Publish or Perish: Food, Hunger, and Self-Construction in Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior"

Abstract

*M * axine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts is a difficult book to define generically. Kingston originally intended it for publication as a novel, but Knopf thought it would sell better as nonfiction and labeled the first printing as such.1 The publisher's strategy worked: in 1976, the year it was published, the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best work of nonfiction. Most of the book, however, is fictional-a collection of stories, myths, embellished episodes, and bewildering shifts in authorial perspective, time, and, especially, setting. Vintage International, unable to decide what the book is, yet unwilling to give up, puts the somewhat contradictory-indeed, unintentionally deconstructive-label Nonfiction/Literature on the cover of the most recent edition.