But Enough About Me

The boundary between autobiographical and critical writing is intriguingly blurred in Nancy K Miller's But Enough About Me:Why we read other people's lives. I learn about her past but also about her ongoing ideas and theories about that past and the present, not to mention the future.

It is not until well after a period that language - via writers, especially life writers, thinkers and talkers - attaches a meaning to it. Nancy Miller didn't realise that she was in the wave of feminism in the 1960s until she was swept up in the rhetoric and landed in an academic role where she was forced to make sense of it. In this book she is able to give that time and her small part in it meaning because she has the language and discursive tools to do it.

Nancy Miller discusses other people's memoirs that overlap geographically and chronologically with her own. She believes that the bond between writer and reader depends on the reader's identification or disidentification with the writer's experiences. The memoir prompts the construction of personal memories around the shared cultural memory. It places personal reminiscence in a cultural context and gives it a shape.

Nancy K Miller grew up in America a decade ahead of me but I can identify with some of her experiences growing up in that time and breaking into the academy as a woman. Her life script was to gain an education and a husband in one breath and live happily ever after surrounded by adoring family. Although she couldn't articulate it at the time she just wanted to get out and live her own life. Despite the built in discouragements and barriers to a woman making it professionally she stumbled through the thickets.

I had only a vague idea of the women's movement when I was at the scientific end of the uni. My professors patted the girls on the head and encouraged them to treat the physically undemanding small animals so that they could work part time when they had children. I believed that small animal practice was my future until I actually found myself in a job which demanded I treat horses, cattle, sheep or whatever came through the door. Miller was in the thick of it in consciousness raising groups, demonstrating, arguing and rethinking the literary canon from a feminist viewpoint. Still she took as long as I did to crystallise what was happening and how society was shifting.