But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives

Nancy K. Miller

Published by Columbia University Press 2002

But Enough About Me

Why We Read Other People's Lives

Nancy K. Miller

In the series Gender and Culture Series

https://doi.org/10.7312/mill12522

Overview
Contents

About this book

Through the memoirs of contemporaries and pieces of her autobiography, Miller explores the unexpected ways that the stories of other people's lives give meaning to our own. But Enough About Me is a group biography, or even an ethnography, of women, primarily middle-class and urban, now in their fifties and sixties. The book also mounts a defense of the memoir against accusations of terminal narcissism by showing how the forms of life writing—memoirs, diaries, essays—are as much about others as they are about their authors.

In her latest work of personal criticism, Nancy K. Miller tells the story of how a girl who grew up in the 1950s and got lost in the 1960s became a feminist critic in the 1970s. As in her previous books, Miller interweaves pieces of her autobiography with the memoirs of contemporaries in order to explore the unexpected ways that the stories of other people's lives give meaning to our own. The evolution she chronicles was lived by a generation of literary girls who came of age in the midst of profound social change and, buoyed by the energy of second-wave feminism, became writers, academics, and activists. Miller's recollections form one woman's installment in a collective memoir that is still unfolding, an intimate page of a group portrait in process.

Author / Editor information

Nancy K. Miller is distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Bequest and Betrayal, Getting Personal, and other books.

Reviews

Nancy K. Miller's new book is an elegant and witty meditation of self-knowledge, particularly for women. It should be read by all of us who are struggling, in these strange, loudly postfeminist times, to make sense of our stories as they have been interpolated by post-World War II America.

A witty defense of the genre.

Cora Kaplan:
Miller's book seems more than its sum, larger than its slim weight in the hand... fascinating... poignant... looms large.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Illustrations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xiii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xvii
1. But Enough About Me,What Do You Think of My Memoir? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Decades Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
3. Circa 1959 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	47
4. The Marks of Time Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	73
5. “Why Am I Not That Woman?” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
Epilogue: My Grandfather’s Cigarette Case, or What I Learned in Memphis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 160
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 17
- Other: 17 photos

eBook

Published: August 21, 2002
ISBN: 9780231516341