I Dwell in Possibility: A Memoir

by Toni McNaron

Overview

This brave and lyrical memoir is a powerful social document as well as an account of emotional, psychological, and intellectual self-actualization over four decades—from McNaron’s childhood encounters with segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, through her first days of teaching and her fear of exposure as a lesbian and an alcoholic, to her recovery and coming out.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781558612808
Publisher:	Feminist Press at CUNY, The
Publication date:	11/01/2001
Series:	The Cross-Cultural Memoir Series
Edition description:	REVISED & EXPANDED
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

Editorial Reviews

"A thoughtful autobiography... grapples with the complexities of the pre-civil rights era and her own emerging sexuality." —Publishers Weekly

"Engrossing and sensitive... It moves along at the swift pace of a well-written novel." —Kirkus

"Lyrical and courageous." —Booklist

"This book will be invaluable to many audiences, both those struggling with their own coming to language and those moving from isolation to lesbian community. Its power and spirit capture with great precision the pleasures of victories, large and small, in the effort to become a complete self." —Carolyn Allen, author of Feminisms at a Millennium

"I Dwell in Possibility is an engrossingly good read in the tradition of Audre Lorde's Zami and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Toni McNaron's wonderful autobiography sensitively depicts the contradictory combination of racial privilege and sexual difference as they shape the dreams and longings of a white girl who did not fit the mold of southern belle." —Susan Stanford Friedman, author of Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, and H.D.'s Fiction

From the Publisher

As a lesbian coming into womanhood in the 1950s and starting her career in the 1960s, McNaron writes movingly about the years she spent closeted about her sexuality and unable to make real connections with friends and lovers in an environment and at a time when homosexuality was still a taboo subject. She hints throughout the book about her growing alcoholism but never really states that there was a connection between her having to hide her lesbianism and her need to drink. However, the day McNaron decided to give up drinking was also the day she decided to ``come out.'' Her own treatment of the important subjects in her life seems uneven and many times disjointed, and she leaves the reader feeling there should be much more to expect from an autobiography than what McNaron delivers. Still, her book adds to the growing literature of women's memoirs and is recommended for women's studies and lesbian history collections.-- Patricia Sarles, Mt. Sinai Medical Ctr. Lib., New York

Library Journal