From: Jane Kurtz Goering <jane_kurtz>
Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2000 12:07:45 -0600

Although I've been on the run this fall, juggling writing/speaking/teaching commitments, I've also been trying to keep up with reading the posts about biography/autobiography-?cause it's a reading love of mine, too. Some of you may have read the YA Talk article I wrote for Booklist about memoir, where I tried to struggle with many of the issues that have been raised in these posts, including the one about constructed truth.

In the last couple of years, I've twice visited Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen's house outside of Nairobi, and those visits set me reading everything I could find about her life--and watching OUT OF AFRICA several times. Her autobiographical writings are certainly constructed...they offer one "take" on a life...and each of her biographers also has a "take" based on reading, interviews (making me realize that the relationship a writer is able to establish with an interviewee could have a big effect on the finished product), educated guesses and surmises and so on. Kamante Gatura, the majordomo at Mbogani House (Karen Coffee Farm), has added his voice through tape recordings in Swahili collected and translated by Peter Beard. It's all fascinating...and it would be wrong, I think, to say that we know more about Karen Blixen's real life from reading what SHE had to say about it than from reading the biographical work. We're all blind (thankfully so) to pieces of ourselves and there's great mystery to anyone's life.

Jane Kurtz www.janekurtz.com
Received on Mon 06 Nov 2000 12:07:45 PM CST