Just Beneath My Skin

By Patricia Foster

Reviewed by Jill Walker

            Patricia Foster’s latest work, Just Beneath My Skin: Autobiography and Self-Discovery, is a provocative collection of essays that portray one woman’s struggle with identity, class, race, and heritage. Although these topics are quite familiar to native Southerners like Foster, her remarkably open and strong voice makes her story recognizable yet distinctly her own. Reading her work, we learn both how it feels to be a Southern expatriate and how this translates personally to Foster. Writing about a world focused on appearance and beauty, she succeeds in taking us beyond the surface, showing us the soul beneath her skin.

            Interestingly, Foster subtitled her book using both “autobiography” and “discovery.” By this choice she implies that the actual events in this narrator’s life are separate from the struggle with and “discovery” of her own identity. Throughout these essays, Foster aptly demonstrates that this is indeed the case—that the life prescribed for her as a woman growing up in white, middle-class Alabama is not the life and the self that she eventually discovers after she learns to shake off the old prescriptions and deal with the South on her own terms. More artistic and liberal than her family and neighbors, Foster seeks a life lived outside the parameters that her culture attempts to impose on her.

            Formerly a visual artist, Foster’s discovery of autobiographical writing proves instrumental in her realization that she is “a woman in bondage to her past.” Through her new medium, she attempts to break free of this bondage—to get under her own skin and liberate herself from the pretty face she’s always been taught to value.

            Although Just Beneath My Skin is a collection of essays and not a continuous narrative, Foster connects them all through a simple, yet effective metaphor: skin. In many of the essays skin signifies external beauty or race, showing barriers in our society that we must work to escape. In one of the most provocative moments in the book, a blind student of Foster’s listens to her voice and tells her, “You sound big.” Until this point, others have defined Foster by her petite size, white skin, and blonde hair—just as she has characterized the African Americans in her community, seeing only the surface. This moment shows how the potential for self-identity is much broader once we can get past the characteristics we use too often to define and contain ourselves. She writes, “I longed to step outside my own cultural sphere…where I felt both an insider and an outsider.”

            Writing is another territory that Foster explores with graceful argument and insight. In one of her essays, “My Savage Mind,” she tackles some hot writing debates surrounding the validity of autobiographical writing. Foster presents a compelling argument for the importance of the memoir, suggesting that:

Although the prevailing myth of the late twentieth century is one of social, economic, and political progress, the current memoir suggests a countermyth of private shame and disgrace, a narrative of breakdown and recovery, a spiritual longing for connection that goes unfulfilled….I suggest that an integral part of today’s diagnosis is being written as well through our society’s memoirs, its autobiographical essays of men and women who give shape to memory’s conflicted desires.

            This argument skillfully counters the complaint that one of Foster’s colleagues expresses, “The world is just sick of people writing about their lives.” Foster clearly sees through the academic trend of the week, instead believing in what she calls the “intelligent heart …the heart that seeks revelation in dreams, then turns dreams into insight, and insight into wisdom.”

            Which is exactly what Foster has done.