Published in A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 12.2 (Fall 1997): 188-202

Suzanne Bunkers
Professor of English
Mankato State University
Mankato MN 56002-8400

Illegitimacy and Intercultural Life Writing

Legitimate: According to law; lawful; in accordance with established rules and principles; conforming to accepted standards; born of parents legally married; of the normal or regular type or kind.

Illegitimate: a. not legitimate, illegal; unauthorized or unwarranted; illegal or improper; not in accordance with good usage. Born out of wedlock.

                            --Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language

In 1960, Roy Pascal, writing in Design and Truth in Autobiography, defined "autobiography proper" as a text that offers a "coherent shaping of the past" (5) and that establishes a "certain consistency of relationship between the self and the outside world" (9). Thirty-eight years later, theorists of autobiography have assessed the limitations of that definition and continue to explore the ways in which diverse forms of life writing embody diverse life experiences. One strand of this exploration is the study of life writing across cultures. What is crosscultural or intercultural life writing? What happens when the established rules and principles of life writing are breached, when a text does not adhere to the traditional definition of an autobiography as the carefully polished story of a completed life? What happens when not only generic boundaries but also cultural lines are crossed, resulting in a life story rife with ambiguity and paradox that cannot be easily categorized or interpreted? What makes a life and a work of writing about that life legitimate or illegitimate? Who gets to decide?

In this essay, I hope to address some of these questions through the lens of my own life writing. When I saw the call for papers for this special issue of a/b, I resolved to submit an essay, and I made a note of that resolve in the blue composition book that serves as my diary. In that same blue book, I reflected on whether the kinds of life writing that I had been studying and doing for nearly twenty years would qualify as cross-cultural or intercultural life writing. Certainly, my writing crosses not only cultural but also generic borders, often blurring (sometimes obliterating) traditional genre lines. In fact, sometimes people don't know what to make of it. They ask if I am writing an academic essay, a personal narrative, a memoir, creative nonfiction, historical fiction, or autobiographical criticism. They wonder if my work can truly be considered autobiography, since it includes a melange of excerpts from my diary, along with quotations from old newspaper clippings and family letters, plus a liberal helping of citations from census records, city directories, church baptismal records, folk tales, and family photographs. My writing is permeated with my knowledge and experience of the Luxembourgish-American metaculture that shaped the first eighteen years of my life and that, to some extent, continue to shape it today. Central to my most recent writing, In Search of Susanna (1996), is the issue of legitimacy and illegitimacy, as viewed from a textual and contextual perspective.

The "Susanna" of the book's title is my great-great-grandmother, Susanna Simmerl, who was born on April 2, 1831, in Oberfeulen, Luxembourg. Susanna, who grew up in Oberfeulen, was the third of twelve children born to Theodore and Angela (Hottua) Simmerl. On December 30, 1856, at the age of twenty-five and as an unmarried woman, Susanna gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Barbara. Then, in the spring of 1857, Susanna and her older brother Peter Simmerl immigrated to the United States. Her infant daughter Barbara remained behind in Luxembourg with Susanna's mother, Angela. Susanna and Peter Simmerl arrived in New York on the William B. Travis in May 1857; seven months later, in December 1857, Susanna married Frank Youngblut, another Luxembourger who had come to the United States in 1852. The couple began farming near Gilbertville, Iowa, just outside Waterloo, where they raised nine children. Frank Youngblut died in 1892, and Susanna died in 1906.

My initial intent in writing In Search of Susanna was to create a "how-to" work that would describe my efforts to trace family lines and explore family secrets as well as offer suggestions to other writers interested in creating works of family history. Over time, however, as I have learned more about immigration history, crosscultural traditions, and innovation in life writing, the book began to move beyond this framework, becoming a more complex and less easily definable kind of life writing, a hybrid text that experiments with narrative conventions as it interweaves memory and imagination and crosses historical and cultural boundaries. It has evolved into a work of auto/biography that is, as Albert Stone notes, "allied to other women's stories about roots and uprooting, relationships, ruptures, and the search for a stable self amid the often-fragmented circumstances of family, emigration, church, love, career" (x).

As the narrator of the tale, my role has become much like that of the bricoleur who, according to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, takes up "bits and pieces of the identities and narrative forms available and, by disjoining and joining them in excessive ways, creates a history of the subject at a precise point in time and space" (14). Smith and Watson note that this kind of narrator can evaluate as well as interpret the past, creating a "countermemory" that "reframe[s] the present by bringing it into a new alignment of meaning with the past" (14).

The role of countermemory, so central to my life writing, is linked to what Jan Walsh Hokenson has termed "transnational, multi-ethnic lifewriting" (92). She refers to such forms of lifewriting, which have blossomed in this era of poststructural literary theory and postcolonial cultural relations, as "intercultural" texts; that is, texts that conjoin cultural languages and, in so doing, create new paradigms for the study of forms of autobiography. Hokenson stresses that the new "intercultural perspective surveys cultures from horizontal latitudes and particularly experiences itself at their points of overlap, of bicultural or multicultural interaction" (95). In discussing Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation as examples of intercultural autobiography, Hokenson notes that many American writers "are writing as this conjunction of cultures, working in the very interzone where their different languages and cultural ideologies of self (and gender and race) overlap, for it is there that identity must be discovered and a compromise or composite negotiated" (100). Not surprisingly, then, many intercultural autobiographies are by women, given the "dawning recognition of women's plurality" as well as the "heightened sense of inter-identity" that many "immigrant and first-generation women bring to autobiography" (101).

Although a traditional approach to immigration history might assert that the texts of immigrant or first-generation Americans would be characterized more by a sense of assimilation than by a sense of inter-identity, considered more apparent in second- and third-generation texts, I believe that Hokenson's discussion of intercultural autobiography can provide a useful model for the examination of autobiographical texts such as In Search of Susanna. While some intercultural autobiographies might reflect their authors' ability to speak and understand two languages, other intercultural autobiographies, not bilingual in a literal sense, might nonetheless exhibit an understanding and internalization of cultural beliefs and traditions that span geographical landscapes and historical eras.

"Mir wolle bleiwe wat mir sin." ["We want to remain what we are."] This is the national motto of Luxembourg, a small European country of approximately 999 square miles whose history spans the past 1,000 years. Luxembourg historians such as Nicholas Gonner, Christian Calmes, Gilbert Trausch, and James Newcomer emphasize the country=s long history of national pride, endurance, resilience, and self-reliance, despite its having been dominated by numerous outside military powers. Over the centuries, certain images, symbols, traditions, and aspects of material culture have become part of Luxembourg's metaculture, reflecting its people's struggle to survive, prosper, and develop a cultural identity and national ethos. Yet, as Newcomer observes, the pattern of Luxembourg's metaculture is not always readily apparent: "What is characteristically Luxembourgian, then, is not spread out like a carpet for a historian to walk on for hundreds and hundreds of years through time. Rather, it is there like the warp beneath the nap, to be felt for and found by searching fingers. Or it is like an undergrowth, unperceived beneath the obvious trees, but as rooted as the trees themselves" (4).

Central to the metaculture of Luxembourg is its language, Letzebuergesch. Throughout the country's tempestuous history, most Luxembourgers have needed to be multilingual--speaking and reading French and German as well as their native language.  Letzebuergesch, primarily a spoken language, has its roots in the language of the Moselle Franks; over the centuries, Latin, French, and German have also influenced the development of Letzebuergesch, which most Luxembourgers learn at home as their first language. German and French have traditionally been taught in Luxembourg's schools, and Luxembourgers who came of age after World War II have also learned English as a fourth language. As a result of a large influx of twentieth-century immigrants from Portugal, many present-day Luxembourgers also speak and read Portuguese. Official government publications appear chiefly in French, while most Luxembourg newspapers appear in German. Radio and television programs originating in Luxembourg are increasingly broadcast in Letzebuergesch. Thus, the multilingual nature of most Luxembourgers' daily lives, past and present, reflects not only their linguistic sophistication but also their determination to keep their native language, a central aspect of their metaculture, alive.

Jul Christophory, who has traced the origins of Letzebuergesch to texts of the ninth and tenth centuries, delineates the rules governing its grammar and usage in Mir Schwatze Letzebuergesch [We Speak Letzebuergesch]. Along with this analysis, Christophory provides what he calls a "rough character-sketch of the Luxembourger." Christophory explains that the Luxembourger "values roots, similarity, and permanence" and that the Luxembourger is "slow, cautious, and serious-minded." Christophory asserts that, as the result of centuries of subjugation by foreign military powers, the Luxembourger has "an instinctive hate for hierarchic organization and for military or pedantic reglementation" and that the Luxembourger is a "natural democrat, proudly independent and reasonably European" (35). Regardless of whether this character sketch is truly generalizable to all Luxembourgers, it is useful in providing a sense of the metaculture of Luxembourg as it has developed over the centuries. Determination, endurance, and independence--these have been and continue to be the watchwords of Luxembourgers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Historically, Luxembourg has been a Catholic country, and it remains so today. While attendance at church may not be as widespread as in the past, the church calendar continues to govern business and daily life; national holidays are observed not only at Easter and Christmas but also at Pentecost and other Catholic holy days of obligation . At the center of the religious metaculture is devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary in her role as Our Lady of Consolation, which dates back to 1666, when the Virgin Mary was named the patron saint of Luxembourg under the title "Notre-Dame Consolatrice des Affliges." This devotion to the country's protector remains strong today, as is evidenced in the annual Octave pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Luxembourg City as well as in numerous village churches, where elegant statues of Our Lady of Consolation in velvet robes greet worshipers and tourists.

The metaculture of Luxembourg is apparent not only in the fabric of the country itself but also in the cultural traditions of Luxembourgers who emigrated from Europe to the United States during the nineteenth century. Nearly all of my maternal and paternal ancestors emigrated from Luxembourg to the Midwestern United States more than a hundred years ago. They followed one of two standard routes: travel by ship to either New Orleans, then by boat up the Mississippi River; or to New York City, then by train to Cincinnati.  From there, many immigrants went on to Chicago, Milwaukee, and Dubuque--all sites of Luxembourger settlements. Eventually, like most Luxembourg immigrants, my ancestors continued to travel west in search of farmland, which could be bought for $1.00 to $2.00 an acre in northwest Iowa, central Minnesota, and the Dakotas. For the most part, my maternal and paternal ancestors (the Kleins, Kokenges, Mullers, Simmerls, Welters, and Youngbluts) had been day laborers (designated as journaliers or tagloners in Luxembourg census records) in Luxembourg, and they gravitated toward a Midwestern American landscape that would replicate their landscape of origin.

In her study, Luxembourger Immigration to the United States of America, Marie-Berthe Frieders-Kuntziger analyzes the adaptation of Luxembourgish immigrants to American life. She notes that, given most immigrants' village origins, they mostly settled down as farmers; in 1870, only 3% of Luxembourish immigrants lived in large American cities, and by 1880, the urban percentage of Luxembourgish immigrants had risen only to 9% (31). Frieders-Kuntziger explains that many immigrants were drawn to farm life in the United States because of the availability of land; in contrast to the "2.5 acres per Luxembourger in the old country," they could farm from 80 to 320 acres in the Midwestern United States (33). She affirms the importance of Luxembourgish metaculture in the lives of immigrants and their descendants: "[They] carry on faithfully their Luxembourger cultural heritage, dialect, traditions, folklore, social events, religious and secular festivals and literature" despite the fact that "preservation of cultural identity in America is much more precarious for Luxembourgers than for any other ethnic group of immigrants" due to the fact that "Luxembourg is a tiny country and its contribution to America's settlement, albeit enormous for Luxembourg, is very small in comparison to other countries" (38).

As I continue to scrutinize the effects of Luxembourg's metaculture, past and present, I am absorbed in examining its imprint on me, a descendant of Luxembourgish immigants. It has been two generations since anyone in my family has been fluent in Letzebuergesch, the native language of Luxembourg. My maternal grandparents, both born around the turn of the century, learned Letzebuergesch as their first language but were forbidden to speak it at country school or in public. In the World War I era during which they came of age, Letzebuergesch sounded too much like German, which was verbueden (forbidden). This does not mean, however, that many linguistic and cultural elements of my grandparents' Luxembourgish heritage failed to survive on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Whenever my grandparents butchered a hog, we enjoyed traipen (blood sausage) or wirschtchen (cooked sausage). We joked about the beduppst (dishonest) storekeeper who cheated his customers, or we admired the neighbors' new little puppelchen (baby). We shared the Luxembourgish devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who enjoyed a prominent place in Catholic liturgy. For several generations, religious, linguistic, and cultural traditions have overlapped and co-existed in my family, producing in many a deeply felt sense of identity as both Luxembourger and American. Although I cannot quantify the nature of this sense of double identity, it exists within me, and it shapes not only my ways of looking at the world but also my ways of writing about it.

Ever since I was a child, I have been interested in stories about my family's European origins, which were primarily in Luxembourg but which also spilled over its ever-changing borders into Belgium and Germany. Frances (Kokenge) and Theodore Klein, my maternal grandparents, lived next door to my family, and almost daily I could listen to their stories. Grandma Klein ("Groussmamm," or "Mamm" for short) grew up in a family of fourteen children, while Grandpa Klein ("Grousspapp," or "Papp" for short) grew up in a family of fifteen children. Both families farmed near the town of Granville in Sioux County, Iowa; both Papp and Mamm, first-generation Americans, grew up learning and speaking Letzebuergesch in their homes, then learning English later at country school. Sometimes Papp would take me along on excursions to the local Catholic cemetery, where he would lead me up and down rows of family graves and point out whose plot was whose. He told me the story of his little brother Eddie, who had been scalded to death after falling into a tub of boiling water set outside to cool after a ham had been cooked; and Papp told me the story of Mamm's mother, Josephine Kokenge, who had suffocated from a goiter that had gone untreated. After I listened to these and other stories, the characters who populated them became real people in my imagination and in my heart. So it did not surprise me that, when I began to write, they would become central to the stories I wanted to reconstruct and tell.

My value system, research interests, and writing style are directly linked to the rural, lower-middle-class, Luxembourger-American, Catholic cultural environment from which I have come. As a child, I learned that scarce resources were not to be frittered away. My grandparents grew their own vegetables and fruits; they raised hogs, milked cows, and grew corn and soybeans on their 180-acre farm. When they retired, moved to town, and built a rambler next door to my parents' house, my grandmother continued to do all of her own gardening and sewing, even remaking some of her housedresses into miniature versions for me. Paap and Maam attended Mass daily and gave generously to the parish coffers. Granville had only one church, St. Joseph's Catholic Church, and one school, St. Joseph's Catholic School. My mother, a fulltime homemaker who had had an eighth-grade country school education, made certain that her five children received twelve years of parochial education. My father, a rural mail carrier by day, worked nights at the local Conoco station. Certainly, my formative years, spent with my parents and my four younger siblings in Granville (population 300+), have shaped my world view in a much different way than it might have been shaped had I been raised in a large city or a university environment.

So, when I began drafting In Search of Susanna, I decided that, based on my experience of growing up in a rural Midwestern American, caucasian, lower-middle-class family during the 1950s and 1960s, coming of age at Iowa State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison during the 1970s, and coming of scholarly age as a teacher and writer during the 1980s and 1990s, my text would feature a narrator called "Suzanne Bunkers," whose signature would appear on the book's title page and whose imprint would be on its pages. This narrator would be constructed as one self in an intergenerational story that would trace her family lineage back to Luxembourg in the early nineteenth century, where another self called "Susanna Simmerl" would become part of the story, propelling it back to the future.

I hoped to create a tale that would interweave generations of a family within cultural contexts and historical eras, all the time striving to fulfill the narrative imperative to tell a good story. But I knew that it could and would not ever be a seamless nor heroic narrative because it would piece together old letters, newspaper clippings, diary/journal entries, church and census records, family photographs, folk tales, and cultural theory to fashion a multi-layered, multi-vocal narrative of what a historian might term "unexceptional lives" and what literary theorist Francoise Lionnet might term an example of metissage: "the braiding of cultural forms through the simultaneous revalorization of oral traditions and reevaluation of Western concepts" (4).

Although genealogical records have constituted one important source of data for In Search of Susanna, I did not intend the book to be solely a genealogical manual. Like Julia Watson, I distrust formal genealogy, not only because, as Watson points out, it subordinates personal stories to an official history of the family but also because it "makes truth claims about the knowability of family history and its power to authorize the individual while actively resisting the incursions of autobiography storytelling" (299). The blank lines on a genealogical chart are as intriguing to me as the lines that have been filled in; and the repercussions of keeping and telling family secrets are integral thematic and formal threads in the personal, familial, and cultural stories that I tell, interpret, and evaluate.

In my lifewriting, transgression against cultural and religious mores has been a central family secret to be explored and evaluated. When I began researching parish records in Luxembourg during my first trip there in 1980, I discovered that my great-great-grandmother Susanna Simmerl's name had been excised from the baptismal record of her daughter, Barbara. Instead, the name of Susanna's mother, Angela Simmerl, had been inserted into the baptismal record as the mother of Barbara. The absence of a father's name, along with the Latin phrase filia naturalis, were the only other bits of information that I could glean from the parish records of Oberfeulen. The Latin text of Barbara Simmerl's baptismal record reads: "Die Trigesima Decembris 1856, hora septa matutina nata eademque die baptista fuit Barbara, filia naturalis Angela Simmerl ex Oberfeulen, levantes erant Petrus et Barbara Simmerl."  Translation: "On December 30, 1856, at seven a.m., was born and baptized that same day Barbara, the illegitimate daughter of Angela Simmerl of Oberfeulen. Godparents were Peter and Barbara Simmerl [Angela's son and daughter--the older and younger siblings of Susanna Simmerl]."

Only by studying a different set of village records, the civil birth records, was I able to recover the name of Barbara's birth mother, Susanna. No one in my family had ever heard of Susanna Simmerl; records in the United States went back only as far as Barbara Simmerl. Thus, the recovery of Susanna's name was the first of many fortuitous discoveries that would come to me. After some time, I came to believe that more than chance was leading me on as I became more deeply enmeshed in my search to learn everything I could about Susanna's life, both in Luxembourg and in the United States. Some deep desire to know more about how and where she grew up, what her family life might have been like, how she became pregnant with her first child was growing within me.

The process of reconstructing my ancestor's life in an intercultural context led me back to Luxembourg a number of times over a fifteen-year period to study unpublished archival records, meet distant relatives, and converse with scholars. The Lindens and the Steiwers, my Luxembourgish cousins, greeted me warmly on my first visit to Feulen, and I was invited to stay in their homes on subsequent visits. My cousins quizzed me about my understanding of Letzebuergesch and urged me to try out my skills as a novice speaker of the language. I delighted in hearing echoes of phrases I'd learned from my grandparents when I was a little girl. My cousin Erny Linden, who nurtured a lifelong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, patron saint of Luxembourg, took me to Catholic churches in a number of Luxembourg villages. There I recognized not only Our Lady of Consolation but also the saints of my childhood (St. Anne, St. Barbara, St. Theresa, St. Mary Magdalene) in the statuary and stained glass windows. As I observed my cousin Erny's devotion to the Blessed Virgin, memories of my own childhood devotion to Mary, virgin and mother, came back to me.

On several trips to Luxembourg, in discussion with scholars researching the history of Luxembourg emigration, I studied the myriad factors that led Luxembourgers to leave their homeland during the nineteenth century. According to the re-edition of Nicholas Gonner's 1889 study, Luxembourgers in the New World, a number of "push-pull" factors necessitated three waves of nineteenth-century emigration in very specific ways. The "push" factors were defined as demographic pressure, unavailability of land in Luxembourg, economic and agrarian crisis (e.g., bad harvests, famine), high taxes, political discrimination against the lower classes (only the rich had the right to vote), and the threat of military conscription. The "pull" factors were defined as the prospect of higher income, availability of land, and Luxembourger immigrant settlements that would provide newcomers with a sense of confidence and identity.

Most contemporary Luxembourgish scholars of immigration history, however, seemed reluctant to explore my hypothesis that some immigrants, like Susanna Simmerl, left their native land not due to fear of Prussian military conscription or famine but due to fear of ostracization for having produced an "illegitimate" child in a cultural context where being an unmarried mother could mark a woman for life. In nineteenth-century Luxembourg, as throughout much of the rest of Europe, it was not unusual for a woman to become pregnant before marrying, Susanna Simmerl's parents being a case in point: Theodore and Angela Simmerl were married two months before the birth of their first child, Peter. It was far less common, however, for a pregnant woman not to marry the father of her child, as was the case with Susanna. As I pondered Susanna's situation, I could not forget an observation made by Leslie Page Moch in Moving Europeans, her recent study of nineteenth-century immigration patterns. In writing about the women of the textile town of Verviers, Belgium, just north of the Luxembourg border, Moch explains: "Migration alone was not associated with bearing an illegitimate child, however; women whose fathers had died and older women were also likely to be deserted when they became pregnant. In Verviers, bearing an illegitimate child was less a matter of isolation than of low standing in the marriage market" (146).

Several pivotal questions in my study of Susanna's life emerged: How did Susanna become pregnant? Who might have been the father of her first child? Why did Susanna not take her baby daughter Barbara along to the United States? How did Susanna=s mother Angela Simmerl and Barbara Simmerl get to America? Were the three generations of Simmerl women (Angela, Susanna, and Barbara) eventually reunited?

No father's name appeared on either the birth or baptismal certificate of Susanna's first child. Luxembourgish historians Jean-Claude Muller and Jean Ensch, responding to my request for possible avenues in which to continue my search, suggested that I examine census records for Feulen to see whether the names of any young men would be listed as living in households adjacent to the Simmerl household. It would, however, be a "needle in the haystack" kind of search, they cautioned me, not likely to produce reliable results. I understood. Suddenly it no longer seemed important to me to fill in "father's name" on Barbara Simmerl's genealogical record; it was more important by far to come to terms with other urgent concerns.

In the earliest stage of my research, I had assumed that Barbara had immigrated to the United States with Susanna; but, contrary to my initial hypothesis and devoutest wish, passenger manifests from the ship William B. Travis revealed that Susanna had not taken Barbara along with her when she sailed from Le Havre in spring 1857. In fact, nearly ten years passed between the time Susanna and her brother Peter immigrated to America and the time their mother Angela and nine-year-old Barbara Simmerl followed in 1866. My search for more information led me to additional records in the United States and Luxembourg. Black Hawk, Iowa, county records revealed that Susanna and Frank Youngblut, along with Peter Simmerl, had paid for Angela's and Barbara's passage. Feulen, Luxembourg, notary records recorded the sale Angela's meager possessions (a small house with garden, two cows, several chickens) to help finance the trip to America. The notary records also revealed that two of Angela's youngest daughters, by then adults, remained in Luxembourg with their husbands.

Upon her arrival in the United States, Angela Simmerl went to live with her son Peter, a teacher and house painter in Luxemburg, Iowa, not far from Dubuque. Young Barbara continued to live with her grandmother Angela and, at the age of thirteen, Barbara became a domestic servant in a neighboring household. Meanwhile, Barbara's mother Susanna remained on the Youngblut family farm near Gilbertville, Iowa, with her husband Frank and their children. In 1875, at the age of nineteen, Barbara Simmerl married Henry Bunkers; a few years later, the young couple moved to northwest Iowa, where they farmed near Granville and eventually raised their twelve children.

Although I now had answers to several key questions, several more remained. Was Barbara ever told that Angela Simmerl, the only mother she had known, was actually her grandmother? Did Barbara come to understand that she was the daughter, not the younger sister, of Susanna Simmerl? Did Susanna and Frank Youngblut acknowledge Barbara as one of their children? How did Susanna feel about Barbara? How did Barbara feel about Susanna?

To answer these questions, I needed to locate Susanna and Frank Youngblut's descendants, most of whom still live in the Gilbertville, Iowa, area. From them, I learnedthat Barbara Simmerl Bunkers and her children had visited regularly with the families of Barbara's younger half-sisters, Sophie Youngblut O'Connor and Susan Youngblut O'Connor. Photographs in Youngblut family albums, clippings from local newspapers, family obituaries, and holy cards given out at funerals spelled out the genealogical lines and made clear to me that, at some point in her life, Susanna stepped forward to reclaim her oldest child, Barbara.

Had this been a traditional research endeavor, In Search of Susanna would have reached its conclusion at this point, and the intersection of my professional and personal lives would not have become part of the story. Yet central to the story of the ancestor whose life I was reconstructing was my own experience with the cultural transgression of illegitimacy. In 1985, I gave birth to my daughter, Rachel, an experience which provided a number of sobering insights into the realities of giving birth to a child outside of marriage. These insights became the second impetus for my work. Once the story of Susanna became the story of Susanna and Suzanne, my work could not go forward in a linear fashion. Rather, it would embody a continual re-assessment of the ways in which the breaking of silences and questions about legitimacy/ille's birth, I discovered that the local Mankato newspaper=s policy was not to print an announcement of an "illegitimate birth." Soon after, I learned that my daughter's birth certificate, stamped "Illegitimate Birth," was kept not in the customary book of birth records at the Blue Earth County Courthouse but in a separate book called the "Black Book"--the "Illegitimate Births" book, stored on a high shelf in a back room. Despite my request that Rachel's birth certificate be placed into the "regular" book, I was told that such a change was impossible unless my status changed (i.e., I married the father of my child), in which case my daughter could be declared legitimate retroactively.

Inevitably, it now seems to me, my research began to focus on ways in which my experience as an unmarried mother resonated with and differed from my ancestor Susanna's. First, I gave birth to my daughter in 1985, not 1856, and I did not live in the rigidly Catholic Luxembourg culture in which Susanna spent the first twenty-five years of her life. Unlike Susanna, who likely had no opportunity for an education, I was well-educated, and I enjoyed a good teaching position at a public university where I would not be accused of "moral turpitude" for bearing a child out of wedlock. I did not have to leave the country, entrusting my child to the care of a substitute mother for an undefined period of time. My support system of family and friends celebrated my daughter's birth along with me. My daughter's birth certificate and her baptismal record listed my name as "Mother."

While living in Europe with my two-year-old daughter in 1988, I wrote in my diary about the issue of illegitimacy: "Within a certain social milieu I can be an 'unwed mother' --a professor, Fulbright scholar, writer--yet I hope Rachel and I won't be judged solely by our 'illegitimate' status. That word infuriates me, makes me sick" (Susanna, 124). As I began to appreciate the enormity of the decisions Susanna had to make (or had forced upon her), my feelings toward her ranged over a wide continuum. Powerful emotions took hold of me as my theory of the heroic mother collapsed, replaced by my new theory of the deserting mother. Rocking Rachel to sleep in our Brussels apartment one night, I raged at Susanna: "How could you have left your baby behind in Luxembourg? What kind of a mother were you?" It would take me more than six years following my return to the United States to come to some middle ground regarding these questions and to accept the paradoxes and contradictions that shaped Susanna's life as well as my own.

The next step in my research involved re-discovering my own past, then re-membering it within the context of Luxembourgish-American cultural tradition and re-visioning it in within the context of late-twentieth-century American life. Doing so led me to challenge any traditional notions of research and life writing that I might once have held. Rather than continue searching in university libraries and national archives, I made a conscious decision to move in a different direction. First, I leafed through old high school yearbooks, photo albums, prayer books. Next, I dug out my childhood diary, which I started keeping at the age of ten, plus the five-year diary that I had kept throughout my teenaged years. There I found a day-by-day record of my activities as well as expressions of my feelings. In her attic, my mother came upon a cache of letters that I had written home during my first year at college; she gave the bundle to me. I began rereading the letters and found the ones I had written to my father during his hospitalization for depression during the months following his mother's death in late summer 1968. In my own attic, in a cardboard box filled with letters sent to me during the early 1970s, I came upon a four-page letter from my father, chastizing me for wanting to continue my education beyond a bachelor's degree and advising me to stay at home, have children, and support my then-husband in his budding career (advice that I ultimately did not follow).

Farther back in the recesses of my attic, I came across another cardboard box containing copies of several years of legal paperwork dating back to summer 1988, when my daughter's father initiated a motion for sole custody of her, accusing me of being a feminist, a fanatic obsessed with my career, and therefore an unfit mother. Although "the custody issue," as it came to be called, was eventually resolved out of court after a year of court hearings, custody studies, and anguish, it unnerved me to unearth the reminders of accusations concerning the question of whether, as an unmarried mother, I ought to be allowed to continue to raise my child.

Drawing on the memories evoked by the artifacts above, I added another narrative layer to the story, but I balked when Al Stone, my editor, urged me to expand the story, to become "more fully confessional" and discuss such subjects as my family's history of alcoholism and my involvement in an abusive relationship with the father of my child. I was reluctant, not only because I wondered how I could represent certain transgressive (and highly painful) experiences in my life writing but also because I feared possible legal repercussions.

As a teacher and student of autobiography, I have given much thought to the issues of "good faith" in autobiography, the "autobiographical pact" between writer and reader, and the ongoing critical debate over the postmodernist question, "Is there a self in this text?" These are all nifty theoretical issues that take on a certain urgency when one's own story is at stake. I believe I have tried to write in good faith, to tell the truth about how my experiences have shaped my self-image, my perceptions of others, and my attitudes toward my intercultural heritage. At the same time, I know that In Search of Susanna is a construct, an artifact shaped as much by the editorial as by the creative process. It cannot, and will not, tell all.

Writing in Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life, Laurel Richardson asserts that "transgressive writings reinscribe the possibility of 'the plot line,' the story, even as they challenge the format through which the story is told" (180). For Richardson, the issue of an author's presence in the text is a non-issue. She writes, "We are always present in our texts, no matter how we try to suppress ourselves" (12). For her, the true question is, "How do we write ourselves into our texts with intellectual and spiritual integrity?" (7).

Like other life writers, I have wrestled with the issue of integrity, an issue linked, of course, to the notion of "good faith" that Philippe Lejeune has theorized as an crucial element of the "autobiographical pact" between writer and reader. How much could I tell? How much should I tell? How would the fact that my intended audience included my mother, my siblings, and my newly discovered cousins inevitably shape what I would and wouldn't say as well as how I would or wouldn't say it?

Most important, how would the fact that my intended audience included my daughter, Rachel, influence the shape that the book would take? I wanted to tell as much as I could, yet I also felt fiercely protective toward Rachel. My daughter has always known who her parents are. She has always understood that her mother and father have never been married (to each other, that is) and that a baby does not come from a wish on a star, a seed planted by God as the answer to a prayer, a cabbage patch, stork drop, or North Dakota (which is what my parents used to say when I'd ask, "Where did I come from?") Even though I know that my daughter, now twelve years old, feels comfortable with her story of origins and enjoys good relationships with both of her parents, I am aware that a child born "out of wedlock" is still labeled "illegitimate" by our culture and might still bear the resulting social stigma. Appreciating this, I have inevitably struggled with how much to tell others between the covers of a book--and with how to tell it.

Laurel Richardson identifies the crux of the struggle: "What to write about yourself in a research text is a puzzling post-modernist problem. The problem as I now see it is to discover and write about yourself without 'essentializing' yourself by the very categories you have constructed to talk about yourself and without valorizing yourself because you are talking about yourself" (107). It has been said that every autobiographer wants to be the hero of her or his own tale, and, to some degree, I must acknowledge this desire in myself. After all, who would want to be the villain of one's own tale? Ultimately, I must concur with Richardson's astute observation about the nature of life writing: "The story of a life is less than the actual life, because the story told is selective, partial, contextually constructed and because the life is not yet over. But the story of a life is also more than the life, the contours and meanings allegorically extending to others, others seeing themselves, knowing themselves through another's life story, re-visioning their own, arriving where they started and knowing 'the place for the first time'" (6).

Intercultural life writing, as I now understand and practice it, is not a mysterious or inaccessible thing. It is based on the meaningful exploration of my own experiences as well as those of others whose stories are interwoven with my own. It involves the recognition that traditional narrative patterns do not necessarily serve the lifewriter whose mission is to interrogate the very ways in which such patterns restrict one's field of vision and one's avenues of expression. It proceeds from the writer's determination to transgress, to test the boundaries of traditional conceptions of textual and formal legitimacy. It is committed to identifying and foregrounding the ambiguous, the ironic, the disruptive, the fortuitous, the incidental as a means of acknowledging the complexities and narrative possibilities engendered by the interaction of memory and imagination. As the editors of Memory, Narrative, and Identity explain, the "discourses of the self--sexual, racial, historical, regional, ethnic, cultural, national, and familial--intersect in us to create our individuality and form a net of language that we share with the community" (17).

In the introduction to her recent memoir, Dancing the Cows Home, Sara De Luca defines the central paradox faced by the life writer: "Memory is fragile and fluid. Sifted through layers of time and experience, some edges soften. Others reveal themselves with increased clarity. Disjointed happenings continue to shift and warp and seek out new connections. A writer never feels quite ready to call memory truth--and set it down" (ix). In Search of Susanna embodies my attempt to come to terms with the tantalizing riddle of memory and truth in life writing. It represents my attempt to answer the question that each of us continues to explore: "Where did 'I' come from?" As we theorize, write, and enjoy the privilege of comparing ideas with other colleagues and friends at academic conferences and in scholarly journals, we are engaged in our own forms of "performance art." For me, it takes the form of wanting you to enjoy, as well as attend to, what I write and how I write it. And, later today, I will go up to my attic study, take out my diary, and transform the experience of writing this essay into a lengthy journal entry in my blue book.

NOTE: I would like to add a special thank you to two colleagues, Helen M. Clarke Buss and Judy Nolte Temple. In March 1997, the three of us presented papers during a session on "Performance and Transgression in Auto/biography" at the American Literature Association Symposium on Autobiography. My paper for that session became the basis for this essay, which has been enriched by my co-presenters' work.

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