The persistence of memoirs
Jun. 11th, 2006 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Years and years ago, when I was but a child on the verge of adolescence, I read a book called Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison. I remember the library I borrowed it from. the room where it was shelved, the afternoon sunlight coming in the window over the shelves of science fiction. I remember the plastic cover taped over the hardbound book's dust jacket. I remember thinking, more or less, - spacewoman? This I have to read.
I was a bit young, some might say, to be reading adult science fiction, but this was one of the handful of parenting things my mother did well - she let me read whatever I wanted to. I had her library card in hand when I went to the adult section of the libaray, and I could read anything that struck my fancy. Most of that was science fiction.
What I did not remember, or realise, until re-reading the book, was how deeply it burrowed into my imaginative subconscious, with its examinations of various kinds of human and non-human reproduction and its revelation that some acts of reproduction are desired and joyful and others are inconvenient and even dangerous and need not be allowed to follow their natural course.
There is an underlying idea, only once or twice stated openly, but pervasive nonetheless, in Memoirs of a Spacewoman that reproduction should be consensual, and that a woman need not stay pregnant just because she is pregnant now - but that a woman who wants to be pregnant has every right to be so, and her needs and those of her child should be accommodated by her society.
In rereading the book, I was astonished to find images I'd forgotten were there, images that had surfaced in my dreams at a particularly crucial point in my life. I was 19, pregnant, and had decided to have an abortion. It was the only decision that was right for me at the time, but this was in the 70s and there were some elements of social conditioning for me to get through. I had a series of dreams at that time that comforted me, made me feel somehow what I knew in my mind, that I had done the right thing. It wasn't until recently, rereading Mitchison, that I realised that the images, the situations, the "stuff" that most of those dreams were made of had come right out of the pages of Memoirs of a Spacewoman.
So a very belated thank you, Naomi Mitchison, for writing the book I would need to help me resolve my emotional issues about abortion.
Oh, and in addition to all the personal stuff, it's an interesting read. Mitchison's protagonist is a career space explorer, a communications specialist, someone trained to use everything - her mind, her words, her body, her empathy - to find ways to communicate with other species. Communication at such an intense and intimate level is, at least for humans and for some other species of varying levels of sentience she encounters, can overlap with sex, which can overlap with reproduction. The events of the protagonist's life, as a spacewoman and as a parent or potential parent in some rather unorthodox circumstances, explores the conections between communication and reproduction, both biologically and culturally
In many ways ahead of its time, it deserves to be remembered as a classic of science fiction.