Girl Rearing

Though it's subtitled "Memoir of a Girlhood Gone Astray," this is not a memoir in any usual sense. Aldrich tells you in subtle and not so subtle ways that she doesn't give a hoot about the rituals of sincerity that define the popular memoir in its contemporary form. This book proceeds on its own terms, in a series of stories, essays, parables, dialogues, and rants that give an account of "M," the heroine, who's knocking on the door of American Girlhood like somebody in a story by Kafka. Her antagonist - the doorkeeper so to speak - is her mother, a character who looms "like giants in wartime, beyond kissing." The parts of this comic drama are alternately hilarious, bitter, and heartbreaking, and the whole is as difficult to pigeonhole as Thoreau's "Walden" - another book you could call a memoir if you wanted to.

In her experimental memoir, GIRL REARING, Marcia Aldrich prefers a literary and expansive notion of truth-telling to the literal and constrained "just the facts, ma'am"-style often associated with autobiography. As such, her GIRL REARING belongs in the tradition of Henry Adams' THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS, Gertrude Stein's AUTOBIOGRAPY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS, Mary McCarthy's MEMORIES OF A CATHOLIC GIRLHOOD, Maxine Hong Kingston's WOMAN WARRIOR, and Sandra Cisneros' HOUSE IN MANGO STREET. Like these other important works, GIRL REARING casts light on the relationship between the documentary imperative imposed on memoir and the invention necessary to tell a particular story in the way the author chooses. Aldrich offers readers the opportunity to revel in what memoir has always promised: a picaresque adventure in the voice of a distinctive "I." How readers view this "I," or Rousseau's or Augustine's for that matter, may have more to do with how fully we embrace the truths fiction can tell rather than the ones we insist facts provide. This "memoir of a girlhood gone astray" presents girl rearing as a relentless education in becoming small (through strict control of bodily appearance), unnoticed (through relegation to the powder room rather than the boardroom), and skilled only at things that do not give pleasure. At the heart of this training in psychic hygiene is a mother who is both overwhelmingly interested in the details of her daughter's upbringing and largely absent. The one source of emotional connection in M's girlhood results from a barely sanctioned foray into dirt: M, like so many girls before and after her, falls big for horses. It is a particular horse, Alert Indian, and an unconventional teacher, who give M her first access into physical control for the sake of pleasure rather than self-punishment, and she briefly thrives. Through Aldrich's moving and brilliantly written memoir, we come to see the artifice of girl rearing, of course, and its silent, psychic damage, but also more comprehensively that femininity itself is a fiction. Aldrich's tactical redirection of girl rearing's logic towards her own fictional self-fashioning in the mode of memoir is a compelling intervention in the representation - and living out - of femininity.

Though it's subtitled "Memoir of a Girlhood Gone Astray," this is not a memoir in any usual sense of the term. Aldrich tells you in subtle and not so subtle ways that she doesn't give a fig for the facts or a hoot about the rituals of sincerity that define the genre in its contemporary form. This book proceeds on its own terms, in a series of stories, essays, parables, dialogues, and rants that give an account of "M," the heroine, who's knocking on the door of American Girlhood like somebody in a story by Kafka. Her antagonist--the doorkeeper so to speak--is her mother, a character who looms "like giants in wartime, beyond kissing," yet in one scene lays an old potato peeler on the counter for M to inspect, in wistful remembrance of the early days of marriage. The parts of this comic drama are alternately hilarious, bitter, and heartbreaking, and the whole is as difficult to pigeonhole as Thoreau's "Walden"--another book you could call a memoir if you wanted to.

Marcia Aldrich provides a series of essay of what it was like growing up female in the fifties. Marcia fails to fit the image of the perfect female as defined by her mother and apparently society. Females kept a home clean as they wore their pink outfits. Marcia was a rebel with a cause as she failed at every essence of traditional feminism as defined in the fifties. GIRL REARING is a coulda book that never decides whether it is a satirical autobiography or a disconcerting attempt to shake up the world with a philosophical primal scream. When the essays are introspective, the reader has a gem of a book. When the essays attempt to nuke the universe, the book loses sight of its objective. Overall, Marcia Aldrich demonstrates writing talent that make her memoirs an interesting read.Harriet Klausner