Autobiography from 1998 and 2016

How one construes or makes an autobiography changes through one’s life. This seems like a tautology. Obvious. Of course it does! One lives more (or at least longer), and more things happen to you and around you. They have to be written up. Or written on. But what I really mean is that, looking at your own “autobiography” as a text, your tone may change, your attitude may change from what these were when you wrote something. Even the facts of your past life may “change”—or be seen in a differ..

Once a feminist: Lynne Segal on Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man

The following contributions came in response to a request, sent to a number of key figures in feminism today, to write on a text that had been formative for their thinking as feminists. The chosen text could be a theory, a novel, an artwork, a performance, a poem: one that had stimulated, or even revolutionised, their ideas. As we hoped, this project has created a selection of texts central to our many and different experiences as feminists. I used to say that Margaret Drabble's The Garrick Year was the story of my life, in my early twenties, as if I was just a creature of time and circumstance. I read The Garrick Year sometime between October 1965, when my first child was born, and the end of 1967, before my marriage disintegrated. Like the heroine Emma Evans, I married a successful actor, had a child, and followed his career—which in the novel led Emma to Hereford for a summer season of plays