Up Home | Ruth J. Simmons

Memoirs of remarkable women are really interesting to me, and Ruth J. Simmons has a remarkable life story. I've read others and they're all inspiring. Most often they feature an exceptionally bright woman who meets the right people at the right time who become her champions and open doors that would ordinarily be closed. I think Simmons probably has another book in her to explore how she got from college (with a literature degree of all things!) to college president at notable universities. How she bust through the glass ceiling of academia (with an English degree, did I mention?!) would definitely be inspiring for many women.

I've read a number of memoirs in the last year (unusual for me) and I'm seeing a pattern. When the memoirist is a professional writer (What We Carry, How to Say Babylon) the book is very different than when the memoirist is a person, who may be a good writer (but not a writer) is telling their story. Memoirs are written with the benefits of hindsight, but in the hands of a professional writer (essayist, novelist, poet) the effect is quite different. I feel like the non-professional writer tends to over-romanticize their past. Simmons puts a high sheen on her life as the child of sharecroppers, for example. I'm not quite sure why that is--whether the writer just has more narrative skills at hand to weave the story, perhaps. Whatever the case, I feel like those more artful stories, rather than just personal stories, linger in my memory more than the more chronological feeling of the non-writer memoirist. Maybe I'm just drawn to those more writerly memoirs because I was an English major back in the day??