Review

Stories worth hearing

LIVES WORTH LIVING: women’s experience of chronic illness
Veronica Marris
Pandora Press, 1996

The strength and interest of this book rests in the variety of voices who can be heard in it, and the direct authenticity that comes from storytelling. The autobiographical constructions of lives lived with a chronic illness have a radical potential to challenge stereotypes, to question the basis of feelings of pity and fearfulness, and to dissolve the barrier of ‘otherness’ with which people with disabilities are regarded. As Marris states in her introduction, ‘the disabled people’s movement is... an area of politics where people still talk about changing the world’.

To a limited extent the book does succeed in realising some of this potential: the voices of the women she interviewed are there to be heard, and they demand the reader’s attention. The limitation, however, is the gloss that Marris applies to the women’s stories, her repetition of the pronoun ‘we’ which seems to be a wholly inappropriate and sometimes even ludicrous assumption of collective ownership of experiences that are patently very individual and personal. She claims that ‘the main or only thing that unites disabled people..is an environment of oppression’. Her introductory chapter acknowledges that ‘we’ experience that differentially, mediated by race, class, gender and age, and she gives brief biographies of the women she interviewed which illustrate their differences, but her insistence on the use of an inclusive ‘we’ throughout the text is set emphatically against that diversity. The women’s stories themselves would have been powerful enough testimony of the many and varied aspects of that environment of oppression, and their struggles against it, without the anxious need to homogenise and find a unity of experience that Marris reveals.

In terms of a political project, I share her concern that ‘women are now disadvantaged by a continuing inability to find common ground among all our differences’, but this fragmentation does not seem to be addressed by speaking of ‘our illness’, as though difference can be resolved by act of will or narrative device. Emphasising the common themes in the stories women have told her works more convincingly, for in their own words the reader can hear the individuated and personal, as well as make connections with what other women say. We are not told of the process which made the book, the form of interview used, and what methodological difficulties arose, but where the book is both effective and useful is in the way it bears witness to the lives of the women, and in how their stories remain so vivid on the page.