In this case, I hope so. The cover of My Brilliant Friends, which I love, was designed by Lisa Hamm, at Columbia University Press. The artist Jojo Karlin created the portraits of my three friends. Jojo, who is also a brilliant graduate student working on Virginia Woolf’s correspondences with her friends, took inspiration from author photos. Her illustrations are interpretations of these faces, the faces of the women whose friendship meant the world to me (Carolyn Heilbrun, Naomi Schor, and Diane Middlebrook). When it came time to choose the author photo for my book jacket, it seemed logical to have Jojo draw mine as well. I prefer the avatar to my photograph, especially the way she reimagined my hair.
Diary Entry
Can You Judge a Book by Its Cover?
- January 17, 2019
- Books
- Columbia University Press, feminism, Jojo Karlin, Lisa Hamm, My Brilliant Friends

Welcome. Some musings on my current preoccupations with the worlds of illness and the worlds of books: the vicissitudes of living with cancer and the need, for now, to launch (a k a promote) my new memoir, My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism. Naturally, I inhabit both spaces, which makes for a strangely bifurcated, though far from boring, existence. Click to view both Feminist Friendship Archive and My Multifocal Life projects.