SOURCE: “Assimilation Blues: Maureen Howard's Facts of Life,” in MELUS, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 95–102.

In the following essay, O'Brien explores the themes of assimilation and ethnic identity in Facts of Life.

Narratives of exile and immigration arguably bring into sharper focus than other autobiographical modes the concept identified by Philippe Lejuene as “the autobiographical pact.”¹ One reason why this may be the case is that there is an implicit struggle in autobiography, an application to the self of the sense of confrontation and critique that is applied to the objective world in Realist fiction. The experience typified and challenged in both Realist fiction and autobiography can, very generally, be called change. And in the age of capitalism, which also happens to be the age when change has become the structural principle of both social reality and the models of identity to which that reality gives rise, no change...