 marriage ended two years after her mother died, she lost her voice. Books by women writers like Rachel Cusk, Olivia Laing and Maggie Nelson helped her find it again.
When my 25-year marriage broke down in 2017, I did what I always do in my life, especially in times of crisis. I turned to books. Specifically, to books by women.
Many, but not all of them, were in middle age, writing about their lives post-husbands 鈥 often post-intensive mothering too. They鈥檇 arrived at an unmarked place. There were no literary or narrative models to follow, in their lives or in their art. So they were making them up as they went.
My hunger for women鈥檚 voices was amplified by having spent a decade reading and listening almost exclusively to men, for the I on accounting.
I had no plan; it was an impulsive, almost life-saving need. The first book I picked up was an old favourite, Jane Austen鈥檚 . In the slow unfolding of her final novel, Austen subjects her readers to the exquisite agony of watching its heroine Anne Elliott suffer a great and apparently hopeless love for her former suitor. Anne is gentle, reserved and bookish. But when moved, she鈥檚 passionate 鈥 outspoken about the force of women鈥檚 emotions, and inequality of opportunity:
Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.
Persuasion acted like a tuning fork, returning me to my bookish self. The self who鈥檇 made a blog called bookishgirl in 2010, before we鈥檇 both 鈥 blog and girl 鈥 become mired in stories written by men: economics and accounting, both .
After Jane Gleeson-White鈥檚 marriage broke down, she did what she always does in times of crisis and turned to books. Photo by Pauline Futeran
Claiming her literary motherline is one of the impulses behind British writer Joanna Biggs鈥檚 new memoir . Much as I did, Biggs turned to women writers to answer the many questions thrown up by her divorce 鈥 and her book is the result of this reading.
In , Biggs says many people have asked about her decision to write in this hybrid form: part memoir, part biographical essays and part literary criticism.
But Biggs didn鈥檛 decide it. The form grew organically from a particular moment in her life, when she was and experimenting with adding more memoir to her reviews, inspired by the autofiction of writers like and .
Biggs looks backwards, partly prompted by books her mother has given her and partly returning to writers she鈥檚 loved 鈥 Mary Wollstonecraft, , Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir 鈥 and reads and for the first time.
In her last chapter, she turns to the present, reading as her novels storm the world 鈥 then rereading the Neapolitan quartet with friends.
Each chapter is devoted to an author, but their lives spill over into each other鈥檚, creating themes that resonate with Biggs鈥檚 own experiences:
I watched them try to answer some of the questions I had. This book bears the traces of their struggles as well as my own 鈥 and some of the things we all found that help.
Biggs turns to these women not just to find new ways to live, but also to learn new modes of writing and reading. Having studied English and French literature at Oxford University, she鈥檚 trained herself out of reading with her emotions and into the 鈥渙bjective鈥 reading of scholarship. Now she鈥檚 undoing that by allowing herself to read with her whole self fully engaged 鈥 the same way she鈥檚 learning to live.
After reading Persuasion, I realised I wasn鈥檛 interested in the past. I wanted to know how and what women were writing now, especially about themselves in flux 鈥 at a time when marriage and all the inherited structures of our lives seem as stricken and prone to collapse as the world around us.
I quickly discovered I couldn鈥檛 have had a more readily satisfied desire. In terms of my reading life, I was in the best of all possible worlds. I read everything I could find by , Maggie Nelson, and Anne Carson. I read lots of Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy and Olivia Laing, among so many others.
Unlike Biggs, who in 2020 decided to read a book a week to combat her depression and created what she endearingly calls an 鈥渆mbarrassing spreadsheet鈥 to keep track of it, there was no structure to my reading. But I seemed to be guided to books that spoke to my many challenges as I moved beyond my marriage.
In 2017, soon after my husband moved out and I was ostensibly free, I wrote on a psychologist鈥檚 form: I can鈥檛 find my voice. I cannot speak.
What is your problem? it asked. I cannot say I, I replied.
Given I was an experienced writer in midlife, it felt bewildering and shameful to have to confess this. The person I鈥檇 been had written in a cool, objective voice, which was regularly remarked upon by male correspondents:
I have by chance come across your book and have to write to say what a marvel it is [鈥 It is totally objective (typically, now, books often seem to remind the reader who the author is, and what he/she is experiencing 鈥 as if we care!).
But suddenly what the author was experiencing was all I cared about.
In , Deborah Levy spoke straight to my turmoil. It takes repeated acts of will, as a woman, to learn to say I, she writes.
It鈥檚 exhausting to learn how to become a subject; it鈥檚 hard enough learning how to become a writer.
Things I Don鈥檛 Want to Know is the first iteration of Levy鈥檚 鈥渓iving autobiography鈥, a form she invented for writing her life while still living it, catching it on the wing as she travelled through her days after ending her own long marriage.
Reading Levy, I began to understand that for a woman, saying 鈥淚鈥 was not a given. It was a learned skill. I had to practise it, to will it repeatedly. Levy was not the only author who shed light on my confounding experience.
Anne Carson is illuminating on the leaden weight of history stacked against the female voice. In her essay , she writes:
Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public, in ancient as well as modern contexts. The high pitched and horrendous voices of the ancient female furies are compared by Aeschylus to howling dogs.
It鈥檚 as if the entire female gender 鈥渨ere a kind of collective bad memory of unspeakable things鈥, which the patriarchal order feels obliged to channel into politically correct containers. Freud believed 鈥渁 thinking man鈥 is his own legislator and obtains his own absolution. But a woman does not have
the measure of ethics in herself. She can only act if she keeps within the limits of morality, following what society has established as fitting.
So in ways that became very real for me, I learnt that to speak as a woman is to transgress.
Transgression is key to Maggie Nelson鈥檚 creative practice. In , her breakthrough work of creative nonfiction, she borrows poet Eileen Myles鈥檚 idea of a poem as a party to make a literary form mutable enough to convey transfiguration.
Notably, her own transition from pregnancy to new motherhood; and her partner Harry Dodge鈥檚 transition through injecting testosterone as he prepares for, undergoes and recovers from top surgery.
At her party on the page, Nelson gathers people who鈥檇 never be seen together in real life and sits them beside each other, so they must converse. You feel its electrifying force from the opening page, where she juxtaposes a tryst with her new lover, Dodge, with :
You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? What鈥檚 your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer.
Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein鈥檚 idea that the inexpressible is contained 鈥 inexpressibly! 鈥 in the expressed. This idea gets less air time than his more reverential Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, I think, the deeper idea. Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.
Maggie Nelson. ,
Olivia Laing does something similar in her memoir-in-essays, , in which she charts her own season of liminality after a breakup, via conversations with the art and lives of others.
Suddenly alone in New York City after the man she鈥檚 moved there for changes his mind, she makes loneliness her subject. In the absence of love, she finds solace and communion in the city itself, and in the work and lives of artists. It鈥檚 here, in visual art and its associated materials (letters, manuscripts, archives) that she begins to find company in her chronic isolation.
I came to The Lonely City at a particularly lonely moment in my own life: April 2020, when all the casual dates, spontaneous beers, snap decisions to eat at my corner bar vanished, all suddenly forbidden by Sydney鈥檚 lockdown laws.
Laing鈥檚 opening pages, where she introduces her subject and her own uncomfortable immersion in it, reverberate with such raw pain and fathomless need, I found them almost too distressing to read.
But Laing鈥檚 prose flows seamlessly as she crawls through the endless days, her mind wandering, alighting on a new theme, a new artist. And each artist brings with them a community of friends, collaborators, lovers and/or kindred spirits, and characters recur 鈥 so it weaves together like an all night party on the Lower East Side, paradoxically becoming immensely companionable.
It seems important to speak of new forms now, especially for women, in life as well as art, because these conversations are everywhere. I鈥檝e talked to an army of women in similar situations since my marriage broke down. They speak of their broken hearts, ruined futures, crushing loneliness, rage. Some are looking for work, housing, sex or love; others for reinvention, adventure, freedom, meaning. Or all of the above.
Most of us are working out how or who we might be beyond our relationships with others, mostly men. And some of us are wondering how to write our newly visible protean selves, entangled in a world that feels distressed in every realm.
Like Levy, it seems we鈥檙e all 鈥渟till searching for a missing female character鈥. As she asks in :
Who is she? That is the question I was starting to ask in all my books. Not who am I, though that comes into it. How does she get along in the world that voided her?
Despite six years of living, reading and writing since my divorce, my subject 鈥 or perhaps my subjectivity 鈥 is still not quite clear to me. In ways I can鈥檛 gloss over, my life and my writing remain uncertain. Messy.
In the early hours, this unknowing can still feel perilous, shameful, especially given I鈥檓 a grown woman with two adult children. Soon after I began writing this essay, I woke from a nightmare at 5am with these words in my head, spoken from the future:
What did you do as the world burned and we ran out of diesel and food?
The question was asked by my conscience, or perhaps by my children. By all the children.
My reply came: I painted myself naked. I was birthing myself, re-birthing myself, through my own self-regard. As hundreds of women have done before me.
This need to remake myself was precipitated by my mother鈥檚 death in 2015 and the end of my marriage two years later. With shocking speed, these two events radically shifted my focus in life and writing from the outside world to my inner being, which lay parched and untended, overgrown with voices that were not my own.
As my married life of caring for and writing about others collapsed, the work that became urgent was a grindingly slow and painful process of self-examination and reinvention. On most days, this felt (and still feels) self-indulgent, in both life and writing. Even verging on heretical 鈥 an act against the received orthodoxies of care, of motherhood, of womanhood itself? 鈥 despite the bigger questions it鈥檚 led me to. And despite its absolute necessity.
Biggs asks herself a similar question at the outset of A Life of One鈥檚 Own. In the wake of her mother鈥檚 diagnosis with and the end of her marriage, Biggs is filled with questions: about love and feminism, what鈥檚 worth living for, and how you might write about this. And, importantly,
How would this not be seen as a problem of privilege, a childish demand for definition, narcissistic self-involvement when the world was burning? Wouldn鈥檛 I be better off giving away all I have and putting down my books, my movies, my headphones and my pen?
A large part of me still answers yes to her questions, on my own behalf. And yet the need remains. Every time I鈥檝e fallen, however inadvertently, into the familiar grooves of my old life 鈥 from fiery affairs with distant men, to writing about the missing value of care work and the natural world in economic measures 鈥 something breaks down: me, the relationship, the man. Sometimes all three. I鈥檓 reminded again and again of this simple truth: change happens, things break down.
Biggs鈥檚 book is her answer to whether this need to reinvent ourselves is an indulgence. No. It鈥檚 vital work.
The questions felt urgent as well as overwhelming. At times I couldn鈥檛 face the page 鈥 printed or blank 鈥 at all. I needed to remind myself that starting out on my own again halfway through life is possible, has been possible for others 鈥 and that this sort of life can have beauty in it.
Her mother鈥檚 础濒锄丑别颈尘别谤鈥檚 shakes Biggs鈥檚 world. She begins to question the life she鈥檚 made and how it fits with her becoming as a writer. In her early 30s, she鈥檚 married to a man she met at 19 who wants children as she does not, yet (or ever?). Despite how settled her life feels, she knows she must upend it. Discussions with her husband and experiments with open marriage only convince her of this. He moves out 鈥 and she removes her wedding ring and claims her freedom. All this happens by the end of the second page.
Questions about her marriage, lovers, and possible future partners and children are scattered through the subsequent pages; one of Biggs鈥檚 driving questions is: what sort of marriage, if any, is possible between a woman who writes and a man?
But as its title from Virginia Woolf suggests, A Life of One鈥檚 Own is primarily about women, their lives, writing and relationships with each other. Its emotional force lies in Biggs鈥檚 portrayal of her tender and loving relationship with her mother 鈥 and in her relationships with women friends, and the authors and books she reads.
The threads of Biggs鈥檚 exploration 鈥 memoir, biography and literary critique 鈥 fuse with particular grace in her chapter on Woolf, which is concerned with the emotionally charged, intractable subject of mothers. Woolf wrote that she was obsessed by her mother until she was 44, when offered her an outlet:
I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.
Biggs seamlessly combines Woolf鈥檚 work and milieu with her own experience of her mother鈥檚 deteriorating mind and the dreaded day when she no longer recognises her own daughter.
And I remind myself still, with Woolf, that a mother is always a mystery; she has lived so much of her life before you were even born.
And in turn, witnessing her mother鈥檚 fading mind opens her to new understandings of Woolf鈥檚 literary experiments. She now sees their aim as conveying 鈥渢he workings of disordered and vulnerable minds鈥, or the way centuries of oppression 鈥渁ct on a woman when she sits down to write something鈥.
When I was 18, inspired by the tempestuous novels of , I began turning my own passionate love affairs into fiction. But every attempt was derailed by the unwelcome arrival of a mother figure. This astonished my teenage self. Only after her death and the end of my marriage did I begin to accept that the hidden life of my mother was partly, mostly, my subject.
Mothers loom large in the books by women I read. I鈥檓 not sure why I initially found it so surprising that other women should be as preoccupied with mothers and motherhood as I am. Is it because, despite all the rhetoric, frank public discussion of mothers is taboo?
In ways I find almost terrifying in their candour and dispassion, Rachel Cusk鈥檚 portraits of motherhood and maternal ambivalence are among my favourite. :
My mother and I don鈥檛 speak to each other any more. [鈥 The loss of a parent-child relationship is a fact. It is also a failure.
Discussing Aeschylus鈥檚 鈥 in which Orestes, encouraged by his sister Electra, murders their mother Clytemnestra 鈥 with a male theatre director, :
They hate their mother for the fact that she has disposed of their father. They have come to resent maternal power so much that they destroy it. Instead they reverence the paternal, which is all image 鈥 their father, Agamemnon, was away fighting gloriously in Troy for most of their lives 鈥 where their actual mother is all actuality. They crush and disdain that actual parent in pursuit of the imagistic father whose value is recognised out in the world. Sound familiar? I ask.
Cusk finds this attitude echoed in the conversations between her teenage daughter and her friends, who spend a surprising amount of time talking about adults they know. They contemptuously dismiss their mothers 鈥 an amorphous 鈥渟he鈥 whose status 鈥渨as somewhere between a servant and family pet鈥 鈥 while they revere 鈥淒ad鈥 for his worldly importance: 鈥渦nlike 鈥榮he鈥, their fathers are hard-working, clever, successful, cool鈥.
Women writers attempting such worldly significance seek it at their peril, especially if they鈥檙e embroiled with male lovers, even more so if they become mothers.
In a letter to a male admirer, Mary Wollstonecraft described her approach to :
A book I am now writing, in which I myself, for I cannot yet attain to 麻豆社madour鈥檚 dignity, shall certainly appear, head and heart.
Ah, 麻豆社madour鈥檚 dignity. I鈥檓 fond of tracing the causes of my afflictions and the ones I see around me to hypothetical origins. I now fix these on the erasure of the Sumerian priestess , who narrated in the first-person singular 鈥 鈥淚鈥 鈥 the earliest known authored text, the ''. Enheduanna lived in the 23rd century BCE. She is the first known named author in the world.
This casts new light on 麻豆社madour鈥檚 dignity. and the were composed around the 8th century BCE. The historical fact of the putative 鈥溌槎股鏼adour鈥 鈥 their author or authors 鈥 is still debated by scholars.
What difference would it make if we learnt at school that the first named author was a woman, writing in the first person singular some 2,200 years before 麻豆社madour?
Instead, we have Rachel Cusk in 2009 CE, as 鈥渙ccluded, scattered, disguised鈥, gone underground. 鈥淲ere a woman writer to address her sex, she would not know who or what she was addressing.鈥
Or, as Sheila Heti writes at the outset of her novel ,
One good thing about being a woman is we haven鈥檛 too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me. There is no ideal model for how my mind should be. For the men, it鈥檚 pretty clear. That鈥檚 the reason we see them trying to talk themselves up all the time.
Questions of authority and form challenge each of these writers, some to breaking point. Depression and suicide recur. Biggs touches on her own depression, so deep she required medication. I鈥檝e certainly experienced my own. Wollstonecraft attempted suicide twice. We know how the vibrant lives of Woolf and Sylvia Plath ended.
My favourite chapter in Biggs鈥檚 memoir is on , whose Neapolitan quartet makes the erasure of women its subject, while centring two bookish women who鈥檝e been friends and rivals since childhood. It鈥檚 about the self-erasure of one, Lila, and her reclamation in writing by the other, Lenu. As Biggs puts it, quoting Ferrante, it
is Lenu鈥檚 attempt, over months of writing, to give Lila 鈥渁 form whose boundaries won鈥檛 dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn calm myself鈥.
Despite our many differences, it鈥檚 uncanny how similar Biggs鈥 and my trajectories have been, from the formative role of our mothers in our reading and divorces, to the central role of books and friendships with women in our unfolding lives.
Most strikingly, we鈥檙e both experimenting with new ways of writing our selves. In , Cusk suggests this urge is not a pathology, but a definition of a feminist:
And perhaps a feminist is someone who possesses this personalising trait to a larger degree: she is an autobiographer, an artist of the self.
, Adjunct Lecturer, English and Creative Writing, 麻豆社madou Canberra,
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