Diary

I’ll Have What She’s…
How many readers still know how to finish the sentence? Or that “I’ll Have What She’s Having” found instant fame in Nora Ephron’s 1989 witty movie When Harry

Dressing for Success?
Walking from the subway to the Graduate Center, where I teach, I pass by the shop window of the Garment Center, or at least what it’s become since

Alpha Females Tell Us How to Do It All
Why do women who have what they think other women want–the magical trifecta of ALL: husband, kids, big job―feel the need to tell women who don’t “have it

Difficult Women
Say a woman is “difficult,” and chances are that she will not get the job, the promotion, or the invitation to join the club. The adjective guarantees pariahdom.

The Shame of Self-Promotion
On the cover of this week’s issue of The Economist, an intriguing headline reads: “Why women should boast more.” I took the hook. I don’t read The Economist

Memoirs by Men, or why bother?
Of course, not. What editor worth his salt would choose to group reviews of memoirs written by men under that title? No one. But Memoirs by Women, now

Back to School
I’m not going back to school in the way that “back to school” meant as a child (new shoes, new teachers), or as an adult who, after experimenting

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

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.