On Writing the Self
At the Brooklyn Book Festival Jacqueline Woodson spoke about accessing her own adolescence as she writes for teens; death and death of self are themes I'm exploring in a novel. This morning I thought about these words from bell hooks in her essay on "Writing Autobiography":
"To me, telling the story of my growing up years was intimately connected with the longing to kill the self I was without really having to die. I wanted to kill that self in writing. Once that self was gone -- out of my life forever -- I could more easily become the me of me....The longing to tell one's story and the process of telling is symbolically a gesture of longing to recover the past in such a way that one experiences both a sense of reunion and a sense of release. It was the longing for release that compelled the writing but concurrently it was the joy of reunion that enabled me to see that the act of writing one's autobiography is a way to find again that aspect of self and experience that may no longer be an actual part of one's life but is a living memory shaping and informing the present."
P.S.Thanks for the kind words on my last post; I was a bit hesitant to share that story for many reasons.
"To me, telling the story of my growing up years was intimately connected with the longing to kill the self I was without really having to die. I wanted to kill that self in writing. Once that self was gone -- out of my life forever -- I could more easily become the me of me....The longing to tell one's story and the process of telling is symbolically a gesture of longing to recover the past in such a way that one experiences both a sense of reunion and a sense of release. It was the longing for release that compelled the writing but concurrently it was the joy of reunion that enabled me to see that the act of writing one's autobiography is a way to find again that aspect of self and experience that may no longer be an actual part of one's life but is a living memory shaping and informing the present."
P.S.Thanks for the kind words on my last post; I was a bit hesitant to share that story for many reasons.