Beginning of Essay
First impressions of Steedman's "Exiles" left me feeling as if the woman had a lot of sour grapes to deal with. The overall flavor of the piece leans toward the negative, the cynical and sometimes even the sarcastic. She seems particularly critical of her parent ....

Middle of Essay
.... when, at about the age of eight, I asked her what she'd done, and she said she'd worked in an office, done clerical work. Steedman then goes on to say how she had sought out and verified that this lie was true: . . .I talked to my grandmother and she, puzzled, told me that Edna had never worked in any office, had in fact been apprenticed to a dry-cleaning firm that did tailoring and mending. Steedman later on sought additional opportunities to reveal her mother's evasion of the truth. From the top of page 650: . . .Now I can feel the deliberate vagueness in her accounts of those years: "When did you meet daddy?"-"Oh, at a dance, at hom ....