The Autobiographical Source. Reflecting on the Memoirs of a Feminist Publisher: Laura Lepetit

Laura Lepetit, founder of Italy’s most renowned and longest-running feminist publishing house, La Tartaruga (1975–1998), left behind in her Autobiografia di una femminista distratta (Autobiography of a distracted feminist, 2016) not only a testimony of her professional activity but also traces of her conception of women’s autobiographical writing. This article analyses the author’s strategies for defining the trajectory and meaning of her life through written memory, as well as certain aspects that emerge with particular force: the complex self-representation combining feminism and publishing; the proud assertion of having independently managed the cultural project underlying book publication; the sophisticated construction of the text, which reflects a deep understanding of the morphology of autobiographical writing; the crucial role of the autobiographical perspective in her editorial choices; and the plural and collective nature of her memoirs. The case of Lepetit’s memoirs demonstrates how the theoretical work of so-called second-wave feminism has profoundly influenced the ways of narrating a woman’s life and, for a woman publisher, of narrating her own.