SOURCE: Sandmaier, Marian. “Outlaw Stories Empower & Inspire.” New Directions for Women 18, no. 1 (January 1989): 20.

In the following review of Writing a Woman's Life, Sandmaier commends Heilbrun's contention that women need to chronicle the true stories of their lives as well as the female experience as a whole.

In 1968, novelist and memoirist May Sarton published Plant Dreaming Deep, an exquisitely beautiful meditation on the experience of buying her own home and living alone. The reviews were approving; her readers rapturous. And then Sarton did something extraordinary: She rewrote the story of those bravely told years of aloneness and called it Journal of a Solitude: now a furious, pain-charged account of struggle and survival. The year was 1973. The mask was lifted; the pretense over.

The publication of Sarton's twice-told tale marks a genuine watershed in women's autobiography, contends Carolyn T. Heilbrun in her passionately argued, revelatory book, Writing a Woman's Life...