bell hooks Reading Response

Summary

In her essay “Writing Autobiography,” bell hooks describes to fellow writers and those interested in writing the process of writing her autobiography and the process of remembering that such a project requires. She talks about the fiction of memory as well as the delight and closure remembering can bring.

 

Synthesis

This essay reminds me of Donald Murray’s “All Writing Is Autobiography,” particularly the sections in which he questions the “truth” of autobiography. When hooks describes the scene with her father’s car on the train tracks, and questions whether is was real or a vivid nightmare, she reminds me of Murray when he says that a fiction can become truth in the telling. Murray would say that though the scene with her father on the train tracks might not have actually happened, the emotions fueling the fiction were real, and in writing the scene down she has given the emotions tangible permanence and validity.

 

Pre-reading Question

3) George Elliot was a woman. This is one particular pen name that sticks out to me. In the time she was writing, if she wanted her work to be taken seriously, it would have behooved her to write as a man, and therefore rid herself of any gender bias. Some authors use pen names when they want to cross over into a different genre, so readers won’t come to their work with pre-conceived notions of what the new novel will be like.

 

Questions for Discussion and Journaling

1) hooks wanted release from her past. She hoped that by writing about her childhood her past self would no longer haunt her. As if, by putting her experiences on the page, she would wipe the experience from her soul.

 

4) hooks goes from wanting to “kill” the Gloria of her childhood to being happy with the rediscovery of her. She accepts Gloria for what she was and can now look to the future.

 

Applying and Exploring Ideas

4) I can’t think of a time when I personally needed to change my identity to write something. However, I had a friend who was asked to make her writing more masculine. She was writing a technical guide, and her professor said that she needed to write like a man to succeed on the project. My friend definitely had to put on a mask so that others would perceive and accept her work in the way that she wanted.

 

Personal Thoughts

I thought this was a very interesting reading. How does it relate to the Malcom X and Sherman Alexie pieces though? We don’t really learn much about hooks’ literacy sponsors in this piece.