Abstract
Mum says I was always a good wee girl…but a clever wee girl too. I could read before I went to school. Teacher said I could read as well as any of the Primary 7 girls when I joined my Primary 1B classmates at a Scottish state primary school in a steadily declining mining town in the mid-1970s. But one day, when I am still only five years old, Teacher tells Mum she is worried about me. I have become very quiet—I am isolated. I no longer read fluently—I stutter. I no longer write—I struggle to hold a pencil in my hand. Mum and Teacher nod and agree…Yes…you can’t be too careful…there is a fine line between genius and madness…and she is such a good wee girl too… And so the well-told family story about my little ‘clever-good-girl’ self was born.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Old-fashioned term for oedema.
- 2.
Informal term for ‘tobacco’.
References
Abraham, N., & Torok, M. (1994). The Shell and the Kernel (Vol. 1). Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Bachelard, G. (1958/1994).The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1986). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge.
Brockmann, B. (2017). Collecting Family Oral Histories in an Elementary Classroom: Shaping Stories as they Shape Us. In L. R. LLewellyn & N. Ng-A-Fooks (Eds.), Oral History and Education.
Cixous, H. (1998). Stigmata: Escaping Texts. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Cixous, H. (2010). Writing Not Yet Thought. In A. Heathfield (Ed.), Performance Matters. London: Performance Matters.
Cixous, H., & Calle-Gruber, M. (1997). Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing (E. Prenowitz, Trans. Vol. I). London: Routledge.
Cixous, H., Cohen, K., & Cohen, D. (1976). The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1, 4, 875–893.
Derrida, J. (1995). On the Name Redwood City, California: Stanford University Press.
Eakin, P. J. (Ed.). (2004). The Ethics of Life Writing. New York: Cornell University.
Edwards, N. P. (2005). Birthing Autonomy: Women’s Experiences of Planning Home Births. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Forster, M. (1995). Hidden Lives: A Family Memoir. London: Penguin Books.
Goodall, H. L. J. (2005). Narrative Inheritance: A Nuclear Family with Toxic Secrets. Qualitative Inquiry, 11, 4, 492–513.
Gordon, A. F. (2008). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hanley, L. (2016). Respectable: The Experience of Class. UK: Penguin Random House.
Hochschild, A. R. (2003). The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.
Martin, P., Hagestad, G. O., & Diedrick, P. (1998). Family Stories: Events (Temporarily) Remembered. Journal of Marriage and Family, 50, 2, 533–541.
McLean, K. C. (2015). The Co-Authored Self: Family Stories and the Construction of Personal Identity Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Pincus, L., & Dare, C. (1978). Secrets in the Family. London: Faber.
Plummer, K. (2013). A Manifesto for Social Stories. In L. Stanley (Ed.), Documents of Life Revisited: Narrative and Biographical Methodology for a 21st Century Critical Humanism (pp. 209–220). Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing.
Pollock, D. (1999). Telling bodies: performing birth. New York: Columbia Press.
Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Richardson, L. (2001). Getting personal: Writing-stories. Qualitative Studies in Education, 14, 1, 33–38.
Richardson, L., & St Pierre, E. A. (2018). Writing: A Method of Inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (Vol. 5, pp. 818–838). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
Skeggs, B. (1997). Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage Publications.
Steedman, C. (1986). Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. London: Virago Press.
Synnott, A. (1993). The Body Social: Symbolism, Self and Society. London: Routledge.
Tonkin, E. (1992). Narrating our Pasts (Vol. 22). Cambridge, New York and Australia: Cambridge University Press.
Walkerdine, V., & Lucey, H. (1989). Democracy in the Kitchen: Regulating Mothers and Socialising Daughters. London: Virago Press.
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Winterson, J. (2001). Oranges are not the Only Fruit. London: Vintage.
Zerubavel, E. (2006). The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bradford, J. (2019). Between a Rock and a Hard Place. In: Goode, J. (eds) Clever Girls. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29658-2_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29658-2_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-29657-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29658-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)