Writing on the Bias

Abstract

One of the pleasures of writing that academics rarely give themselves is permission to experiment. I have broken with tradition here because I wanted to document the experience of being my own informant as well as tell a story about a white working-class girl's sorties into white middle-class culture. I began working on the narrative in an effort to recall my childhood and adolescent experience of literacy, and kept at it because the more I wrote the more uneasy I became about having forgotten that I had learned to read and write at home before I started school. Writing on the Bias was written under the influence of all that I remember of what I have seen, heard, read, and written over the years. Yet not one of the thousands of texts that has influenced me is appended in a list of works cited, since no textual authority was summoned to underwrite the telling of the narrative. While I may not have depended on published texts, I prevailed mercilessly on the generosity offamily and friends, whose support I gratefully acknowledge here and whose advice contributed to none of the shortcomings of this text: my son Jesse Brodkey, my sister Mary Archer, Mark Clark, Michelle Fine, Patricia Irvine, Sara Kimball, George Lipsitz, Robert McDonell, Susan Miller, Roddey Reid, and Barbara Tomlinson.