30 - Writing Lives, Inventing Selves

Summary

While in the 1980s and 1990s the capacious genre of life-writing provided an accessible frame to counter erasure for women writers, represent their lives, and articulate the complexity of their multiple subject positions, the chapter focuses on the ways in which black and Asian women writers such as Andrea Levy, Meera Syal, Jackie Kay, and Bernardine Evaristo have invented themselves through autobiographies, autobiographical novels, and memoirs. Charting life-writing’s flexible and subversive potential, the chapter examines three recurrent preoccupations: home and return; orphanhood, adoption, and foster care; and the often transatlantic and diasporic search for lost family histories. Enabling the reinvention of black and Asian female subjectivities and a range of perspectives from which to confront the silences of history, the chapter illuminates the ways in which the diverse possibilities of life-writing have empowered a number of writers to engage with, transcend, and counter such pressures, writing themselves into the narrative of British history and continuing to create new voices and contexts from which to reconfigure their lives.