SOURCE: Lappas, Catherine. “‘The Way I Heard It Was …”: Myth, Memory, and Autobiography in Storyteller and The Woman Warrior.” CEA Critic 57, no. 1 (fall 1994): 57-67.

In the following essay, Lappas underscores the roles of myth and memory in Storyteller and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.

Somewhere near the end of her autobiographical narrative Storyteller, Leslie Marmon Silko muses, “sometimes what we call ‘memory’ and what we call ‘imagination’ are not so easily distinguished” (227). Similarly, commenting on the blurred boundary between fact and fiction in her mother's “talk-stories,” Maxine Hong Kingston confesses in The Woman Warrior: “I couldn't tell where the stories left off and the dreams began, her voice the voice of the heroines in my sleep” (19). Besides sharing a childhood rife with traces of voices, Silko and Kingston both transform stories they heard as children into self-fashioning tools as adults. If, as Sidonie Smith writes, “autobiography is...