A few years into her marriage and feeling societal pressure to surrender to domesticity, Joanna Biggs found herself longing for a different kind of existence. Was this all there was? She divorced without knowing what would come next. Newly untethered, Joanna returned to the free-spirited writers of her youth and was soon reading in a fever—desperately searching for evidence of lives that looked more like her own, for the messiness and freedom, for a possible blueprint for intellectual fulfillment.
A moving biblio-memoir that’s a gift to readers of all ages, especially those in midlife who want to stroll down the memory lane of their formative reading experiences ... The book’s engaging, breezy chapters explore each subject’s life and writings in chronological order ... Biggs serves up amuse-bouche anecdotes about each figure ... The resulting juxtapositions are often poignant, albeit with few surprises ... Biggs doesn’t approach these monumental writers as one’s professor would have. Instead, she writes about them as if reminiscing about late, lamented friends ... There’s precious little material considering authorship, marriage or divorce in context. History is glossed over. Class and economics come up only glancingly. Intersectional approaches aren’t the book’s strong suit ... About this lack, Biggs is again charmingly self-deprecating ... A Life of One’s Own has much to offer readers new to its subjects.
[An] unusual blend of memoir, criticism and literary biography ... Biggs seems to take a more jaded view of marriage, hardly crediting that any woman might survive it with her independence and spirit intact ... Biggs has chosen women who put their own lives into their writing – as has she.
Full of strange and arresting images from the lives of talented oddballs ... Assembling vignettes of extremely famous writers...is easy, but tying them together is harder. The subtitle, Nine Women Writers Begin Again, suggests a thesis that never quite emulsifies ... Biggs could have chosen a different genre or written this one better.
