Why does it seem as if everyone is writing memoirs, and particularly women?
The current popularity of memoir verifies the common belief that we each have a story to tell. And we do...especially women. Memoirs are not only representations of women’s personal lives but also of their desire to repossess important parts of our culture, in which women’s stories have not mattered.
Beginning with her own motivations for writing memoirs, Helen M. Buss examines the many kinds of memoir written by contemporary women: memoirs about growing up, memoirs about traumatic events, about relationships, about work. In writing memoirs, these women publicly assert that their lives have mattered. They reshape the memoir, a form as old as the middle ages and as young as today, into a social discourse that blends the personal with the political, the self with the significant other, literature with history, and fiction with autobiography and essay. Buss urges readers to use their reading experience to help themselves understand and write the significance of their own lives.
Repossessing the World is the first book-length critical inquiry into women’s use of a form that has often been dismissed as less important than autobiography, less professional than the novel, and less intellectual than the formal essay. Buss demonstrates that the memoir makes its own art, not only through selective borrowing from these genres but also through the unique way that the tripartite narrative voice of the memoir constructs the personal and public experience of the memorist as significant to our cultural moment.

Anne McWhir is a professor of English at the University of Calgary and has written extensively on William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley and P.B. Shelley.

D.L. Macdonald teaches English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Poor Polidori: A Critical Biography of the Author of “The Vampyre” (1991) and of Monk Lewis (2000).

Helen M. Buss is a professor of English at the University of Calgary. Her book on Canadian women’s life writing, Mapping Our Selves, won the Gabrielle Roy Prize. As Margaret Clarke, she has published novels, short stories and poetry.

Helen M. Buss' profile page

• Winner, Laura Jamieson Prize, Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women

Memoir has long deserved the careful attention Helen Buss gives it in Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women.... In this study Buss returns to some of her previous work...investigating the memoirist's tripartitie roles as witness, participant, and relfective/reflexive narrator. The strengths of this book lis in Buss's engagement with the interplay between these roles, and in her exploration of how they allow women to resist narratives and restrictions inherited from patriarchal society.

Elizabeth Maurer, Canadian Literature, 2004 September

Repossesing the World is a fascinating, seminal, challenging, and at time iconoclastic, college-level discourse of the hidden depths in writing by female authors and highly recommended for serious students of women's studise and contemporary literary criticism.

Kristi Siegel, Wisconsin Bookwatch, May 2002, 2003

Citing a wide variety of theorists [Buss] probes issues of balance, mother-daughter relationships, trauma, and academic matters as significant themes in the evolution of English-language memoir writing. As with most scholarly monographs, which attempt to advance a field of study, this one can sometimes make difficult reading for those not up on their theory, but the analysis is happily leavened by the author's determination to integrate her own subjectivity into the discussion and by her engaging scholarly passion.

Margaret Conrad, Canadian Book Review Annual, 2006, 2007 February

Buss's volume will be useful to anyone analyzing the rich nuances of writing as a means of recording and analyzing the self and to students of textual modes: autobiography, memoir, personal narrative.

K. Gale, Loyola Marymount University, CHOICE, 2002, 2002

Buss argues convincingly that memoir serves as an ideal form for women--in particular--to 'repossess ways of knowing the world and the self that do not divide the heart from the head.'... Buss's intelligent book presents an excellent resource on women's contemporary memoirs, and also serves to offer a nuanced analysis of the memoir itself, a genre that has not received the critical attention it merits.

Kristi Siegel, Biography, 26.3, Summer 2003, 2003