JAN 117 - The Wild Women of Memoir

As Isabel Allende put it, “Most male authors want to look good in their memoirs and have a place in posterity, while most women know that posterity is what happens when you no longer care.” In this class we will be reading about women who, in effect, “no longer cared” and created groundbreaking memoirs that created a stir-by bending genres, exploring forbidden sexuality, breaking gender roles or otherwise challenging the status quo. 

The structure of the class is two-fold: we’ll first read memoir and discuss craft issues the work raises and then attempt to mimic a writer’s particular style through in-class freewrites, and three Short Assignments. Your most successful piece will be expanded into one longer Final Assignment. 
We’ll start halfway through the 20th century, reading shorter works by Grace Paley, Tilly Olsen, excerpts from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Maxine Hong Kingston’s seminal Woman Warrior. More contemporary works include Lidia Yunkovich’s The Chronology of Water, shorter works like Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, along with essays by Roxane Gay, JoAnn Beard, Abigail Thomas, Rebecca Solnit and Isabel Allende. Craft-wise, we’ll analyze how these writers turn their experiences into page-turners, the eternal debate between truth versus what David Sedaris calls “true-ish” details, and the pros and cons of sharing the most intimate details of one’s physical and mental lives versus a more distanced narrative approach.  Excerpts from Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir will serve as a guide to both analyzing and writing personal essays.

Guest speaker: Gina Frangello, author of the memoir Blow Your House Down, and four novels.
This is a rigorous class for those who love reading and writing. 

Trigger warning: descriptions of sexual violence, psychological abuse and explicit sex scenes.

Instructor(s): Joanne Furio
Email:  jf14@stmarys-ca.edu

Prerequisites & Notes
Prerequisites:  ENG 5/108
Course Fee:  15
 

Credits: 1