But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives

Gender and Culture Series

by Nancy K. Miller

In her latest work of personal criticism, Nancy K. Miller tells the story of how a girl who grew up in the 1950s and got lost in the 1960s became a feminist critic in the 1970s. As in her previous books, Miller interweaves pieces of her autobiography with the memoirs of contemporaries in order to explore the unexpected ways that the stories of other people's lives give meaning to our own. The evolution she chronicles was lived by a generation of literary girls who came of age in the midst of profound social change and, buoyed by the energy of second-wave feminism, became writers, academics, and activists. Miller's recollections form one woman's installment in a collective memoir that is still unfolding, an intimate page of a group portrait in process.

168 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 14, 2002

About the author

Nancy K. Miller is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past, winner of the Jewish Journal Prize for 2012, and the story of a quest to recreate her family’s lost history. A well-known feminist scholar, Miller has published family memoirs, personal essays, and literary criticism. She is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches classes in memoir, graphic novel, and women’s studies.

Miller lectures widely, both nationally and internationally, and her work is anthologized in popular volumes on autobiography and collections of feminist essays. She also co-edits the Gender and Culture series at Columbia University Press, which she co-founded in 1983 with the late Carolyn Heilbrun.

After graduating from Barnard College, Miller sailed to Paris to study French literature and complete a master’s degree. Already in love with the city from movies and novels, she hoped to create a new, more sophisticated identity for her twenty-year-old, nice New York-Jewish-girl self. Several years of adventures and misadventures later, including marriage to an American ex-pat, Miller returned to New York minus the husband but ready to reinvent herself as an academic and writer.

Her new book (forthcoming from Seal, Fall 2013) describes that odyssey.

Reviews

[chantel nouseforaname · Rating 3 out of 5]

A completely random read that I jumped into after reading another book that mentioned this one while discussing the importance of memoir and life-writing. If I remember correctly it might have been Why I Read by Wendy Lesser that mentioned this text.

Nancy K. Miller gave me what I wanted in this read. She discussed her youth, feminism, and her life’s progress while also examining how when reading about others, we can centre ourselves in place & time as well as see the world through eyes that may have been not available to us otherwise.

”We read the lives of others to figure out how to make sense of our own, and in the process we also admit to our wishes for a future. So what may look like a stubborn attachment to the past is just as powerfully a passion for what is to come in all its unknow- ablity. Life writing is a way of moving forward into the future by revisiting the past—visiting and not getting stuck there, not taking up residence. If reading the stories of other people teaches any- thing, it’s a lesson about time and timeliness—or is it untimeliness? A lesson about knowing that the life on the page has already changed—even before you have time to finish reading. — p. 137 in But Enough About Me by Nancy K. Miller

As a reader who’s passionate about memoirs, it was nice to revel in the reasons why I’m so fascinated by the lives of others, from famous folks to every day folks.

My only complaint is my common complaint about most books written by older white folks under the umbrella of literary criticism or investigation, and that has to do with the lack of attention paid to the way they paint the work of Black and POC experience as exotic and hot yet somehow ignorable or absorbable into their own dynamic, and their own white experience as standard and intriguing — even when in reality it may be boring and malignant, ie. in cases such as their casual gentrification, or frustrating and benign, ie. in their case of cavorting with elitist, chauvinistic fuckwits.

This was a pretty decent random read tho. Here’s another quote I liked:

“That’s why I devour memoirs the way some people read detective stories or thrillers. After all, there are crimes, mostly of the heart, and mysteries. Memoirs provide me with suspense of a different order.Will she stop falling in love with the wrong man,get a better job ...sit down and write her poetry,her novel, or her memoir. Will you?”

[Zen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miller's central thesis is that: 'We read the lives of others to figure out how to make sense of our own'. I would have liked a clearer explication of this, something more fleshed out, along the lines of How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves by Paul John Eakin. However, Miller's approach is an interlinking of personal memory with a contemplation of life writing as a mode of the recording of self (in spite of, she insists, its inherent unknowability)- it's more personal, less scholarly. The book provides clear exemplars of how life 'writing' encompasses a variety of 'texts', which includes the visual.

The most interesting part of the book for me was the observation of her evolution of self, set against the emergence of feminist literary criticism; a time of momentous female emancipation from the 50's to the 80's. To consider how much has changed as a result of the 'feminist project' (as diversely voiced as that was) is most fascinating.

Ultimately, this is a poignant read. Miller's melancholic, wistful tone pours onto the page as she looks back at the passion and radical conviction of the days of her early (amidst collective) feminism. Added to this, are her lamentations regarding aging ('looking hard at fifty' and 'facing down sixty') which are somehow unsettling to read, yet one feels grateful they're committed to the page. All in all, this isn't a book I'd recommend for everyone - it lags in a few places, and the memoiring isn't always that riveting - but, for those pursuing an interest in life writing, it's a worthwhile read, especially given Miller's place as a key life writing theorist in the academy.

[Jill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read quickly, mostly for her reminiscences of Hunter College High School.

[Federico · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cozy reading

[Gord Higginson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I devour memoirs the way other people race through mystery novels" Miller says (p.25) in this book. I devour autobiographies & biographies of writers as well. That's why this book is fascinating, for it is not only a memoir of writer and American scholar of French literature Nancy Miller, but a study of why we read about other people's lives. Striking and witty recollections of her life first as a very short-term English lit student in England in 1959, then as a French novel student in Paris in the 'sixties and her life afterwards. I just wish her memoirs were longer!