SOURCE: "Oppressed by Narrative," in The New York Times Book Review, November 6, 1994, p. 18.

[Muske is an American educator, poet, novelist, and critic. In the following review of Linda Wagner-Martin's book Telling Women's Lives (1994), she rejects the author's thesis that women's lives, because of their non-linear nature, do not lend themselves to traditional biography.]

With Telling Women's Lives, Linda Wagner-Martin erects a shaky platform from which to leap headlong into the swirling waters of controversy engulfing the genre of biography. Here's a sample quotation from her introduction:

"The lives of real people have always been more interesting than stories about fictional characters; we may temporarily believe in the exploits of imaginary human beings, but biography wears better."

That will come as news to those of us permanently obsessed with Anna Karenina, Sula or Holden Caulfield. In light of this quick dispatch of imaginative writing, it is particularly ironic that...