How does the imagination entwine the shreds of memory of family, place and culture to root a self in the fluid experience of the present?

Daughter, wife, mother, teacher, writer and feminist academic, Helen M. Buss / Margaret Clarke has lived in many parts of Canada and writes from a life of multiple perspectives full of contradictory loyalties and obligations, of opposing histories and identities. For this woman, whose sense of a unified identity is so tenuous that she even writes under two names, writing memoirs becomes the way to bring together the diverse strands of...

Why does it seem as if everyone is writing memoirs, and particularly women?

The current popularity of memoir verifies the common belief that we each have a story to tell. And we do...especially women. Memoirs are not only representations of women s personal lives but also of their desire to repossess important parts of our culture, in which women s stories have not mattered.

Beginning with her own motivations for writing memoirs, Helen M. Buss examines the many kinds of memoir written by contemporary women: memoirs about growing up, memoirs about traumatic events, about...