On autobiography. The book examines the differences in writing styles between men and women in autobiographical works. This encore presentation is just under an hour. Cspan jill ker conway, author of when memory speaks reflections on autobiography, where did you get the idea for this . Guest well, i have been traveling around with my publicist from alfred knopf and giving readings from some of my earlier volumes and memoirs, and i started to explain to the audience before i read something about the genre, something about its history and where i thought my own work fitted in with it. And the audience would always get very interested and ask a lot of questions, and finally, my editor said one day, well, why dont you do a book about this . so i thought it was a wonderful idea and ii had to do a great deal of reading of 19th century memoirs that i hadnt read before in order to do the book, but i had great fun doing it. Cspan i have a copy of something youll. Guest mm. Cspan . Youll recognize, the road from coorain, yourwhat . Memoir or autobiography . Guest its a memoir. Its my childhood and growing up in the outback of australia and my education in sydney. And its definitely a memoir. It evokes the life and times a lot more than being a fulldressed autobiography. Cspan andand what impact did this haveyouryour memoir have on your whole idea of what memoirs are about . Guest i wrote it for three reasons. First of all, because i was tired of all the australian movies that celebrated male heroes in the australian outback, the worst being crocodile dundee, and i wanted to write a story that had a female heroine, my mother, and a female narrative voice, mine. The second reason was that ive been teaching since i was 23, so thats a very long time now. And if im teaching a young man and talking with him about his plans for his future, what hell do after graduation, i can always find just dozens of memoirs by menhow i founded general motors, how i rescued the Chrysler Corporation, how i discovered dnawhich will maybe inflate the power of the narrator to control his own destiny considerably. But on the other hand, itll be a working, sort of, road map for a young man to think about how he might plan a future. But if i am talking to a young woman, whos just finishing college and thinking about her life ahead, there are really very few memoirs about a womans education that will help her think about it, and also, very few that deal with how a young adult woman sets about planning her life. And so i wanted to write a story that would be a useful kind of road map for somebody going through that process of graduating from college and thinking about the future. And so that was a second important motive. And then the third one was feminism today is expressed in rhetoric thats being so politicized over issues like abortion and the whole question of pornography, that most people just switch off. So i wanted to talk in a narrative voice that drew the reader into the story, male or female, and made them experience, through the story, some of the central issues ofof feminismwhat happens, really, when a society is unjust in its dealings with women. And inin that narrative, you see my mother, who has been such a powerful, very creative, likable, attractive woman sink into despair and neurotic mental illness, mainly because the world she lives in doesnt have a dignified idea of how a widow lives or what she does. And you also see me run into a lot of discrimination. And i wanted that to be told in terms that were very faithful to the important men in my life, father, brothers, teachers, lovers, but made it very clear that the story wasnt a romance its not about relationships with men; its about how a woman gets her life under control and makes important choices. Cspan by the way, whats coorain . Guest coorain is the name of my familys sheep station in southwestern new south wales, a very remote, arid area. The word means windy place. its an aboriginal word. And its the land that my mother and father took up as pioneers before i was born, when they were in their early 30s. And its aa story about what a lbeautiful world they built for a child to grow up in and then how that world is destroyed, mainly as a result ofof climate and australias recurrent droughts. But its also destroyed because my parents, unwittingly, are agents of the destruction. They bring in sharphooved animals into a very delicate, arid countryside where theythey just destroy the root system of the plants. And so the country turns into desert. Cspan the book was written in 1989. Guest yeah. Cspan out in paperback. And you can get the hardback, even. I found that in a store. Guest yeah. Cspan how many years does this bookyouryour memoir cover . Guest it covers the first 25 years of my life. Im 25 on the last page, when im walking out across the tarmac to get on a plane and come to the United States. Cspan what year did you leave australia . Guest i left in 1960. Cspan and since that time, youve been president of Smith College for 10 years . Guest yes. Cspan why did you leave that . Guest oh, well, ii had aan agreement with my husband, was jointly arrived at, that every 10 years, the other person would get to say where you lived. And that way, nobodys career would be primary and the other ones secondary, nor would we have to have a commuting marriage. So the first 10 years of our married life was spent in canada, and then he said, ill go wherever you want to go. we spent 10 years at smith. And then it was his turn again. We went toto live in boston, and i started teaching parttime at mit. But i really wanted to spend that time getting back my old writing style. I used to write a lot when i was an undergraduate at the university of sydney. I stopped when i got to harvard and did a phd. I started writing for other historians and i began to write short articles and very scholarly academic prose. Then i became a university administrator, started writing bureaucratic prose, you know, memoranda to this person and that. So when i came to have the time again to go back to the writing i wanted to do, my style was gone. Ii couldnt write in anything but that terrible bureaucratic voice. So i knew id have to write something that was very close to the bone and got deep into my psyche in order to get my style back. So thats why i started, among other reasons, and it did come back. Cspan small point, but i notice the difference in the road to coorain, you dedicate the book to john. Guest yes. Cspan . And in this new book, its in memory of john. Guest yes. He died just about three years ago now. Cspan and where did you meet him . Guest i met him when i came to harvard as a graduate student, and i didnt understand the system very well. I was in a big hurry to get through the prpreparatory part of doing a phd, in which you take courses and then you present yourself for a general examination on your understanding of the field youve chosen. And mine was 19th and 20th century american history. And i was in a hurry. And im also extremely compulsive, asas a person, about studying, so i knew that if i gave in to the standard pattern in which graduate students took two, three, four years to prepare for their general examination, id just be so compulsive about it that id never get it done. So i decided id have my general examination within days of passing all my preparatory courses. And i didnt understand that if i did that, i lost my scholarship and i had to get a teaching job. And so i hurriedly went to the Harvard History department to ask for a teaching job, and they said, oh, yes, theres one. You can go and be a teaching assistant in john conways course. so i did, and thats how we met. Cspan how long were you married . Guest thirtythree years. Cspan any children . Guest no, alas. Not for lack of trying, but we just didnt manage that. Cspan now in this book, did you ever total up how many different authors you talk about . Guest you know, i didnt count them. Iveive often counted the ones in the anthologies ive done, but i didnt count them. Cspan well, let me pick one. Guest ok. Cspan . And have you talk about it. One of those that we know here on this network is katharine graham. Guest yes. Cspan why did you pick her autobiography or memoir to write about . Guest well, the main theme of when memory speaks is about the differences between the way, in different time periods, its thought appropriate for a man or a woman to tell their life story. And in the opening chapters, i trace the waythe romantic myth about a female life shapes how women tell their life history. And the romantic myth, just to talk about it in almost parody form, makes the heroine wonderfully, emotionally finely tuned. Shes usually beautiful or attractive or got some special quality. And shes carried by fate or destiny into meeting the romantic hero. There are some complications to the romance, but eventually, they marry, and then, you know, 19th century womens novels used to finishor memoirs, and so, reader, i married him. and her history ends at the point of the marriage and is subsumed within his. And for aa strong or a powerful woman to try and present herself in this romantic vein, she has to conceal all her motivation for power, to exercise choice and influence over her destiny and to make herself seem like this lovely person to whom things just happened. And i was fascinated by Katharine Grahams memoir because she rescued a faltering family media enterprise, served very well as its president and as publisher of the Washington Post and clearly exercised a great deal of judgment about how that enterprise was run. But in her presentation of herself in her autobiography, she really lets you think that shes just this nice suburban woman who doesnt enjoy being thrust into this role and is always being badgered by her advisers and scarcely making a decision of her own. And sheshe uses a phrase, i heard my voice saying, as though its another person. And so i thought she was a wonderful example. Shes a woman i admired greatly, and im so interested that even somebody who has exercised the power she has, after all, deciding to publish the pentagon papers, deciding to back the reporters who broke the watergate storydespite that, she still feels obliged to present herself that way. Cspan do you know her, by the way . Guest yes. Yes. Cspan just before we opened the cameras up here and the microphones, you were talking about coming from a board meeting. Guest yes. Cspan . And i believeand i dont know thatbut you are on quite a few boards, arent you . Guest yes, i am. Cspan how many . Guest six. Six forprofit boards and then hospitals, colleges, schools, foundations. Cspan would you mind naming the six . Guest im a director of Merrill Lynch, colgatepalmolive, arthur d. Little consulting company, a small hightech Company Called allen telecom, nike and an australian Company Called lend lease international, which is a Global Property and real estate company. Cspan how many days a year are you in meetings on boards like that, the commercial boards . Guest oh, goodness me. Its probably half my life. Cspan what do you think of it . Guest i enjoy it very much because, remember, im a historian. Ive spent a lot of my life studying economic history, and its fascinating for me to see how contemporary organizations that have to make a profit work and to contrast those, which are not entrepreneurial in the exact meaning of the word, but lilive and operate in the nonprofit sector, and they must always generate a surplus in order to be able to manage and improve themselves, but are really working not to return to shareholders but to return to society. And so, it fascinates me. Cspan as you know, you write about a merrill. Guest yes. Cspan . By the name of James Merrill. Guest yes. Cspan . Who has something to do with the Merrill Lynch. Guest yes, hes son of the founder of Merrill Lynch, son of Charles Merrill. And, of course, one of americas greatest poets. Cspan is he still alive . Guest no, he diedoh, seven or eight years ago. Cspan and what was his memoir . Guest his memoir is called a different person. Its one of my favorites, first of all, because hes a great writer; secondly, because it describes the life of a young man, whos gay, coming to terms with his sexuality. And its a story of his struggle to become a mature person and to somehow escape from being the child of so enormously asuccessful a man and yet respect and admire what his father does. So its beautifully written. He has a wonderful talent for prose. Theres a wonderful passage in it in which he describes being in rome with his father, whos going for an audience with the pope. And his father sets out in the morning dressed in an absolutely white silk suit, so Charles Merrill greets the pope clad in the same color. And James Merrill describes it as a confluence of jupiter and saturn. Its wonderful language. Cspan what was his relationship to his father . Guest he finishes his story describing his affection and respect for his father. Of course, he has the standard youthful rebellions, but he comes to think of him as aa very benivolbenevolent influence in his life. Cspan is there anything left in Merrill Lynch of the Merrill Family . Guest theres no immediate kin of the Merrill Family, but thethere were, until quite recently. And the heritage of Charlie Merrill stays very strong in the firm. There are stories told about him, people recall how he talked about himself and about the business, and its quite common for people to begin a presentation about the firm today, starting out with aa quotation from him. So hishis spirit is very much there. Cspan right next to the merrill story in your book is aan author that i was first introduced to when we did a special on oxford. And that was when mr. Clinton came into office. Guest uhhuh. Cspan . The president , and we went over there and did a special, and one of the books i read to get ready for it was jan morris book on oxford. Guest on oxford, yes. Cspan now you paint an interesting picture of this human being. Guest yes. Cspan tell us about jan morris. Guest well, jan morris began life as james morris. Heheshe tells in the story the experience of being, even as a very small child, convinced that thethe person who inhabited this body, which happened to have male genitalia, was female. And the story is a narrative of how james morris eventually became jan morris by having anan actual surgical effort to create female genitalia. And what interested me about the story was that the narrative is told very much in a male mode until maybe the last chaptermaybe chapter and a half, in which the newly emerged jan morris begins to feel that she cant handle ordinary mechanical tasks orshe describes not really liking to drawto open the wine or park the car and allall those other things. And she also describes the shock of discovering that in this new form, people condescend to her and explain things that she understands very well, in a very condescending way. But shes happy because she feels shes got the right physical body to match her inner psyche. And to me, shes very interesting because there is a school ofof feminist thought today that is what we call essentialist and which believes that there is, somehow or other, an essential female or male psyche inin all of us. I dont happen to agree with that. I think our identities are very much socially conditioned and that, really, biologically, apart from the arrangements for reproduction, our minds and our mental powers andand physical capabilities are very similar. But jan morris is a wonderful example of someone who believes the opposite, and because she does, she has no personal history to recount after becoming female. Shes found the right essence for her substance, and theres nothing more to develop. So the story gets pretty flat after that. Cspan well, there is a line that i wanted to ask you about, though i dont know if you have any more information on it. she now lives as a woman. guest yes. Cspan . With a female partner, and clearly doesnt want to think of the relationship as lesbian. guest yes. Iiithats just my own observation, but cthats clear in the book, very clear. Cspan thetheresthe next chapter is grimm tales. Guest yes. Cspan now whats that mean . Guest well, i was thinking about grimms fairy tales, because a lot of the victim memoirs that we are reading today read like fairy tales. There are wicked parents and much misunderstood and mistreated children, and there is a narrative drive in all of those stories to rediscover that parent and, somehow or other, even up the scales or theres a preternaturally wonderful parent, mostly a mother, who is being celebrated by an adoring child. And those arethose are story categories out of fairy tales. Life is much more complex than that. Cspan you pickeda couple i want to ask you aboutrick bragg of the new york times. Guest yes. Wonderful story. Its about braggs childhood in poverty in the south. Cspan this was just in 1997, w. Guest yes. Yes. Cspan yeah. Guest very recent. And he is the child of a wonderful struggling mother who is married to a nogood, unreliable, alcoholic, brutal male who beats her and abuses her and the children. But she remains faithful to him and goes back whenever shes invited back to him, when he abandonsafter hes abandoned them. And she labors mightily to support the two sons. And one son, rick bragg, escapes through his gifts and talents and one son remains in that impworld of poverty, doing hard physical labor all his life. And rick bragg, the narrator, wants to celebrate this remarkable mother, as he becomes more and more successful as a journalist. And he ishe writes in a narrative style that is not unlike the way women are obliged to present themselves inas romantic heroines do, because he attributes his success to luck. Its just luck that he happened to get a job working as a Sports Reporter for a local paper. Its just luck that hes in the right place to move up in the journalistic world. Its even luck when he makes it to the nieman Fellows Program at harvard. And so he, in a way, treats his life as though hes not personally responsible for having abandoned the family and moved away, although he stays true to the south in wanting to report southern stories. And i think that thats characteristic ofof men born in extreme poverty. Its almost too dangerous, psychologically, to think about striking out for extraordinary success. And so you attribute causation to luck. But i dont think theres all that much luck in life. We are caught in a very complex web of causation, and w