The excitement of possibility: The life and writing of Bobbie Ann Mason

With the publication of her memoir, Clear Springs, Southern writer Bobbie Ann Mason has given scholars a unique opportunity to examine the way that fact and memory are interwoven in what she had previously published as fiction. The traditional boundary between nonfiction and fiction is blurred in her narratives which, regardless of format or label, facilitate the individual reader's understanding of identity within a cooperative society. The voice that Mason so carefully distilled in her fiction and which sometimes revealed autobiographical details culminated in what may be considered her finest piece of writing when she turned her examination of human experience on her own life, to illuminate the recesses of her childhood memories and the histories of family members.;The critical practice employed in this analysis is that of life writing which weds research and personal experience, fact and fiction, memory and analysis. Life writing adds a complicated wrinkle to the fabric of literature. It does not simply conflate the writer's life and the writer's work, but instead calls for an understanding of the author's position within the text even when the subject is not the "autos." Instead of abstract and impersonal explications, this genre demands the interplay of the personal and the theoretical. The critical practice of life writing calls for a union of experience and exposition, a wedding of mind and matter, that enlivens the text with personal experience while analyzing it. More than reader response, life writing becomes reader participation and author response.;This examination includes a close reading of Mason's short story collections, Shiloh and Other Stories, Love Life and Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail, and her novels, In Country, Spence + Lila, and Feather Crowns, in light of her autobiography and interviews. Ultimately, words are unable to convey the power of experience, regardless of the truth of memory; thus whether in fiction or fact, the truth lies in the ability of the author to convey the details that arouse the "excitement of possibility"---the possibility of connection with readers through their shared humanity. Mason's work raises interesting questions about the study of fiction, autobiography, and memory.