NONFICTION - May 29, 1994

VOICE LESSONS: On Becoming A Woman Writer by Nancy Mairs. (Beacon: $15; 166 pp.) Where would we be without Nancy Mairs, vigilant chronicler of a woman’s life, a writer’s life? We’d be stuck trying to convert the 500 a year Virginia Woolf told us we’d need to write into billable hours, like immoral lawyers calculating backwards, that’s where. It has been said already that she is fearless, can write about anything: depression, sex, adultery, religion and now, writing (in true life order of degree of risk). Which means that these essays look more to the stories writers write (in particular, Virginia Woolf, Montaigne, and Helene Cixous, among others), the text, than they do to immediate life experience, as in Mairs’ other books. “What has interested me particularly,” she writes, “is the crucial role that learning to decipher texts--both my own experiences and the works of other writers--has played in my writerly evolution.”

Often asked, “How did you find your voice?” Mairs responds: “In the beginning was the Word . Not me. And the question, properly phrased, should be asked of my voice: How did you find (devise, invent, contrive) your Nancy?” This may seem rhetorical, out of context, but it relieves an enormous burden to find one’s voice, as distinct from others’ and from the experience of others; a voice with some critical authority and a great deal of distance from real-life suffering--a quest Mairs believes is uniquely male in nature.

Having grown up believing that men could fill emptiness in women, for a long time Mairs wrote, she tells us, “out of yearning.” Filling voids with men is replaced, as she grows older and more confident (with the help of other women, writers and friends), by filling voids with ideas, bringing the same ardor to this yearning as to the first: “I could feel them in my flesh, quickening my breath, itching my fingers....” As always, Mairs’ revelations and transformations will translate more easily for some readers than others, but her resolve and her ability to turn a once haphazard path into a clear evolution (her own) is an inspiration. “This is the body,” she writes, “who works here.”