Reflections on Autobiography - The 92nd Street Y, New York

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92NY Humanities Audio Collection

About Women

Reflections on Autobiography

Mar 9, 1998


Australian-American scholar, author, and memoirist Jill Ker Conway speaks about her new book, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (1998). This lecture is part of the 1998 Ruth and Oliver Stanton About Women Series. Conway explains that she became interested in the genre of autobiography while studying the papers of some of the first female graduate students. She noticed that these women tended to write about “their life history as though they were romances,” with themselves as passive characters that things incidentally happened to, regardless of what they had accomplished or achieved. Conway wrote her first autobiography, The Road from Coorain (1989), partially as a response to this observed trend. She also argues that young women leaving universities don’t have a clear picture of their own futures because they don’t always have adequately recorded examples from the women who came before them. She concludes her lecture with a call to action, asking women to “think about rewriting the plot” when it comes to writing about themselves. The lecture is followed with questions from the audience.

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