Friday Book Review: Kelly Cherry’s Girl in a Library
Part memoir and part literary analysis, Kelly Cherry‘s Girl in a Library: On Women Writers and the Writing Life (BkMk Press, 221 pages, $16.95) could be required reading for anyone about to plunge into — and those already immersed in — a writerly existence. The depths explored during such a life are murky and invigorating, sometimes both. Cherry is the author of 19 books, including volumes of poetry, short stories and criticism. She presents here a collection of essays that examine her experience and output as a woman and writer, within the context of other women who write. “It will still be a long while before the term woman writer becomes unuseful — I do hope someday it will be exactly that,” Cherry writes, “and in the meanwhile women writers may look to one another for support, guidance, and a sense of the possibilities, if only by reading one another’s work.”
Cherry, whose own roots are there, devotes many pages to Southern writers, including one whole chapter for Bobbie Ann Mason. There’s also a chapter on Cherry’s favorite contemporary African American women writers, plus individual chapters devoted to the writers Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary Ward Brown and Ann Tyler. Within these and other sections, Cherry nods to dozens more scribes, both male and female, whose works influence and impress her. (The bibliography and index, combined, stretch for 12 pages.)
