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essentialist, what motivates its deployment?'" (xi). In other words, essentialism can be read as a strategy for possessing or colonizing others or as a liberating means of repossessing what has been taken away, depending on who uses it and for what purpose. In returning to Laurence's Dance several years after my first reading, I seek the grounds of Laurence's essentialism, the reasons for its deployment, and the part that the memoir form plays in that process. As Fuss asserts, we must read an argument for essence by discovering "who is utilizing it, how it is deployed and where its effects are concentrated" (20). In rereading Laurence's memoir I find her engaged in an artful dance in this regard. She makes a performance that utilizes a discourse of the essence of maternality in order to establish the importance in her life of her own maternality and that of her three mothers. She deploys this discourse through the special capacity of the memoir form to negotiate the sacrificial binary that our culture makes between the private and public worlds. She constructs maternality as essence in order to produce an effect that revises her cultural inheritance to a significant degree. In observing the performance in other women's memoirs of this "dancing with our mothers," I find women experimenting with a complex narrative voice and the genre-blending of fiction and memoir, and memoir and academic essay. I also find women reaching out to diary, epistolary, and dramatic forms in an effort to construct a dialogic mother/daughter discourse. This not only allows me to place Laurence in a growing tradition of women's memoir writing but also to note her special contribution to this form. The formal element that strikes one on first reading Dance is the overt use of the maternal lineage to construct the chapters: each chapter is named after a mother. This is an important part of repossessing maternality as an aspect of the plot of women's lives, even women who become well-known novelists. Yet, I find that Laurence's most important contribution is in the joining of the very personal to the very public and political in a text about people who have not led particularly public lives. This intimate bonding of the personal and the political , a basic feminist act, has all sorts of ramifications for women's practice of the memoir form. 114 Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women Dancing with Our Mothers 115 Laurence's daughter Jocelyn says of her introduction to Dance that Laurence "conceived of a new structure, one in which she could not only incorporate the facts of her own life but also touch upon the lives of her three mothers.…This new approach allowed her momentary digressions, too, into the issues that most concerned her: nuclear disarmament, pollution and the environment, pro-choice legislation" (xi). I would disagree with Jocelyn Laurence's description of form in only one detail: I think the discussion of issues is neither "digressive" nor "momentary ." Rather, I find this aspect of the text both integral and continuous . The memoir consciously performs the connections between private lives (ones lived by ordinary people who are not direct actors in large events) and the public ideologies that they are both shaped by and resistant to. It is this fact of private persons being shaped by and resistant to historical conditions and public ideologies that Laurence uses as the bonding element between private and public. Her purpose in bonding the private and public worlds is very political in the profound sense that Laurence herself believed art to be. Her purpose is to establish maternality at what she perceives as the neglected centre of our culture, the spiritual aspect of our lives. To establish maternality as central she must construct it as essence, as the one element without which we cannot exist. Although the text is filled with this rhetorical approach of bonding private and public, perhaps its most spectacular example is in the image of the crucified women early in the text. The working of this image into a symbol to establish a mater

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