Despite the backdrop of a rainy October evening, my conversation with my old friend Celeste Schenck, President of the American University in Paris, at the American Library in Paris (do you scout a theme here?), led to a lively exchange with an audience made up of the Library’s fans and friends from my times in Paris. It was especially moving, even borderline Proustian, to discuss feminism and women’s friendships in My Brilliant Friends with Celeste, with whom I spent the decade of the 1980s trying to make Women’s Studies thrive at Barnard.
Diary Entry
Scenes from a Library: My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism—in Paris.
- November 4, 2019
- Books
- American Library in Paris, Celeste Schenck, feminism, 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.