If I’m honest – and I usually am 😉 – I have very little idea of who Laurie Lisle is, which may not seem the most obvious starting point for reading her autobiography! But, the subtitle – ‘A Writer’s Life’ – caught my eye. Her work has included biographies of artists (e.g. Georgia O’Keeffe), feminist discussions including being a childless woman, and gardening. That mix appealed, somehow, and so I started reading.

Ms Lisle is the same generation as my mother, one which was really pushing or at least living through modern feminism’s birth, demanding equal rights and questioning the societal expectation that women simply found a husband to support them while they raised children. Over the long span that it took me to read this – wandering off and then refinding it – that has become far, far too topical again, I’m sad to say!

The early struggles to be taken seriously as a journalist, and a woman in work, perhaps hit a few too many sore points, even all these decades on. Part of the book deals with a life-long debate on whether to have children, and how that decision would affect her career, her relationships, her womanhood. Being child-free is a lot more commonplace now than it was back in the 60s and 70s, but it still attracts questions and comments. Balancing motherhood and a career is probably even harder than it was back then, in some ways! And then the point where it’s ‘too late’, and questioning life post-decisions, too.

I went into this book thinking I’d read about a writer and the process of writing, but if anything that was the least part of this. For a start, non-fiction writing didn’t feel anything like fiction writing as I’d think of it, so a very different mindset. There is still a strong sense of a love of words, and that even in non-fiction how language can be ‘art’. The parallels to the lives and careers of the artists Lisle biographies, or her own husband, make this even stronger.

But what I found most striking about this book was the sense of how times have changed – and I’m not sure for the better. There is something almost alien thinking someone could make a living writing a single volume every few years or more. That the author so casually rents a house to retreat to write, travelling up and down the country weekly. There’s no sense of wealth here, just a vastly different era that is only a generation or two ago. It was startling, if I’m honest.

While I struggled a little with the early book – again, might have helped if I knew anything about the author first! – it absolutely grew on me. It’s very honest, and spans a whole life time. I’ve seen other reviewers complain that there’s no ‘excitement’ – well, no, this isn’t a “I trekked Antarctica and scaled Mt Everest” kind of a book. But it’s such a *real* life. Told chronologically, we age alongside the author, living through life events most of us will face, or similar, from youth to 80.

For example, the combination of losing a parent, turning 40, getting divorced, prompted the line:

“I decided it was time to give birth to a reborn self and my voice as a writer.”

And oh, how that resonated! Perhaps one strength of this book is that at some life stage, it will match the reader’s own, and offer that sense of ‘yes, yes – that!’.

Still, I can see that it won’t appeal to everyone. I hate to say it, but it is a woman’s life and experiences – some male (even some female!) readers will find that off-putting. It does lack ‘excitement’, if that’s what you’re after. But as a quiet slice of life, and even as a look at just how much has shifted in society in a relatively short space of time, it was great. I found it both inspiring and hopeful, but also a little sad at times. We’re all so much just muddling through life as best we can, and I can only hope for a life as overall satisfying as this.

This book is an adventure I never knew I needed as a writer. Dripping with empathy and real-life wonderment about the highs and lows that cleave to writers and the intersection with day-to-day variables—such as relationships, hobbies, sacred spaces and more—Lisle is ever a timeless artist in her medium of words and their arrangement.

Unexpected, essential surprises touched me deeply—as a woman without children, when I pondered her sentiment, “I recognized that creative work that demands inspiration and inventiveness, as well as many hours alone, needs to be protected and nurtured not unlike taking care of a child.” Freedom flitted off these pages. Whether the reader works in literary circles or simply desires to read about the life of an intentionally-perseverant woman, I wholeheartedly recommend this work.

WORD FOR WORD, A WRITERS LIFE
BY LAURIE LISLE
#WordforWord,#NetGalley,#LaurieLisle,#GirlFridayProductions

Laurie Lisle has written a memoir of her aspiration from young of becoming a writer.
She was raised in a strict family by her mother and stepfather in New England. Inside and outside of the house, and verbal restrained and the reluctance of what one thought about, ruled.
Laurie had a habit of writing down thoughts in a diary and journal from a young age. She felt alone among classmates. In fact, in a letter to a boyfriend, she says” I give my best indirectly through writing” She compares the lives of other female writers such as Virginia Wolf, Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millet, Robin Morgan and others. How they managed to be writers.
After graduation, she started as a reporter on Wall Street. However, her dream is to write her own story. Simultaneously, her thoughts are, can she manage writing if she is married, a wife, a mother. Will she be free to pursue her thoughts without the family support needs? Will she continue to write when she felt slighted or opposed? Writers required their own space. She also noted that a few middle-class wives had careers. It is either working or parenting. The housewives' syndrome petrified her. A suburban housewife was living in a ”comfortable concentration camp.”
Laurie wrote a biography, Portrait of an Artist, about an elderly artist Georgia O’Keeffe, famed for her Mexican landscapes. Gerogia O’Keeffes life has answered Lauries many questions about how many women in the arts had managed to express themselves so fully, freely, and fearlessly for long.
Another biography, A Passionate Life, about sculptor Louise Nevelson, followed and Laurie was writing other people's stories. Eventually, Word For Word, is her story, her thoughts and emotions of becoming a writer.
A good read, especially for budding writers.
I rate it a 4 star read.
Thank you, NetGalley, Laurie Lisle, and Girl Friday Productions for an e ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I usually like memoirs of gifted writers because they’ve often lived interesting lives (or no decent publisher would be interested) and/or I’m anxious to learn how they developed their own style. I’m sorry to say that in my opinion Ms. Lisle has not lived a life that is very interesting to read about. However, she reports her accomplishments and experiences as if she believes each would be important to the reader. She quotes snippets of her not extraordinary student writing and states they were published in the school magazine. A specific example of the author’s retrospective evaluation of her youthful abilities is the following, referring to her trip to Europe as a teenager: “My excellent boarding school instruction in art history is evident: when the boat briefly docked in southern England, I likened a windblown sky of swirling colors to paintings by J.M.W. Turner, and on the train from Le Havre to Paris, fields of orange poppies reminded me of Monet’s paintings”. I personally don’t find the quality of Ms. Lisle’s writing to be good and this lessens my interest in learning how she learned to write that way. A budding author looking for a virtual mentor could check out classics by Anne Lamont, Stephen King, John Gardner, Annie Dillard, Sol Stein, and so many more. For authors’ memoirs/biographies: Maya Angelou, Mary Karr, Natasha Trethewey**, Frank McCourt, Edna O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, John McGahern, Vivian Gornick, Jeanette Winterson, Joan Didion, and dozens and dozens more. All of these are worth every second the reader invests in them...which is what a decent writer owes him/her. .

Beautiful. As someone who also answered "writer" when asked what I wanted to be, I could relate greatly to this title. Maybe now I'll put feet to those dreams and begin! It was encouraging to read Laurie's journey and I highly recommend it to readers and budding writers.

Laurie Lisle’s memoir, as her title indicates, has to do with an author’s need for self-fidelity in the search for truth that all honest writing must be. Factual accuracy is of course what a journalist aspires to, and this author does begin her writerly career as a journalist. There is indeed plenty of truth-facing in her book, which often gives the reader the impression that the author is balance-walking through her life on the edge of a knife of fortune and decision-making, leading us with her by the hand or reminding us of our own halting stories.

Truth, however, is not a catalog of accurate facts, but requires and even fosters reflection and wisdom as experiences compile into patterns. As the biographer of two artists who are, above all else, true to their art and to themselves, Laurie Lisle develops a reflective consciousness of her own informed by, but larger than, the sum of her remembered (and carefully archived) personal experiences. It seems perfectly in keeping with the course of her self-narrative that the book ends in her garden and in her memory of her mother, where the sharp ego-involved edges of family, career, and marriage conflicts that she has led us through diffuse into a tranquil place of belonging and forgiveness. Word for Word is a book that accurately captures the challenges and accomplishments of a woman’s life as it was lived through the second half of the last century into our present time, but that lifts itself out of the anxiety of what it means to struggle day-to-day to place us in the peace of the serene gaze of memory, serene because memory allows us to leave go of ourselves. This self-forgetting is, after all, what allows us to remember, as Marc Augé reminds us: “Memories are crafted by oblivion as the outlines of the shore are created by the sea.”