'Writing into the World: Memoir, History and Private Life, Part One'

In the forty years since the publication of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, writers, particularly in the United States, have been working to represent their lives in memoir, to bring to the cultural conversation a diversity of lived experience that is truly remarkable.

But still I meet writers who insist they don’t want to write “just a memoir.”

As the tradition enters its fifth decade, it seems important to explore how craft and consciousness of time and place assure that no memoir is “merely personal.”

Memory drives memoir, but it can take writing to realize that while we thought we were just living, history was unfolding.

Read the rest on TriQuarterly. 

'Beautiful, Beautiful,' on Literary Hub

There is heat at the back of my neck, a spot of heat that gets hotter and hotter. I take the combs out, swirl my hair up, stick the combs in, wear my hair up until my nape cools down. After years of this, I came to understand why women of a certain age cut their hair short, why even the most revolutionary of 19th-century feminists acquiesced to the requirements of modesty and wore their hair up. It’s hormones! I have been told that the dance of my hands twisting and lifting my thick curtain of hair is an act of kinetic sculpture. Once when I was in my late forties, a student hit on me: “I couldn’t take my eyes off of you, how you kept putting your hair up and taking it down.” The kinetic sculpture has by now become a comedy, hair up, hair down, hair up, hair down. And the combs—what a collection I have! Made in Paris of plastic by Medusa’s Heirlooms, the size of a calling card, ivory, malachite, zebra-striped or azure, with teeth that hold… But my subject is my hair, the greatest gift bestowed on me by my ancestors, my gene pool, my biology.

Read the rest of Honor’s essay on Literary Hub.