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As for writing, most people secretly believe they themselves have a book in them,
which they could write if they could only find the time. But this is not the same as being a
writer. When you are a writer, you have a responsibility towards the society and people. 21
For Atwood, writing can never be divorced from the concerns of people and the world in which
they live. Consequently, the writer should always keep in mind that she has a duty towards them and
employ her artas a means of creating awareness. In the second chapter of the book, Atwood poses
the question “what is the relationship between the two entities we lump under one name, that of
the writer?” 22 Atwood comments on the fluidity of the writer’s persona: “All writers are doubles for
the simple reason that you can not meet the author of the book you have just read. Too much time
has elapsed between the time the text was written and read.” 23 In Atwood’s opinion, one should not
forget that writers also lead normal lives like other people. The house has to be cleaned, the dog has
to be walked, the food has to be cooked, etc.
When we think of autobiography, several questions arise:
What is a self that it can be represented? What is autobiography that it can represent a
self? We can see the ways in which autobiography is produced within discourses of
identity that are powerfully informed by concerns about gender: when we ask the
definitonal question that links gender with genre:What is a woman’s autobiography? Both
gender and genre as they converge in autobiography are produced through a variety of
discourses that depict “the individual” in relation to “truth”, “the real” and identity. 24
Gilmore further suggests that “I do not understand autobiography to be any experientially truer
than other represesentations of the self or to offer an identity any less constructed than that
produced in other forms of representation. Simply because the autobiographer intends the subject
to correspond to herself or himself.” 25 The pertinent questions Gilmore asks are important in relation
to any discussion of autobiography. If the autobiography is to represent a self, the question of
representation of that ‘self’ inevitably emerges. Since gender implicates the self in very significant
ways, one also needs to pay attention to the ways in which the writer of the autobiography expresses
her/himself through discourse.
Comparing and contrasting reading and writing, Atwood comes to the conviction that there is a
permanence in writing that speech lacks. “Works of literature are recreated by each generation of
readers, who make them new by finding fresh meanings in them.” 26 In this context, meaning is in the
eye of the beholder who is an active participant in the creation of meaning rather than a passive
consumer of any given text. Depending on his/her particular situatedness, the reader brings to the
text new frameworks of interpretation. In Atwood’s words:
The printed text of a book is like a musical score, which is not itself music, but becomes
music when played by musicians or “interpreted” by them, as we say. The act of reading a
text is like playing music and listening to it at the same time, and the reader becomes his
own interpreter. 27
As Linda Anderson has observed; feminism has had an almost symbiotic relationship with
autobiogaphy, which has often acted as the shadow and locus for evolving debates about the
subject. 28 If we go back to the early years of the relationship between feminism and autobiography,
in the 1960s and 1970s, as second wave feminism flourished, autobiography seemed
to provide a priviledged space for women to discover new forms of subjectivity, both
through the reading of autobiographical writing by women historical as well as
contemporary, and through the production of texts which explored the female subject in
franker, less constricted or more inventive ways. Later, however, as poststructuralist
theory began to transform feminist thinking, autobiography became the site for major
theoretical debates about the subject. 29