Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

"But enough about me, what do you think of my memoir?"

2000; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/yale.2000.0023

1080-6636

Nancy K. Miller,

Autobiographical and Biographical Writing

In the early fall of 1990, a New Yorker cartoon showed two men in hard hats chatting in a lumber yard. One says to the other, "Well, Al, the sixties was peace. The seventies was sex. The eighties was money. Maybe the nineties will be lumber." 1 Throughout the nineties, like the hard hats, media pundits searched for the right way to characterize the decade. Presidentially speaking, if the eighties were Reagan and corporate greed, the nineties were Clinton, the stock market, and Internet mania. (Maybe Clinton IS Reagan, as The New York Times has recently speculated.) 2 Of course, the Clinton era will go down in history not just for the halcyon days of an endlessly touted national prosperity and the birth of dot-com culture, but also for a paroxysm of personal exposure: making the private public to a degree startling even in a climate of over-the-top self-revelation. If Clinton's performances stood the feminist dictum of the personal being the political on its head, the impulse of ask and tell was in no way unique. And not being shocked was, well, very nineties.