Nov 3, 2026 · 1 hr 24 min · 11 segments
Be the main character in the story that is your life – that is the ambition of eight remarkable women featured in Anne Fernald’s collective biography, *Her Own Voice*, guided by Virginia Woolf. We…
She's a fully formed adult woman in her 30s at a time when that was quite an old woman or quite a mature woman.
And she's like, oh, I want something different with my life and I'm going to grab it.
And that, I mean, I was just so interested again and again with each of these women in how they thought about their agency in their own lives and how to be a main character in their own lives and not just be a princess waiting for a kiss in a castle, but to actually be someone who would say, um, No, I have value as a spy.
But I love what you just said, that they want to be seen in the fullness of their lives, which means when they enter into these new relationships...
They're not saying, but I'm going to edit out this other part, or I'm going to forget that I was a mother, I was married, I was a spy, I was politically aligned over there, now I'm over here.
And in some ways, I thought your attitude toward every single of these women is you have a kind of capacity to love them in the sense of holding all of their things in place without reducing them to say, well, this is contradictory or this must make sense only if we discount the other part is less important.
You're holding their lives in front of us and saying this happens and then this happens.
But then sometimes they said, I'm not going to make sense of it because I'm going to live it.
She's a fully formed adult woman in her 30s at a time when that was quite an old woman or quite a mature woman.
And she's like, oh, I want something different with my life and I'm going to grab it.
And that, I mean, I was just so interested again and again with each of these women in how they thought about their agency in their own lives and how to be a main character in their own lives and not just be a princess waiting for a kiss in a castle, but to actually be someone who would say, um, No, I have value as a spy.
But I love what you just said, that they want to be seen in the fullness of their lives, which means when they enter into these new relationships...
They're not saying, but I'm going to edit out this other part, or I'm going to forget that I was a mother, I was married, I was a spy, I was politically aligned over there, now I'm over here.
And in some ways, I thought your attitude toward every single of these women is you have a kind of capacity to love them in the sense of holding all of their things in place without reducing them to say, well, this is contradictory or this must make sense only if we discount the other part is less important.
You're holding their lives in front of us and saying this happens and then this happens.
But then sometimes they said, I'm not going to make sense of it because I'm going to live it.
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