Diary

Is self-plagiarism really plagiarism?
I’ve just moved to London for the summer and one of the first things I did was attend the June meeting of “Laydeez do Comics,” a lively, successful

What’s in a name?
A few days ago I received an email from a high school friend I haven’t seen for many years. She said that on a recent trip to Paris

If Emily Dickinson tweeted…
I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you―Nobody―Too? (c. 1861) Despite Dickinson’s well-known gift for concision, these lines and the ones that follow in the poem, suggest that Dickinson

Is Twenty-Seven Old?
At some point in the interesting new movie Frances Ha someone declares: “Twenty-seven is old.” In his enthusiastic review film critic A.O. Scott observes: “while that may in

The Compliment
When friends learn you are in treatment for cancer, naturally they prefer not to believe it. They want to cheer you up. “But you look great!” So how

Transitions
“It’s not the moves, it’s between the moves.” This was one of those offhand remarks that has stuck in my mind for at least twenty years. I remember

Am I still that person?
A few weeks ago, my friend and former jogging partner Ellen Sweet sent me this snapshot that she had just discovered while scanning old photographs into her computer.

Brooding
One morning last week when I was walking around the reservoir in Central Park with a friend we came upon these two ducks. The sight stopped us in

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.