Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison

Thinking of Elizabeth Barrett Browning saying that she “looks everywhere for grandmothers and see none” - Mitchison is a woman I would love to count as a grandmother. I genuinely wish I could have met Mitchison. Doing so while living in Scotland seems like just the thing. I’d like to make 2014 a year of reading Mitchison. I’ve got a copy of The Corn King and the Spring Queen to read next, courtesy of my Glaswegian’s parents, and after that - I live about an hour away from the National Library of Scotland, so whatever I can’t find used on the internets I should be able to find there.

Not being very well read in classic science fiction I nevertheless had a sense of space odysseys always being connected to an imagined benevolent imperialism, to do with colonies and terraforming and so on–the stuff Ursula LeGuin said, in “A Citizen of Mondath,” seemed to be “all about starship captains in black with lean rugged faces and a lot of fancy artillery.” But here was a book that was not about that - that was about confronting feelings of revulsion in oneself in order to communicate with different life forms, to strive always to understand them, and to leave them alone. It’s also less a plot-driven novel than it is a rambling travelogue that stops more than it ends, but with episodes of which I never tired and that produced in me real fear, elation, and sympathy. It didn’t hit me in the way Travel Light did, because it’s not that kind of book if Travel Light is a book for the child that lives within an adult, Memoirs of a Spacewoman is for the adult, ruminating on responsibility, communication, compassion, exploration, relationships.

I found a used copy of Memoirs of a Spacewoman, and after reading it almost immediately bought another so I could lend one out without fear of losing it. It was the darkest part of an awful year, and I remember just sitting on my bed alternating between stunned silence and sobs when I finished it, reading the last page over and over, feeling an intense dislocation between where I was and where I felt I ought to be. I’ve been gushing to anyone who’ll listen about Naomi Mitchison and this particular book since Karen Meisner gave me a copy for my birthday in 2011. Given the whole begin as you mean to go on thing, I’m delighted this went live yesterday: my post on Naomi Mitchison and Travel Light for NPR Books’ “You Must Read This” series.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison