Berkshire Women Write

The description Eula Biss’s book as listed on The Bookloft’s website calls it, “A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity,” which it is. But really, this book goes so far beyond that–it’s an exploration of what it means to be a young woman in America, an idealist in New York City, a white woman teaching third grade in Harlem, an Easterner searching for home in Iowa.  These essays are about identity across the board.

“Perhaps it is only through leaving home that you can learn who you are. Or at least who the world thinks you are,” Biss writes in the essay “Back to Buxton.” “And the gap between the one and the other is the painful part, the part that you may, if you are me, or if you are Zora Neale Hurston, keep arguing against for the rest of your life–saying , No, I am not white in that way, or, No I am not black in that way.’”

As a woman about Biss’s age who has lived in the Northeast, the Southwest, the Midwest, and, for one strange summer, Wyoming, my sense of belonging is constantly being re-evaluated. Whether about race, gender, educated or uneducated–I think Biss’s essays get at the core of what it means to be American how we define ourselves, and how others define us.

But the book isn’t nearly as dry as I’m making it sound right now. These essays are richly written, the author including personal anecdotes from her life along with historical facts. Her lineup of characters include Alexander Graham Bell, Zora Neale Hurston, Joan Didion, and NAFTA. Sometimes the essays are loose, scraps of information assembled together, collage like, the reader drawing her own conclusions. The essay “Babylon,” for example is composed of one to two sentence long paragraphs, separated by space breaks, and include historical accounts of the garden of Babyon, Biss’s experience in a garden park in Oakland, details about palm trees, the take-over of abandoned buildings by squatters in New York for the use of city gardens. Through these little clips we can string together Biss’s line of logic–which can’t really be summed up in a sentence (hence the collage-like structure of the essay), but has to do with human migration, how we inhabit and abandon space, and how the story of domesticated plants parallels our own story.

Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, is one of the best collections of essays I’ve read in a long time. It’s no wonder ”Miss Eula,” as her Harlem third-graders addressed her, was the winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. I know, she’s not a Berkshire writer (although she did spend some of her childhood  in rural Massachusetts), but any American woman writer can identify with the themes that pulse through Biss’s writing.

Also by Eula Biss:

Tags: Women Writers

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