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.
