Taking My Life - Book Review

By Jane Rule

Introduction, Afterword, and Acknowledgements by Linda Morra
Talon Books
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
www.talonbooks.com

Everyone of us has looked for something we’ve misplaced, been unable to find it, and then coming across it weeks, if not years, later.  Sometimes, we’re relieved, even excited, to find the lost item, and sometimes it no longer matters to us that we found it.

Imagine yourself going through stacks of archival materials.  As our lesbian elders pass On, and with the largest lgbt archives in the world located in Los Angeles, the June Mazer Collection in West Hollywood CA, and Barbara Gittings’ papers housed at the New York Public Library, it’s not impossible to imagine going through Jane Rule’s archival material in Canada.  What is impossible for me to imagine, even though I know with certainty that it happened, is coming across Jane Rule’s unpublished autobiography.  In a box.  In the Archives of the University of British Columbia.

Handwritten on yellow paper.  This is what happened to Linda Morra, who describes herself  in the Afterword to “Taking My Life” as “startled.”  Talk about understated.

Startled?  Indeed.  Lucky for all of us, the Estate of Jane Rule permitted Morra access to all the archival material that she needed, including allowing her to take the original manuscript away from the Archives for a month – that’s unheard of for an Archive to do.  Clearly, Morra is held in sufficient high regard that she was permitted unprecedented access to Rule’s papers.

That’s the serendipitous part.  The rest is this delicious, wholly satisfying autobiography.  I’m going to go out on a limb to say that, if you read no other book this year, read this one.  There’s not a wasted word.  Every description is precious.  I can see the Eel River, the orchards, the redwoods, the willows, the wisteria.  I believe I could reproduce the interiors of the homes where Rule lived as a girl, so detailed are the descriptions.  Often, detailed descriptions of locations are so overly wordy that the reader is exhausted by the words.  Get on with it.  Not these descriptions.  You will want to read them again and again. Ditto the European travel scenes. And aboard the Queen Mary.   Awesome.

The family members come to life in vivid relief, like a sculpture.  You will feel as if you know  these people, for better or for worse.  Rule’s compelling descriptions of her family’s  dynamics and dysfunctions draw us in, and we come to care about what happens to them, at least want to know what comes next.

Her coming out, coming of age, coming to terms with her sexuality are painful to read. This might be a generational, or even a class thing, but there is so much unsaid as the sexual tension grows between Rule and Ann Smith, a married painter whom Rule is so drawn to that she experiences physical symptoms of illness.  Real love sickness.

Typical of that era, Ann eventually makes love to Jane Rule, but only from her safe haven as a married woman whose husband would also like to have sex with Rule.  And Rule ends up with unexplained, dark moods and anger. This pattern is common among women of the era in which Rule came of age.  Later, though, Ann becomes a mentally ill alcoholic.  Who can say if unresolved core issues of sexuality played a role? The autobiography ends when Rule is only in her twenties, with the notation, “In the cold winter flat in West Hampstead a cousin of Roussel’s had found for us, I made my first real home, learned after a fashion to cook, to entertain friends, to live with a lover, and to write my first, unpublishable novel.  In that process, I also began to learn how to live with the baggage of my life, its rhythms of failure and rebirth.”

It’s hard to say whether knowing Rule’s work is important to fully appreciating “Taking My Life.”   If you are not already a huge fan, you will become one after reading this Splendid book.