| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman's Life. By Polly Spence. Edited and with an after-word by Karl Spence Richardson. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 225 pp. Illustrations. $17.95, £13.95, paper.)

The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray's Diary. By Jennifer Sinor. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. xiv + 238 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $49.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.)

These two newly edited and published autobiographical works add to a growing canon of personal chronicles by ordinary people whose stories invite readers to grapple with the evocative blend of diurnal dullness and piquant earthiness of their experiences. Spence's Moving Out is a full blown memoir of a rural Nebraskan woman's growing up, marrying, building a family, and surviving through the Depression, tragedy, and emotional abandonment toward eventual prosperity and contentment in the early decades of the twentieth century. Spence's son, Karl Spence Richardson, edited the account following his mother's death at the age of 84 in 1998. The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing is nominally a diary kept by the editor's great-great-great aunt Annie Ray, who married a blacksmith and homesteaded in Dakota Territory in the late 1880s. But this remarkable book transcends easy categorization. It interweaves Sinor's own memories of childhood and the shaping of her female and writerly identities into the complex story, incorporating incisive analysis of life-writing as genre and ordinariness as an experiential condition. It also engages in an exploration of the tropes of articulation that invest mundane details with keen and nuanced meaning. Both works are signal contributions to the burgeoning literatures of down-home remembrances and women's autobiography.

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