A Story Larger Than My Own
Women Writers Look Back on Their Lives and Careers
In A Story Larger than My Own, Janet Burroway brings together essays and poems by nineteen accomplished women, all now over the age of sixty, who challenged the status quo and paved the way for future generations of writers. Taken together, their stories offer advice from experience to writers at all stages of their careers and serve as a collective memoir of a truly remarkable cohort of women.
Praise
A Story Larger than My Own is an essential book, for women writers, for all writers, for readers, for people with mothers, for people who remember their mothers.
Cris Mazza, author of Something Wrong with Her
Excerpt
These were the years of embryonic change for women who wanted to write and to be taken seriously in the world of letters, who waited for the mail in the fret of an expectant lover, or pushed, tenuous and frustrated, and then insistent and aggrieved, not against any such lofty thing as a glass ceiling but against the scuffed doors of newsrooms, editors and agents. It worked. We made our way into publishing with an anxious determination. But Jane Smiley can write that toward the end of that era she emerged with “not one single thought about whether a girl should be doing this.”