Panthea Reid

A feminist icon, beloved of the left and also a superb delineator of what blocks writers from writing, Omaha native Tillie Olsen is deserving of this penetrating biography. It’s the first book to unravel the riddle of a life devoted to and tormented by writing.

Olsen, like her contemporary Henry Roth, first came to fame in the 1930s, publishing a brand of proletarian fiction grounded in the hardships of her own immigrant roots and working-class life. And then she fell silent.

She seemed to disappear and then emerged out of obscurity with the celebrated appearance of her 1978 essay collection, “Silences,” an eloquent disquisition on the fate of mostly female writers whose lives were interrupted and stifled by the need to work, to raise children, to support husbands and families — to, in short, submit themselves to the demands of conventional roles and traditional expectations.

So powerful was Olsen’s evocation of this thwarted writers’ world that it seemed almost as heroic to relinquish the will to write as it was to remain writing.

“Silences” propelled a new audience of readers to discover Olsen’s fiction, especially her well-reviewed yet neglected 1961 masterpiece, “Tell Me a Riddle.” That volume’s signature story, “I Stand Here Ironing,” a classic of American literature, is the soliloquy of a mother worrying about the damage done to her daughter by poverty-stricken circumstances.

The story is inspiring because the mother’s anguish is so well articulated. The title becomes a heroic shibboleth akin to Luther’s “Here I Stand.” And what makes the story so powerful is that it ennobles the woman’s domesticity even as it laments her plight.

Olsen transformed her own life into this story, making it into a powerful myth as a popular platform performer who brought audiences to tears and cheers as she presided over her own rebirth as the wife, homemaker, mother and worker now teaching writing classes and inspiring a new generation of writers. Tillie Olsen was not merely esteemed; she was revered.

Enter the admiring biographer. Panthea Reid was flattered when Olsen responded affectionately to one of Reid’s appreciative letters. But the correspondence ended when Reid announced she wanted to write Olsen’s biography.

A year passed, and after making contact with Olsen’s family, Reid began to get her subject’s cooperation. All to the good, until Olsen balked at granting the biographer’s request for permission to quote from Olsen’s Stanford University archive.

What was the problem? Like Huckleberry Finn, Tillie Olsen did not mind telling quite a few “stretchers.” In fact, Olsen had not witnessed the aftermath of a black man’s terrible beating; she had not been held back in school because she was deemed retarded. Her dramatic versions of her childhood were false or wildly exaggerated, as Olsen’s brother and others were quick to tell Reid.

In effect, Reid learned that biography is the enemy of the ideology and mythology that many writers invent for themselves. Reid’s success in negotiating the fraught territory between the fact and fiction of Olsen’s life while demonstrating why Olsen’s work should still have a strong hold on us is what makes the biographer’s book so bracing.

Reid reveals her finesse by explaining how she ultimately coaxed Olsen into giving permission to quote from unpublished work. The sly biographer composed a statement lauding Olsen for making her archive available to scholars — and then slipped in a phrase about giving permission to quote. “What a nice letter,” Olsen said, as she signed her approval.… (mere)