Hannah Curtis narrates this retrospective on lessons to be learned and inspiration to be gleaned from a group of women writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. In each chapter the author weaves the experiences of one writer, examining her marriage, her work as a writer and an editor, and the difficult life decisions she faced. Curtis delivers an intimate portrayal of each woman. She communicates the deep bond the author feels for each one and the wonderful connections among some of them. Curtis also conveys the author's joy at discovering that some long held assumptions about her subjects proved to be untrue. For example, interviews with Toni Morrison dispel the notion that she had conventional views about family and community. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

05/01/2023

In this finely tuned blend of memoir, literary criticism, and biography, Biggs (All Day Long), an editor at Harper’s Magazine, finds inspiration in the lives and work of eight women writers (the author is the ninth in the subtitle). She recounts how, in her 30s, she felt unmoored by her faltering marriage and her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, prompting her to reconsider her life and turn to books by women who questioned societal expectations of love, autonomy, and creative expression. During the dissolution of Biggs’s marriage, she gravitated toward Mary Wollstonecraft, whose decision to buck social norms and spend most of her life happily unmarried reminded Biggs “to listen to my feelings, even if they scared or embarrassed me.” She also takes heart from the example of George Eliot, who found love and literary success in midlife after romantic disappointment and the death of her parents, as well as from Janie Crawford, the protagonist of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, who refused to settle for a lackluster relationship. The sharp analysis and biographical sketches testify to how literature has long served as a site of reinvention for women: “The ultimate freedom might be to take the wreckage of your life and write your own story with it.” Book lovers will swoon over this smart meditation on life and writing. (May)

In this trenchant and wide-ranging book, Biggs writes about starting over after divorce while seeking wisdom from a canon of great female authors. In Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, George Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir, Elena Ferrante and others, Biggs finds inspiration, advice and cautionary tales that shade her experience.” — New York Times (“19 Works of Nonfiction to Read This Spring”)

“A moving biblio-memoir that’s a gift to readers of all ages, especially those in midlife who want to stroll down the memory lane of their formative reading experiences. The book’s engaging, breezy chapters explore each subject’s life and writings in chronological order. . . . A Life of One’s Own has much to offer readers new to its subjects. . . . [Biggs] has learned a lesson from these writers she’s long looked up to, for better and for worse. The book ends with her realization that she ought to ‘let go of them and become the author of my own life.’ She encourages her readers to do the same, cheering us on with the last words, ‘You can too.’”
— Washington Post

“A Life of One’s Own is itself the writerly achievement [Biggs] had hoped for, which means that the larger story of her absorbing, eccentric book is the story of how she came to write it. . . . There is, of course, another sort of yearning here; alongside Biggs’s search for a way to be a woman apart from being a wife is her search for a way to be a writer apart from being a critic. On the evidence of A Life of One’s Own, she has found it.” — New Yorker

“To make sense of and find a shape to one’s life within the context of one’s literary predecessors is the project of Biggs’s brilliant book, which combines incisive biographies with a personal story of starting over. This book reframed my own life in the most startling and revealing ways, illuminating complicated desires and lifelong debates via the absorbing stories of nine women authors whom I now consider sisters, teachers, kin. A deeply moving meditation on reading and writing, friendship, desire, the life of the mind, and the woman writer’s perennial yearning to be free.” — Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

"A meditation, by turns glorious and aching, on what it means to be a woman and to try to be free.” — Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex

“A genre-breaking exploration about starting over.” — Shondaland

"Joanna Biggs is an unmissable writer. She gives new scope and fresh meaning to the idea of literary empathy." — Andrew O'Hagan, author of Mayflies

“Joanna Biggs is one of our sharpest critics and wisest interrogators of how to live. This is a deeply moving and invigorating book.” — Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting

“Written with profound sensitivity and a singular eye for detail, this book is engrossing, surprising, and moving reading for anyone interested in what it means to write—and to live.” — Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts

"Such beautiful, meaningful writing on the pursuit of beauty and meaning. It's the book equivalent of sinking into a hot bath after a difficult day." — Emma Forrest, author of Your Voice in My Head

"A powerful collective portrait of women writers who are often only studied via their isolated exceptionalism…An enlightening meditation on the intersections of art and freedom.” — Kirkus

"I adored this book. I started turning down pages to note favorite parts, then found myself turning down almost every other page. It’s such a generous, enlivening work, destined to be passed from friend to friend for a long time to come." — Megan Hunter, author of The Harpy

"Book lovers will swoon over this smart meditation on life and writing." — Publisher's Weekly

“Acute and tender . . . alive with debate, discovery and desire.” — Observer (UK)

“A beautiful, deeply philosophical book about reading as a form of existential consolation…wonderfully inconclusive, moving and original…a brilliant exploration of uncertainty and a compelling anti-guide to art and life.” — Literary Review

Hannah Curtis narrates this retrospective on lessons to be learned and inspiration to be gleaned from a group of women writers, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. In each chapter the author weaves the experiences of one writer, examining her marriage, her work as a writer and an editor, and the difficult life decisions she faced. Curtis delivers an intimate portrayal of each woman. She communicates the deep bond the author feels for each one and the wonderful connections among some of them. Curtis also conveys the author's joy at discovering that some long held assumptions about her subjects proved to be untrue. For example, interviews with Toni Morrison dispel the notion that she had conventional views about family and community. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

2023-03-08
Biggs wonders how to begin again after divorce, turning for advice to the women writers who kept her company through processing her new freedom.

In this mixture of memoir and literary criticism, featuring moments in the lives of writers who thrived in moments of transition, the author begins with a series of rapid-fire questions, clearly seeking urgent answers. To find them, she begins exploring the ways in which the women writers she has felt kinship with have had to start over in their own lives as well as how their work during those transitions continues to help readers through their own rebirths. Biggs delves into the experiences of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. Biggs excels at tying the lives and the works of these women together, showing how Eliot was influenced by Wollstonecraft, Woolf by Eliot, and so forth. As a result, the author creates a powerful collective portrait of women writers who are often only studied via their isolated exceptionalism. “Women might draw benefit from thinking of themselves as being involved in a long conversation," writes Biggs, "in which they both listen and talk, and even manage in this way, over time, to establish a tradition.” Naturally, the author is unable to find answers to all of her questions, but her journey did allow her to cultivate a sense of being free that doesn't require isolation but instead leans into community—sometimes with the women writers in this book, other times with various people in her daily life. Ultimately, though Biggs may not be sure of her success in beginning again, she is sure of her freedom and lucid in her assessments of how these nine authors helped her find it.

An enlightening meditation on the intersections of art and freedom.