REMEMBERING (AND) THE SELF IN A WOMAN WRITER’S MEMOIR SLEEPING WITH CATS BY MARGE PIERCY

This article aims to explore the concept of the self in Marge Piercy's memoir Sleeping with Cats. This memoir occupies a very important place in the literary ouvre of Marge Piercy as one of the representative writers in contemporary American literature. It embodies her own personal journey through the years, experience and memories of her life in search of a deeper understanding and remembering of the self. Her memoir is written as a combination of prose and poems, which is an essential feature of the text and as such it will be a primary object of analysis in this paper. The blending of these two literary genres contributes to Piercy’s original approach toward the self and to the way she relates to memory. It represents Piercy’s original finding to reveal her deep commitment to poetry as a vital component of her being and of the way she situates the self in the world. The paper will focus also on another element which is critical in understanding the way Piercy remembers herself in time and the process of becoming the person she is today. This element is Piercy’s very strong bond to her mother and grandmother, as they had an enormous influence on her as a woman, and a writer. The paper will employ the methods of text analysis and the biographical approach.