Jill Ker Conway describes autobiography as “our favorite form of fiction.” A distinguished and best-selling autobiographer herself (The Road to Coorain and True North) as well as a scholar of the subject, she knows the genre well. In her stimulating and enlightening new book, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography, she gives us historical perspective on the subject, emphasizing how gender, race, and societal attitudes have influenced what autobiographers write about themselves.

“For men,” she notes, “the overarching pattern for life comes from adaptations of the epic hero in classic antiquity. Life is an odyssey, a journey through many trials and tests, which the hero must surmount alone through courage, endurance, cunning and moral strength . . . His achievement comes about through his own agency . . .” With St. Augustine, the odyssey in time moved from the external world to the inner consciousness. Rousseau’s Confessions brought us a “secular hero creating himself,” the story “of the individual against society.” Classic antiquity was not helpful in the same way for women. “It was within the special enclave of religious life that the tradition of Western European women’s autobiography was first established, in narratives about the autobiographer’s relationship with God.” Therefore women did not discuss “the sense of agency and acting on one’s own behalf,” which continued in secular narratives.

Ker Conway considers the works of such well-known writers as Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But many of her subjects are not as well known: Harriet Martineau, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. And in contrast to the writings of such male explorers as Richard Burton, David Livingstone, and Henry Morton Stanley, Ker Conway points out overlooked female accounts of “travels into territories every bit as dangerous” like those by Mary Kingsley and Gertrude Lowthian Bell.

Of particular interest are Ker Conway’s discussions of contemporary works such as Angela’s Ashes, The Liars’ Club, The Color of Water, All Over but the Shoutin’, The Shadow Man, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The author reminds us that we are all autobiographers, “but few of us give close attention to the forms and tropes of the culture through which we report ourselves to ourselves . . .” She emphasizes the importance of cultivating the power to confidently speak for ourselves out of our understanding of our own experience. She encourages us to find our own voices.

Reviewed by Roger Bishop.

The actress Rachel Roberts wrote in her memoirs that everybody has a story and a scream. The Italian novelist Cesare Pavese said, No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide. Both Roberts and Pavese killed themselves.

What Mark Seinfelt has done in his new study is to give us the stories, the screams, and, inasmuch as they can be determined, the reasons for suicide of 50 celebrated writers of the past 100 years. Defining his parameters, Seinfelt notes that suicide was a rare phenomenon among writers and artists before 1900. In Greek and Roman times, when self-murder was often viewed as a noble way to defy persecution or stand up for one’s principles, such figures as Socrates, Cato, and Seneca chose suicide as a virtual affirmation. But in our century, only a few ideologues have deliberately sacrificed themselves to a cause, a protest, or a dogma. In the literary world, Yukio Mishima is perhaps the most striking example of such martyrdom.

Sometimes it seems that once Freud unlocked the subconscious and he had several writers as analysands a Pandora’s box of suicidal impulses was opened among the literati. Chronic depression, madness, alcoholism, drug addiction, existential despair, inconsolable feelings of worthlessnessÐall these things had plagued writers in earlier epochs. Yet suicide, once considered the gravest sin, was usually held at bay. Only in a century of unprecedented martial slaughter, nuclear holocaust, and genocide has it become a near-commonplace of intellectual life. For the Dadaists (whom Seinfelt does not address), it was the only act that made sense in a world in which reason played no part. It is not Seinfelt’s intention to illustrate theories or put the suicides he recounts into an overarching historical/psychological paradigm. His approach is that of the mini-biographer, with each writer’s life story discretely sketched, his or her career outlined, and the events leading up to suicide summarized. The chapters, one per writer, are often meager on analysis but are satisfyingly generous on vital detail. About a few of the most famous authors, such as Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, Seinfelt is both short-sighted and uninspired. But with writers less read, like Hart Crane (the subject of his longest chapter) or Stefan Zweig, he performs a more valuable service than merely rendering a downward spiral: He makes you want to read their work.

Final Drafts is an intriguing bedside-table book, better for dipping into than for reading at a stretch. The stories are necessarily grim and disturbing, but the subjects rarely fail to fascinate.

Randall Curb writes for The Oxford American, Southern Review, and American Scholar.

Although some may lament the decline of handwritten letters, many people are writing more than ever, whether it is e-mail, reports, newsletters, memoirs, or family histories. Writing programs continue to cite increases in enrollment. Patricia O’Conner, former editor at the New York Times Book Review and author of the successful writing book Woe is I, offers readers a new guide to writing entitled Words Fail Me. Designed to ensure that our words do justice to our ideas, O’Conner’s book provides practical advice on how to improve our everyday writing. Words Fail Me is divided into short chapters that offer witty and detailed solutions to a range of issues such as verbs that zing and the Ôit’ parade. O’Conner also tackles issues writing professors repeat every semester to their students: know your subject, know your audience, and know your position. No one, O’Conner reminds us, can avoid having to organize one’s writing. She also discusses the difficult subject of jargon, words that many feel they have to use in their company’s memo. (The comic strip Dilbert masters these.) She warns that jargon is often too complicated and sounds contrived. While the majority of the book focuses on writing style, O’Conner also confronts the one issue many fear: grammar. She explains grammar rules in a short, concise manner with humorous anecdotes, making even passages on prepositions enjoyable. And if readers should forget all of her advice, she provides a check list at the end of the book.

Charlotte Pence is an English professor at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Banned authors or their books are usually attacked for their socially, politically, or religiously unacceptable ideas or speech. Perhaps it’s not by chance that we observe Banned Books Week in September. After all, it’s the time of the year when students (those we encourage to think for themselves) return to schools and colleges and review reading lists for the year’s writing projects. While many students will recognize Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Lolita as banned material, they may be shocked to see Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass on the list as well. 100 Banned Books discusses the censorship histories of books both past and present and this is only the short list. Banning, as it turns out, is an old and established way of . . . well, keeping the lid on. The first list of forbidden books was probably compiled during the fifth century by the pope. The Vatican, however, didn’t abolish it until 1966, after running up a grand total of 4,126 books. The irony is that The Bible still ranks as one of the most censored books in history, yet it’s translated more times and into more languages than any other book and has outsold every book in the history of publishing. Another study in irony is popular sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a believable tale of a futuristic society in which all books are banned. It’s also on the list. 100 Banned Books clears up the fog about what’s been banned, when, where, and why. But it has more than court cases and public opinion. The book allows readers a bird’s-eye view of the values and opinions that this and other societies have held over the centuries with respect to politics, religion, sex, and social mores. Each listing begins with a brief summary of the book, followed by its censorship history, and a generous listing of newspaper, newsletter, magazine, and journal articles for Further Readings. The book provides a panoramic view of the full scope of book banning.

Pat Regel is a frequent reviewer for BookPage.

The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed Murder, madness, glamour, and greed. Yep, I’d say that pretty well covers it.

“One of the first status labels” to emerge after World War II, the Gucci luxury goods company, most noted for its shoes and bags, started with a small shop opened by Guccio Gucci in Florence, Italy, in 1921. Surviving an earlier cheap “drugstore image,” the international, multimillion-dollar business “was imprinted on the American mentality as top-of-the-line chic,” in the 1970s.

Behind the scenes, however (and often more publicly), the Gucci fortunes traced an erratic course that was probably predictable, the author points out, in light of the family’s “individualistic and haughty” Tuscan character: “arrogant, self-sufficient, and closed to outsiders.” Two of Guccio’s sons, Aldo and Rodolfo, alternately fought and made up, and the family tensions escalated into the third generation when their sons, particularly Paolo and the charismatic Maurizio, intensified the conflicts among and between generations.

Often endangered by hostile takeovers and damaging business and government run-ins, the Gucci firm recovered some of its old glitz in the late 1990s. By the turn of the century, under the guidance of a foreign investment firm, it has resolidified its business base and entered into a brilliant partnership with the Yves Saint Laurent label. Its edgier “power look” seems to promise great strides under new management, and more celebrity for the Gucci name.

So much for the glamour and greed. The madness, aside from typical excesses not uncommon in the high-fashion world, is linked to the murder of Maurizio in 1995. The person convicted of instigating the murder is behind bars, and was one of some 100 persons interviewed by Forden, the former Milan bureau chief for Women’s Wear Daily. The parade of hot shot lawyers and business experts is never-ending, and they all have their say, through Forden’s pen. The successive acts of the Gucci spectacle will keep the pages turning and readers anxious to turn to the newspapers for further news of this ongoing drama.

Maude McDaniel writes from Cumberland, Maryland.