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Constructing the Self in this Volume

Current discussions of southern life-writing are not alien to the critical theories and approaches to the self and autobiography mentioned above, as we hope to demonstrate in this volume. Neither is southern life-writing alien to the torrent of memoirs and other types of personal narratives published over the last few years. Given the diversity of autobiographical works covered in this volume, we prefer to use the term life-writingssss1 to refer to the narratives produced by southerners to construct the self in time. New elements and types of life narratives have inevitably changed the way southerners construct the story of the self. Timothy Dow Adams claims that “autobiography is often an attempt to reconcile one’s own sense of self and one’s life, and for southerners, often conflicted over racial matters, the genre is therefore especially apt” (“Autobiography” 84). However, while it is still apt and appealing to discuss race, we believe that the current southern autobiographical impulse also responds to a multiethnic and multicultural South in which not only racialized bodies but also ill bodies, for example, find expression. Proof of that is Lee Smith’s Dimestore: A Writer’s Life (2016), a memoir in which she interweaves her own personal reflections with the reality of global migrant workers in the region (in her funny piece “Driving Miss Daisy Crazy; or Losing the Mind of the South”) and talks about mental and bodily disease and the role of writing (in “Kindly Nervous” and “The Little Locksmith”). In her seventies, like many other great southern women writers before—Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Spencer, for instance—Lee Smith has decided to look back to trace, through a collection of personal essays, her development as a writer. Dimestore, which Sandra Ballard discusses in this volume, is a contemporary exploration of self, moving and at times funny, told with Smith’s inimitable artistic craft.