The Writer on Her Work: Contemporary Women Writers Reflect on their Art and Situation

The Writer on Her Work: Contemporary Women Writers Reflect on their Art and Situation by Janet Sternburg. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780393013610.

This is a book that celebrates diversity. In these essays, most of them commissioned for this collection, notable women writers examine their lives and their work. The contributors include novelists, poets, and writers of nonfiction—among them, Mary Gordon, Joan Didion, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gail Godwin, Erica Jong, Muriel Rukeyser, Nancy Milford, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker. The essays explore such themes as the impulse to write; the struggles and satisfactions of writing; the conflict between the need for solitude and family obligation; the relationship of the writer to her past, to literature, and to womanhood. Each writer approaches her subject from her own angle of vision, each speaks in her own voice. All are taking stock, asking themselves, "How did I come to be doing what Im doing? On what terms? With what critical choices?" In "Becoming a Writer," Gail Godwin traces her development as her mothers daughter. Maxine Hong Kingston conjures a vision of what she calls "The Coming Book." Nancy Milford tells a story that touches the core of her impulse to write biography. Anne Tyler considers how she balances fiction and daily life. This is a collection that reaches out to the ways in which people lead their complicated and various lives. Each essay, rich and personal and concrete, gives an immediate sense of what it is like, right now, to be a woman who writes.