Yvonne Rainer's Experimental Memoir 'Feelings Are Facts'

Yvonne Rainer, a founding member of Judson Dance Theater in 1962 and key figure in 1960s New York minimalism and conceptual art, published her memoir 'Feelings Are Facts: A Life' in 2006. The book, written in an experimental style mirroring her dance and film work, uses montage, diary entries, letters, and multiple perspectives to recount her life up to 1972, with an abbreviated epilogue covering later years. Rainer avoids conventional biography, opening instead with teenage sexual partners and dropping out of Berkeley in 1952. She incorporates a 4,000-word letter to her brother from 1961 detailing her early New York years among artists like Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage. The memoir also addresses her suicide attempt in 1971 and her shift away from heterosexual relationships in the 1980s. Rainer's formal descriptions of her dance practice challenge political readings, emphasizing the body's thinking and feeling in time and space. The book argues that the fact of a feeling is inseparable from its expression.