Diary

Three Shades of Black
Summer Black, of course. No New Yorker needs persuading about wearing black in the summer―is there any other color?―but apparently London women need help, or at least encouragement

Twitter and Trolls
The FEMEN movement has warned London and Britain that an offensive on the city is in the works. Inna Shevchenko whose face inspired a new image for Marianne,

“New-Wave Feminists,” starring Jane Austen
I’ve long been enamored of new-wave movies since they changed my life, and so it was a treat to see feminists referred to as “new wavers” in a

DOES She Forgive Him? Or How CAN She Forgive Him?
There I was all set to report on the doings around the Royal Baby, when an item about Anthony Weiner popped up as the head column in the

Can we forgive them? Jews in the news.
Back in New York for a few days, and reading the Times (on paper, of course), I’m reminded how publicly Jewish a city New York is―compared, say, to

Plus ça change, or are women people?
“Murray ends the 77-year wait for British win.” Ooops. The headline misses the fact that Virginia Wade won Wimbledon in 1977. But she won in women’s singles. Feminist

Same boyfriend, different life.
We memoirists like to think our lives are uniquely ours, but often it turns out not to be true–at least not wholly true. I’ve been worrying these past

Do Nice Girls Have Sex?
Or how did nice girls have sex in the 1950s―you know, so twentieth century. In her controversial NYRB piece about two new Sylvia Plath biographies, the critic Terry

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.