On Writing Portrait of a Feminist by Marianna Marlowe

The inspiration for my book began one spring eight years ago. It was the year I turned fifty; the same year my oldest son turned eighteen, graduated from high school, and left for a college five states and two airplane rides away; and the year the troubles started between me and a beloved sibling. I was not in a good place—dreading Empty Nest, turning fifty with no new passion or career, aching with family conflict. That spring of 2018 I’d never written “creatively” in my entire life. I had read all my life, and written academically as a PhD in English and an educator, but I never thought I should or even could write creatively.

But also that spring something in me, or in the universe, suggested not only writing creatively but writing memoir. I don’t remember what the specific trigger was for this suggestion, quite new and somewhat outlandish to me, but I continue to be immensely grateful to it. In many ways, in the most important ways, creative writing has been a lifesaver. Suddenly I had what felt like a pointed purpose, just as my previous purposes were fading away. I no longer had academia and teaching, and I was soon to transition out of hands-on motherhood. My house was decorated and my garden landscaped. What was I going to do with my time?

Somehow, someway, I decided that spring to try my hand at writing memoir. It may have been reading Abigail Thomas’s Safekeeping, or perhaps Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments. Here was a genre, the artful telling of true stories, done intimately and compellingly. I was attracted to it, a magnet to steel, as a way to express what I could not or would not to my friends and family—this sort of life crisis that I didn’t want to burden them with. 

So I started to write. 

At first I wrote secretly. I wrote in cars waiting for my sons to finish their various activities; I wrote on my living room couch; I wrote on my bed. And my writing was about myself, about my life and my choices and my desires. And they all, it turned out, revolved around feminism. The very first draft of my memoir was in a traditional, linear form with chapters that led loosely one to another. But it wasn’t the right format for me. Because I was new to creative writing, and had never tried to write anything like memoir, the first attempt was clumsy and uneven. There were some scenes, but not that many, and much exposition.

I had writing coach Marion Roach Smith take a look at it and she told me immediately that I had to write more in scenes. So I scrapped the whole thing and started anew. At around that same time I read craft book Shimmering Images by Lisa Dale Norton, and her strategy of starting with a shimmering image from your past then building on that image resonated with me. It turned out that the idea of fleshing out the “shimmering image” was an endlessly productive entry into writing from and about my life. Concurrently, I started taking a memoir workshop at The Writing Salon in San Francisco. There we were encouraged to write 2,000 words or so every two weeks from a creative nonfiction example. This became the template for my process.

I wrote and wrote and wrote. I saw shimmering images in my memory and sat with them, thought about them, expanded on them. And each and every one had something to do with feminism, or, more precisely, with the evolution of my feminism. Since I can remember, I’ve always identified as a feminist, even before I knew that label for what it has become to me: a profoundly humanist philosophy. After a year or so, I had a selection of mostly stand-alone pieces. I began to think of them as chapters in a book. Instead of a slice-of-life memoir, or a memoir about one adventure, challenge, or trauma, I saw what became Portrait of a Feminist as a book of thematically linked chapters. And the organizing concept was feminism. 

Every chapter, organized in the book chronologically, tells a story that shaped my evolving feminist identity. Not every chapter describes some obvious feminist moment. In fact, most of them don’t. What all of them do, though, is show how patriarchy infiltrates every part of our culture and thus our experience, from family to school to work to ambition to clothing choices to everyday freedoms like walking or traveling or living alone as a woman. Patriarchy with its misogynist norms and toxic masculinity saturates our identities to the point where it’s hard to tell how much we’ve been shaped by it. 

Isabel Allende writes that she’s been a feminist since kindergarten. I understand this. I feel like I’ve been a feminist from birth. My feminism is a sense of justice before anything else. It makes sense, then, that when I started writing, I would write a memoir called “Portrait of a Feminist.” Once a writing instructor—male—asked me with a bit of a smirk in his voice if I thought it was a good idea to call my own book “Portrait of…” He was thinking, of course, of James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, and implying hubris on my part. Yes, I knew of James Joyce’s book, and also of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady. Both written by men. Instead of assuming hubris, he should more correctly have assumed a rewriting of the male gaze and the male ego that centers the masculine self. What I wanted to do was prioritize women’s experiences, to write from the feminine self. 

Perhaps because of the thematic organization of the book, there is no dramatic narrative arc. But with the framing of the memoir, I wanted to show some movement forward, some “progress” in terms of living a feminist life. The memoir starts with a scene in which I’m teaching teenage girls about “media literacy.” When I ask who identifies as a feminist, only three girls raise their hands, and two of them hesitate before doing so. The concluding chapter of the book, by contrast, depicts a gathering where a young woman in her twenties asks me if I am a feminist, then raises her arms in joyful triumph when I say yes. Ending the book on this note, however subtle, hopefully shows how my struggle to live and model and teach feminism is worth it, was always worth it. 

—
Marianna Marlowe is a Latina writer who writes creative nonfiction that explores issues of gender identity, feminism, cultural hybridity, intersectionality, and more. Her short memoir has been published in Narrative, Hippocampus, The Woven Tale Press, Eclectica, Sukoon, and The Acentos Review among others. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

PORTRAIT OF A FEMINIST

Infused with a passion for justice, this sublime, expansive memoir by a Peruvian American feminist will appeal to fans of Crying in H Mart and How to Raise a Feminist Son.

Through braided memories that flash against the present day, Portrait of a Feminist depicts the evolution of Marianna Marlowe’s identity as a biracial and multicultural woman—from her childhood in California, Peru, and Ecuador to her adulthood as an academic, a wife, and a mother.

How does the inner life of a feminist develop? How does a writer observe the world around her and kindle, from her earliest memories, a flame attuned to the unjust?

With writing that is simultaneously wise and shimmering, nuanced and direct, Marlowe confronts her own experiences with the hallmarks of patriarchy. Interweaving stories of life as the child of a Catholic Peruvian mother and an atheist American father in a family that lived many years abroad, she examines realities familiar to so many of us—unequal marriages, class structures, misogynist literature, and patriarchal religion. Portrait of a Feminist explores the essential questions of feminism in our time: What does it look like to live in defense of feminism? How should feminism be evolving today?

BUY HERE

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing