num_pages: 89
description: Hejinian's work explores how personal identity may be constructed by and through language. Her experimental autobiography My Life, first published in 1980, is the purest example of this poetic project, and established her as one of the foremost members of the Language school of poetry.My Life is composed of titled prose paragraphs, each built of disjunctive sentences that avoid coherence. The text is allusive and often ambiguous. Many of the sentences appear as windows into a life, while others act as brief aphorisms on the making of the book itself. Phrases recur and weave together as motifs throughout, making new meanings through repetition. However, Hejinian keeps overall coherence at arm's length: she acknowledges that when writing any history it is "impossible to get close to the original, or to know 'what really happened.'"
language: English
title: My Life
titlecomplete: My Life
genres: Literature, Feminism, Womens, Biography, Memoir, Autobiography, Biography Memoir, Read For School, Poetry, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 1941
awards: awardedAt: 536486400000
name: San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award
publisher: Burning Deck