ABSTRACT
When I was growing up, there were few accounts of autism, and thus, little perspective from which to evaluate our own experiences; now there are hundreds. And when I was growing up during the seventies, memoir itself was a small and ignored genre, unless the memoir was written by white men like Benjamin Franklin. However, the genre has grown, partly because it has made room for voices from outside the mainstream: women and other minorities, the disabled-although often these memoirs are viewed as “confessional” and taken less seriously. Yet there has recently been a healthy explosion of such memoirs, in large part because these voices have been silenced for so long. Ironically, it is these memoirs-written by mothers of disabled children-that have often enabled women to “cross over”: to write memoirs in which women act as heroic figures in a manner similar to those in the male “quest narrative,” as explored by Carolyn Heilbrun in Writing a Woman’s Life. As Heilbrun explains, autobiographies of famous women such as Margery Kempe and Jane Addams follow the pattern of reporting “the encounters with what would be the life’s work as having occurred by chance” (24-25). The women depict their lives as passive until they are “called” to fulfill their mission, their quest. Women memoirists traditionally
do not represent their lives as pre-ordained scripts the way male memoirists often do; for women memoirists, life is something that happens to them, rather than something they create (Heilbrun 22).
