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2016
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Discussing her latest collection of stories, Twelve Women in a Country Called America, Kelly Cherry recently quipped, “I wrote this book precisely because I was tired of everyone thinking my work is autobiographical.”1 Indeed, the stories feature protagonists of many different backgrounds, races, creeds, and ages in Southern locales ranging from New Orleans to Richmond. Cherry’s title links these Southern spaces to the nation, a relationship the collection’s epigraph by Norman Mailer emphasizes. Read in this new context, Mailer’s statement about bumbling Southerners – that America “is so complicated that when I start to think about it I begin talking in a Southern accent” – is turned on its head. Twelve Women offers a rebuttal through its cosmopolitan settings and range of complex characters. These twelve women are distinct from familiar Southern literary figures, one another, and, of course, Kelly Cherry. To further illustrate her point, Cherry quotes Fred Chappell as saying, “There is no such thing as autobiographical fiction.” Indeed, Chappell has said that Cherry’s writing reveals “that no personal narration is singular,” and thereby no writing is singularly autobiographical.2 The statements by both Cherry and Chappell offer a rejoinder to those readers and critics who continue to look for the writer in the text even after biographical critical methods
WHY KELLY CHERRY WRITES NOW a review by Matthew Dischinger Kelly Cherry. Twelve Women in a Country Called America: Stories. Winston-Salem, NC: Press 53, 2015.
MATTHEW DISCHINGER is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at Louisiana State University, where he earned his PhD in 2015. His work has appeared in the collection Race and Displacement: Nation, Migration, and Identity in the Twenty-First Century (University of Alabama Press, 2013) and Virginia Quarterly Review, and he has essays forthcoming in Mississippi Quarterly, Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas (University Press of Mississippi), and Small-Screen Souths: Interrogating the Televisual Archive (Louisiana State University Press).
1
Quoted in Lady Banks, “Kelly Cherry Talks to Her Ladyship, the Editor,” Authors ’Round the South 30 June 2015: web.
2
have fallen out of fashion in the academy. Rather than reading for the writer, they say, one might read for him- or herself, or for the characters, or for place. Cherry’s remarks bring to mind the famous proclamation by Roland Barthes that a work of writing bears little ultimate resemblance to its author. The interpretation of a text, Barthes argues, should better take into account “the total existence of writing”: texts do not belong to authors but to cultures, other texts, readers – past and present.3 I have rehearsed this brief and familiar history in order to give myself a bit of latitude to make the following statement: Kelly Cherry’s latest collection is about Kelly Cherry. Let me explain. I found myself thinking about Cherry’s recently published essay, “Why I Write Now,” long after I put down Twelve Women. The essay explores a question posed by one of Cherry’s friends about whether it is better for a writer to attain passing fame in her lifetime or longstanding respect and canonization after death. While Cherry’s output is truly prolific – twentytwo works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry – her work has rarely garnered the sort of literary fame that matches her publishing heights. More writer’s writer than bestseller, Cherry briefly reflects on the circumstances that led her away from literary fame in Why I Write Now: “I had managed to make every mistake a writer
3
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image – Music – Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 148.
Fred Chappell, “Introduction: Point of No Return,” A Kelly Cherry Reader: Selected Stories, Novel Excerpts, Essays, Memoir, and Poetry (Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State UP, 2015) 11; subsequently cited parenthetically.