Herself by Hortense Calisher (1972)

Perhaps the clearest way to explain my response to this book is to imagine myself on one ridge in the landscape of life, and Calisher on another close by. There is an essential and telling distance between, made of our genders, experiences, cultures, and so on. But she's intent on explaining and delineating her time and times, both personally and politically. Sometimes she veers off her ridge in my direction and speaks especially convincingly, and I can look into her eyes and get soul-messages from them (that would be WAY too airy-fairy a notion for her!). Sometimes she veers off the other side of her ridge and I can barely hear her, or she disappears from view pretty completely. Just to complicate it a bit more, sometimes she comes my way, but says things I don't feel sympathy with. Sometimes I'm pretty sure I do, but something in the way she says them puts me out of range. That's the nitty-gritty of the way this book functions for me. But the amazing thing is that it is still a great experience - somehow her intelligence and depth of response, mixed though they are sympathetically, are still arresting, original and fascinating. I've been quite deeply in her presence, and I like that. This book covers her life, her responses to literature and the making of it, and some smaller occasional pieces she had written previously that fit into its "autobiographic" context - she called it life-talk, which is a good summation. She was always a maverick in what she called the 'litry' world of her times, always not quite on key, doing things which were not canonically correct, not guaranteed the usual plaudits. For this reason her reputation has naturally suffered. Her writing can be challenging, but, oddly, once you're attuned to her style and modes, it's nowhere near as daunting as it first appears. It can only be hoped that such originality will soon find its audience, albeit a necessarily smallish, discerning one.