Diary

“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.

Can You Judge a Book by Its Cover?
In this case, I hope so. The cover of My Brilliant Friends, which I love, was designed by Lisa Hamm, at Columbia University Press. The artist Jojo Karlin

MLA, 2019, Encore
I was thrilled to receive this photo of four of my wonderful students and former students. I love seeing them posed with their copy of My Brilliant Friends

MLA, Chicago 2019
Jennifer Crewe, my savvy editor and the head of Columbia University Press sent me this snapshot of the Press booth at this year’s book exhibit. Unfortunately, the poster

Ladies Who Lunch
A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with my (brilliant) friend Peggy Waller at Nix, a sublime vegetarian restaurant near Union Square. I showed her the one

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.