The Joys of Being a Woman, and Other Papers — A Closer Reading

The Writer's Elusive Self

Kirkland's foreword establishes a central paradox: the essay appears artless, like a little boat sailing without chart or compass, yet it demands rare skill. She argues that only those who can hear their own fairy comrade—the true Self—can write essays that warm readers with friendship. This self speaks only in joy, and following it requires childlike feet. Kirkland contrasts this ideal with the reality of readers who hound authors for autobiography, tearing books to shreds to find recognizable portraits. She insists that a writer's head contains a thousand unseen faces, all begging for story, and that the relation between experience and expression is deep and intricate, not a mere introduction of facts.

The Burden of the Autobiographic Assumption

In a later excerpt, Kirkland recounts how friends and family constantly assume her fiction is drawn from their lives. They beam and say, 'Oh, here is Aunt Sarah's chicken-pen!' when the scene describes a well in Brittany. They claim to recognize characters from a single meeting years ago. Kirkland finds this impulse universal: readers are unwilling to let an author possess an imagination. She notes that even critics, when authors are famous enough to be dead, rake the ground to prove that fictional folk were drawn from earth rather than air. This pressure to be autobiographic, she implies, is especially acute for women writers, who must adjust their work to a feminine body, brain, and social relations.

The Discipline Behind the Inspiration

Kirkland also addresses the romantic notion of pure inspiration. She observes that nine-tenths of people want to write, seven-tenths have tried, and only one-tenth understand why they failed. Many think the impulse is more distinctive than its accomplishment, and they regard a writer who goes to her desk every morning like a machine with half-contemptuous envy. Kirkland bluntly states her conviction that any person who could have written would have written, and that her only introduction to editors was made by her own manuscripts. She dismisses the idea of a charmed approach, emphasizing that creation is not merely inspirational but requires steady work.

Kirkland's essays resist easy categorization; they are neither pure memoir nor detached criticism. Readers will find her observations on the writer's life both specific and resonant, particularly her insistence on the reality of the imagination against the demands of literal-minded readers. The collection rewards those who attend to her shifts between humor and seriousness, and who appreciate the craft behind her seemingly artless prose.

There are evenings when Kirkland’s essay about the stubborn discipline behind a sentence reminds me of sitting by a lamplit window, pages rustling like distant footfalls. Her fierce, practical honesty felt softer then, a quieter companion. I found an echo of that quiet in Philosophic Nights in Paris Being selections from Promenades Philosophiques — Background and Themes, where thought itself hesitates, lovely and unhurried, asking only for patience.