Writing like life? 'Life-like' relation, femaleness and generic instability in Small moving parts

Small moving parts (Murray, 2009 ) is a useful text through which to raise questions about women's writing, life writing and the re-presentation of female experience and subjectivity. The story of a white working-class Durban family of mother and two daughters, the book not only situates femaleness within a marginal white community uneasily located in apartheid, it foregrounds female bodies as the sites of emergent (and thwarted) consciousness about gender, class, race ... In undertaking such a project, the author blurs the boundaries of novel and life writing so as self-reflexively to perform her interest in female identities as being made in contexts of geographical-historical relation even as they struggle for autonomy. The mobile turns of genre in narrating female experience are strategically apt for a woman author who hopes to investigate the contradictory claims upon her female imagination of the multiple contemporary discourses available for the writing of life.