Description
Book SynopsisWith an afterword by Linda M. Morra
Discovered in her papers in 2008, Jane Rule's autobiography is a rich and culturally significant document that follows the first twenty-one years of her life: the complexities of her relationships with family, friends, and early lovers, and how her sensibilities were fashioned by mentors or impeded by the socio-cultural practices and educational politics of the day.
In writing about her formative years, Rule is indeed taking the measure of her life, assessing its contours of pleasure and pain, accounting for how it evolved as it did. Yet not allowing the manuscript to be published in her lifetime was an act of discretion: she was considering those who might have been affected by being represented in her work not as confidently emancipated as she had always been. She must also have appreciated the ambiguity of the title she chose, with all its implications of suicide: at the end of her writing life, she was submitting h
