The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1995, Page 27

SPRING /SUMMER 1995
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
137
Comack: I think it’s true, as you say,
“Women live someone else’s script and see
themselves through someone else’s eyes.”
You say a diary may help them find them-
selves. “You may see a pattern in your life,
a path of your soul and maybe a dim out-
line of yourself.” You keep a diary. Have
you found yourself?
Wylie: Shortly after I was widowed and
had started to write, someone said to me,
“Bettyjane, I think you’ve found yourself.”
I said, “I never thought I was lost.” It’s true
that a diary does centre you. I quoted Alice
Roller in my book, Between the Lines, be-
cause there were two women who deliber-
ately set in on an inner journey to discover
what they were all about and she said, “Af-
ter this time analyzing and going into my
inner self, nobody is ever going to tell me
something about myself that I don’t already
know.” I think that’s it — it’s a self-aware-
ness. Instead of taking other people’s script,
instead of being your parent’s daughter,
your husband’s wife and your children’s
mother, you have your own script. You are
yourself. You’ve established that, although
you have those obligations to the people
that you love and you are happy to carry
them out, you still have a real identity of
your own.
Comack: Do you have another book in
mind?
Wylie: I have another book coming out
in the fall. I’ve started writing dramatic, po-
etic monologues based on some of the dia-
rists I couldn’t get out of my mind. I see it
as essentially theatrical for people to per-
form — and as I’ve been writing them, I’ve
been performing them. But Blackmoss
Press is going to publish them as a collec-
tion of poetry. It will be out in the fall and
I will be coming back with that. It's called
The Better Half. I’ve just signed a contract
to do a new screenplay with a partner and
co-writer and I have to finish The Treatment.
You always have to try for whatever the next
thing is.
Comack: You refer to writing diaries as
“spinning” or “weaving” but I especially like
your comparing them to “crazy quilts, full
of bits and pieces, created by happenstance
and using whatever was in the rag box.”
Betty Jane Wylie’s books are the kind you want to
read again and again and to keep and mark up as
she does with the diaries she collects. I doubt that
any one of her eight grandchildren has any
understanding of how many people’s lives have been
affected by the profound and informative writings of
that dear “amma who lives in the woods. ”