Volume 24, Number 1 · February 3, 1977
Ghosts
By Diane Johnson
The Names
by N. Scott Momaday
Harper and Row, 170 pp., $10.00
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
by Maxine Hong Kingston
Knopf, 209 pp., $7.95
Encounter with an Angry God
by Carobeth Laird
Malki Museum Press (California), 190 pp., $8.95
Autobiography, by far the more durable tradition, has never been honored for art the way fiction has, presumably because it lacks the requisite property of 'invention.' But it might be argued that to impose significant form on the chaotic materials of life lived, instead of fashioning them from the more restricted, more determined, more orthodox contents of the imagination, or from the more restrictive conventions of fictional genres, requires a superior faculty of invention, or at least the grace and clear-headedness of an inventor. The artist writing his memoir is in double jeopardy; first he must lead the risky life worth reading, must come through it and face in retrospect the awful disparity between what it meant and what he had intended. Then he must make a fiction of it, a work that has many or most of the formal properties of fiction.
Review, 3363 words
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