We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The voice of the mother: embedded maternal narratives in twentieth-century womens autobiographies" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Every woman autobiographer is a daughter who writes and establishes her identity through her autobiographical narrative. In The Voice of the Mother, Jo Malin argues that many twentieth-century autobiographies by women contain an intertext, an embedded narrative, which is a biography of the writer/daughters mother. Analyzing this narrative practice, Malin examines ten texts by women who seem particularly compelled to tell their mothers stories: Virginia Woolf, Sara Suleri, Kim Chernin, Drusilla Modjeska, Joan Nestle, Carolyn Steedman, Dorothy Allison, Adrienne Rich, Cherr?e Moraga, and Audre Lorde. Each author is, in fact, able to write her own autobiography only by using a narrative form that contains her mothers story at its core. These texts raise interesting questions about autobiography as a genre and about a feminist writing practice that resists and subverts the dominant literary tradition. Malin theorizes a hybrid form of autobiographical narrative containing an embedded narrative of the mother. The textual relationship between the two narratives is unique among texts in the auto/biographical canon. This alternative narrative practicein which the daughter attempts to talk both to her mother and about heris equally an autobiography and a biography rather than one or the other. The technique is marked by a breakdown of subject/object categories as well as auto/biographical dichotomies of genre. Each text contains a self that is more plural than singular, yet neither. In addition to being a theoretical and textual analysis, Malins book is also a mother-daughter autobiography and biography itself. She shares her own story and her mothers story as a way to connect directly with readers and as a way to bridge the gap between theory and practice.
