I’ve placed my copy of Carolyn’s first letter to May Sarton on my desk, next to the published account of her long friendship with Sarton: “A Unique Person.” I’m puzzling over the contrast in tone between the language of the Carolyn I did not know […]
In her reply to Carolyn’s harsh critique of her novels, Sarton takes the high road: “Dear woman,” she protests (and I love this), “you simply cannot use the categorical imperative,” she’s a writer, after all, and goes on to defend her aim as a […]
Over the past decade, students have been thrilled by their forays into the archive. I’ve been skeptical but also intrigued by their fascination — both what hooks them and why, especially when lured by the siren song of the epistolary. And so here I am […]
A thought experiment. Suppose I had read Brooks Atkinson’s review (see part 5) and bought Plant Dreaming Deep. I would certainly have been arrested at the door by the author’s use of a famous sixteenth-century French poem as an epigraph to situate her project […]
I’ve been stuck for over a month, unable to continue the narrative, still troubled, almost paralyzed by my late life discovery about my friend Carolyn Heilbrun’s fan letter to May Sarton. What did this mean and why did it matter to me? […]
This past April, I read, in a state of shock, the first letter my friend Carolyn G. Heilbrun sent to the writer May Sarton. Dated March 8, 1968, it was a typed, single-spaced letter on personalized stationery with Carolyn’s name […]
What I remember about Carolyn with an onslaught of intellectual agita is not solely the artifact of a major death anniversary, but also the surprising effects of an earlier encounter with an interesting young woman.
Had I told Carolyn the mismemory story (see part 1) many years later, at one of our weekly dinners, confessed my confusion and embarrassment but also made light […]
It was October 1992. Carolyn had retired from Columbia after the spring semester—early, as retirements go these days, at sixty-six. The head of the Women’s […]
October 10 is my friend Naomi Schor’s birthday. She would have turned 80 this year. Naomi’s Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory, and French Realist Fiction
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 now, in my eighties, to imagine what new writing might be.