Diary

My Cancer on Lockdown
For a long time, I’ve been living with cancer, lung cancer to be exact. This is in fact year 8. I had more or less come to terms

Remembering Feminists and Brilliant Friends at Sussex University
Dear Friends, If you happen to have London plans in February, I’d love to see you at my conversation with Margaretta Jolly about her extraordinary new book Sisterhood

Scenes from a Library: My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism—in Paris.
Despite the backdrop of a rainy October evening, my conversation with my old friend Celeste Schenck, President of the American University in Paris

Friendship in Paris
Chères amies, chers amis, If you are headed to Paris in October—or perhaps are already there—please stop by for one of my conversations—with friends—about My Brilliant Friends. The

“The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac”
I’m between scans again, or should I say still? The latest one left the oncologist and the pulmonologist frankly puzzled. Something new and strange had appeared on my

Death Cleaning and Me
I’m not Swedish, not even remotely Scandinavian. But these days any title with death in it attracts my interest. As Margareta Magnusson, who says she is somewhere between

From the Department of Self-Promotion
As all twenty-first century authors know, writing a book is now just a small part of publishing. The real work comes once the book is out. Here’s an

The Decluttering Syndrome
OK, it’s January, the month of New Year’s resolutions, so I thought I’d take the plunge and read Marie Kondo’s bestselling book: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

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.