MOFITA Book Report: A LIFE OF ONE'S OWN

Look at us, learning and growing!

Jul 02, 2024

Joanna Biggs had me at the first sentence of her part-divorce-memoir, part-feminist-literary history A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again. “Around the time I realized I didn’t want to be married anymore, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave.”

It’s okay if you don’t know who the S that is, I didn’t really. Biggs is here to ‘splain you some badass writer ladies, in the warmest way possible, like the opposite of how thy did it in the Oxford or Cambridge (I can’t remember which or what the difference is) lit classes she took as an undergrad, where if you wondered about the personal life or emotional desires of the writers you were thought of as pedestrian.

This book is about Sylvia Plath, and Toni Morrison, and George Elliot, and others, but it’s mostly about how they bravely tried new things — new personas, new art forms, new relationships, even in middle-age, (which for some of them, historically speaking, was actually old age). It’s also about Joanna, realizing she didn’t want to be married or have kids, or even live in her home country, at the ripe age of almost-forty, and how that was very scary and she read and studied women who came before her to learn how to make it okay.

And you wanna know what it’s really about??? It’s about me. And you. And uncertainty. And believing in yourself. And imagining a future that no one before you has laid out. And mothers. And children. And life.

I loved it. I got it from my new best friends at Womb House Books (and also

The Womb House Books Review

), who recently moved into my neighborhood, like manna from heaven. I will spend all my money there now, sorry family.

I read it while my daughter read old Babysitter’s Clubs from the 90s at a taco place. I read it with another woman at a restaurant, just being ladies reading our separate books, cause Virginia Woolf, via Joanna Biggs, told me I could make friendship whatever I want.