With an afterword by Linda M. Morra

Discovered in her papers in 2008, Jane Rule's autobiography is a rich and culturally significant document that follows the first twenty-one years of her life: the complexities of her relationships with family, friends, and early lovers, and how her sensibilities were fashioned by mentors or impeded by the socio-cultural practices and educational -politics of the day.

In writing about her -formative years, Rule is indeed "taking" the measure of her life, assessing its contours of pleasure and pain, accounting for how it evolved as it did. Yet not -allowing the manuscript to be published in her lifetime was an act of -discretion: she was considering those who might have been affected by being represented in her work not as confidently -emancipated as she had always been. She must also have appreciated the ambiguity of the title she chose, with all its implications of suicide: at the end of her writing life, she was submitting herself to critical scrutiny, -allowing herself to be vulnerable as a person to the critique of her readers.

Deeply moving and elegantly witty, Taking My Life probes the larger philosophical questions that were to preoccupy Rule throughout her literary career and showcases the origins and contexts that gave shape to her rich intellectual life. It will especially -appeal to avid followers of her work, delighted to discover another of her books that has, until now, remained unpublished.

Author: Jane Rule
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Talonbooks
Published: 05/31/2011
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.8lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.40w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780889226739


Award: 2012 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist - Lesbian Memoir/Biography


Review Citation(s):
Quill & Quire 09/01/2011 pg. 28
Publishers Weekly 08/22/2011

About the Author

Jane Rule was born in New Jersey in 1931 and came to Canada in 1956, where she later taught at the University of British -Columbia. Her first novel, Desert of the Heart (1964), in which two women fall in love in 1950s Reno, Nevada, was successful as a 1985 feature film titled Desert Hearts.

Rule emerged as one of the most respected writers in Canada with her many novels, essays and collections of short stories, -including Theme for Diverse Instruments (1975). She received the Canadian Authors Association best novel and best short story awards, the American Gay Academic Literature Award, the U.S. Fund for Human Dignity Award of Merit, the Canadian -National Institute for the Blind's Talking Book of the Year Award and an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of British Columbia.

In 1996, Jane Rule received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award for an Outstanding Literary Career in British Columbia. She passed away in 2007.