Art For the Ladylike: An Autobiography Through Other Lives

By Whitney Otto

I always knew that I would never write a traditional memoir or autobiography. I felt my life wasn’t eventful enough in any sort of significant way, which can be good in the real world, but can be something of a liability in the memoir world. Also, my favorite memoirs/autobiographies run along less conventional lines.

Think The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, or An Accidental Autobiography by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, or The Big Sea by Langston Hughes.  These autobiographies are excellent examples of creative narrative approaches. 

I began something a little experimental in the late 1990s which, by the early aughts turned into Art For the Ladylike: An Autobiography Through Other Lives. The idea being that we can be known by who and what we love, that being influenced by people or, in my case, a group of women photographers, can be an autobiography. 

I’m primarily a novelist, and that might be the very thing that had me understanding that autobiography can be presented as imaginatively as a novel—you just can’t change the particulars of the story and still call it nonfiction. Or as the writer, Janet Malcolm, wrote, the fiction writer is free to construct the house, but the nonfiction writer is just renting; the furniture may be moved around the place but the house must remain the same. 

This book is a selection of biographical details of the lives of eight women photographers whom I have loved since my youth (I am not a photographer. I didn’t aspire to being a photographer). That is, I didn’t just decide to write about female photographers; these eight women are specific and highly personal because it is my autobiography.

Another aspect of this book was wanting to draw on the same source material, that is, the same eight women photographers (who easily span the 20th century) featured in my novel, Eight Girls Taking Pictures. Art For the Ladylike is the nonfiction version. I was curious to see how the same material would dictate the form and function of each book. I call it my literary diptych.

So, I began with the desire to, more or less, examine my own life, which led to revisiting the lives of these photographers. How did they find the time and space to make their pictures? How did they navigate love and partners and children? How did they work around the societal expectations of women in their respective eras? How did they find success within their, often male-dominated, professions (depending, again, on their era)?

This book is very lightly researched, that is to say, because these women had been in my life for a very long time (some since my late teens), I was fairly well-versed in their lives and art. I did look at, or read, more recent biographies or documentaries, just to fill things out a bit. I also knew that I was only interested in writing about aspects of their lives, not their entire lives, things that resonated for me, making this a book with biographical elements rather than straight biography.  It isn’t a bad idea to take your research, as one of my writing professors once told me, and put it in another room, away from your desk, once you begin to write. He said that what you remember is what you need.

But the answer to how I wrote this book is to say I just wrote about things I liked talking about. I didn’t think about a reader (writers often have a reader, or a type of reader, in mind when writing), or if the book was publishable (I wasn’t sure that it was), or if it would fit neatly into a literary category. I just wrote what I loved.

—

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Whitney Otto is the author of five novels and one book of nonfiction. How To Make an American Quilt was a New York Times Best Seller (as well as other bestseller lists), New York Times Notable Book, nominated for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award, and adapted into a feature film produced by Steven Spielberg. Now You See Her was nominated for an Oregon Book Award, and optioned for film. The Passion Dream Book was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, optioned for a film, and an Oregonian Book Club selection. A Collection of Beauties at the Height of Their Popularity was a Multnomah County Library selection. Eight Girls Taking Pictures, was published by Scribner in November 2012. Her novels have been published in fourteen languages. Her latest book is ART FOR THE LADYLIKE: An Autobiography Through Other Lives.

Her work has also appeared in anthologies, magazines and the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Oregonian. In 2006 she had an art exhibition of her shadow boxes at the Littman & White Galleries in Portland, OR. For additional information please visit www.whitneyotto.com.

ART FOR THE LADYLIKE: An Autobiography Through Other Lives

“Whitney Otto has woven a work of breathtaking texture. Art for the Ladylike is a love letter to the resilience and beauty of women who deign to make art. This book brought me back to myself.” — Lidia Yuknavitch

“A fascinating and peripatetic memoir, Whitney Otto’s fearless, free-range narrative investigates parenting, class, sexuality, and worlds beyond. Startling, funny, and compassionate—reminiscent of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet—this is an invaluable guide to the life of the mind and the soul of an artist.” —Diana Abu-Jaber

“In this inviting blend of biography and memoir, novelist Otto (How to Make an American Quilt) examines her life in terms of the women artists who influenced her.…Otto provides a fascinating tour of art through the lens of her own experience. Creatives of all sorts will enjoy [her] wide-ranging insights.” —Publishers Weekly

In Art for the Ladylike, Whitney Otto limns the lives of eight pioneering women photographers—Sally Mann, Imogen Cunningham, Judy Dater, Ruth Orkin, Tina Modotti, Lee Miller, Madame Yvonne, and Grete Stern—to in turn excavate her own writer’s life. The result is an affecting exploration of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be an artist, and the perils and rewards of being both at once. In considering how feminism, career, and motherhood were entangled throughout her subjects’ lives as they tirelessly sought to render their visions and paved the way for others creating within the bounds of domesticity, Otto assesses her own struggles with balancing writing and the pulls of home life. Ultimately, she ponders the persistent question that artistic women face in a world that devalues women’s ambition: If what we love is what we are, how do those of us with multiple loves forge lives with room for everything?

BUY HERE

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing