Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. By Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. xvi, 296 pp.

Reviewed by Timothy Dow Adams

Long celebrated for their fruitful and varied collaborations in the
field of autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson bring to Reading Autobiography their years of experience as teachers of life writing, producing a book aimed primarily at students of autobiography, including not only undergraduates, graduates, and scholars attracted to personal narrative, but also members of the general public who might be puzzled by the complications of reading and writing life stories. While sophisticated and experienced literary scholars in the field might at first take the book to be a sort of expanded "Cliff's Notes" or "Autobiography for Idiots," in fact they too will find this an essential volume, in and out of the classroom, as will scholars and readers in American studies, women's studies, comparative studies, African-American studies, ethnic studies, history, and other disciplines.

This book will be useful for all of the audiences I've named because the book contains so many different sections. In its role as a guide, Reading Autobiography begins with a succinct but complete introduction to the field, starting with the frequently asked questions common to those new to the topic: definitions and distinctions between autobiography, biography, autobiographical novels, and historical narratives, generally referred to by Smith and Watson as "life writing," followed by a short discussion of "autobiographical truth." While the authors make clear distinctions between "autobiography/autobiographical," "life writing," and "life narrative"--the term they prefer--an inexperienced reader might find confusing the sometimes interchangeable use of "autobiography" and "life narrative," as for example in the book's title and subtitle.

In its function as a handbook, Reading Autobiography provides in its second chapter, "Autobiographical Subjects," a thorough review of subjectivity, divided into the following key terms: "Memory," "Experience," "Identity," "Embodiment," and "Agency." As the complexities of autobiographical subjectivity are filtered through each of those terms, the topic is further broken down into smaller sub-topics. In the case of "Memory," for instance, the sub-headings are "Memory as Meaning-Making," "Memory and History," "Memory as Contextual," "The Politics of Remembering," "Collective Remembering," "Memory and Materiality," "Memory and Trauma," and "Reading for Memory." The

a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

usefulness of each section and sub-section is further enhanced by the many examples of actual life narratives we are asked to consider.

Chapter Three is an anatomy of autobiographical acts, subdivided into a series of components suggested by the work of the sociologist Ken Plummer in his Telling Sexual Stories. Expanding on Plummer's three key terms--"producers," "coaxers," and "consumers"--Smith and Watson look into a wide variety of culturally and historically specific rhetorical acts, including: "Coaxers, Coaches, and Coercers," "Sites of Storytelling," "The Producer of the Autobiographical `I,'" "Relationality and the Others of Autobiographical `I's," "The Addressee," "Structuring Modes of Self-Inquiry," "Patterns of Emplotment," "The Medium," and "The Consumer." In some instances, these sections are furthered divided into sub-categories, and in each case multiple examples of life narratives chosen from a wide variety of literatures illustrate the concept in question.

While the first three chapters provide the sort of information we would expect in a handbook or guide, in chapter four readers will find a survey course in the history of Western autobiography, beginning with antiquity and progressing through to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ending with the postmodern era, with a nod toward the future. Throughout this survey, the authors include multiple examples of texts from different groups, showing how various subjects found expression in their particular historical and cultural situations.

In chapters five and six readers are given a history of the criticism of autobiography, beginning with the earliest attempts to define the genre and establish some canonical texts, followed by a history of the second wave of critics. An entire chapter is devoted to the third wave of autobiographical critics, a section that includes summaries of the major arguments and the major books in the last two decades. The authors quote from individual books, single out influential essays, and weave the various approaches into a fair-minded narrative that never takes a stand for or against a particular way of looking at autobiography. Instead these last two chapters give an overview of the arguments, what Smith and Watson refer to as "a map" for readers who are "beginning to navigate these debates." As the historical surveys of autobiography and its critics moves to the present, the examples provided are expanded to include life narratives taken from extra-literary situations, including a quick look at books aimed at teaching would-be autobiographers how to construct their own stories.

Following the handbook, anatomy, and history functions of the earlier chapters, the next section of Reading Autobiography is a tool kit, twenty "strategies" for reading life narratives. This section may prove to be the most often consulted of any in the book, for each strategy could become a student's approach to a term paper, a teacher's ap-

3

proach to a particular set of texts, an organizing question for members of a reading group, or an item in an individual reader's checklist of questions to consider while working through the complexities of life narratives. Following the main body of the book, the authors have appended four appendices. Although genre has been a frequent subject throughout the book, Appendix A, "Fifty-Two Genres of Life Narrative," is an alphabetical glossary of genres and terms, one for each week of the year, from "Apology" to "Witnessing." Appendix B consists of a set of group and classroom projects, which, when supplemented by the last two appendices, "Internet Resources," and "Journals," and the extensive bibliographies of both primary and secondary works, will be invaluable for suggesting a wide range of activities for teachers and students at every level.

In each of the chapters I have described, Smith and Watson are careful to demonstrate that while they wish to help the reader with bulleted lists, telescoped highlights, sections and subsections, in actual practice all of their headings would be blended and re-combined in other variations, each inflected by all of the others. And while their histories are especially well crafted, they are quick to point out that like any history, theirs are "critical fictions," constructed out of their own needs to help the reader understand the general trends and approaches that have prevailed.

Each term, topic, or approach is introduced with a brief summary, sometimes only a few sentences, followed by complications and considerations, often illustrated in a paragraph or so by a practical example, concluding with a short summary, again a few sentences. Because the most complicated topic is discussed in such clear detail, the writing so clear and to-the-point, some readers will want to use the book as a genuine handbook, looking only at individual sections on the fly, while others more in need of an overview will want to read straight through the main sections, using the appendices as reference. While I have tried to make clear the various functions offered by Reading Autobiography, finally the book feels less like a handbook, taxonomy, anatomy, guidebook, or history, and more like that celebrated text of the sixties: The Whole Earth Catalogue.

West Virginia University