Technically a memoir, 'The Woman Warrior' becomes almost magical through its inclusion of folk tales, dreams, and revisions.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
You know, it shouldn't just be about women as heroic figures overcoming things, it just needs to be about women in general getting the opportunity to play a multitude of roles, telling a multitude of stories - just to express human experience from a woman's perspective. I hope, someday, we can get to that point. I'm all about representation.
I always thought of my mother as a warrior woman, and I became interested in pursuing stories of women who invent lives in order to survive.
I have seen and really liked the varied movie adaptations of the book, but 'Little Women' has a sprawling, richly tangled story that needs time and space to weave its magic.
I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told.
Literary fiction is kept alive by women. Women read more fiction, period.
A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.
I have found things that I could have done better in 'The Woman Warrior.' But then I thought: Let the work of one's youth just stand.
One of the more interesting challenges I face when doing research for my novels is to trace the lives of women who are vital to the narrative and try my best to give them back their voices.
Pretty much anything you care to imagine can happen in a fantasy, which in turn means you can really crank up the intensity of the tale you're telling.
I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption.