Diary
Regarding Susan Sontag
Saturday night I watched the showing of Nancy Kates’s marvelous documentary about Susan Sontag at the Tribeca Film Festival. I was lucky enough to belong to the board
I’M ALL EARS
As a New Yorker born and bred, I feel entitled to kvetch, and I may have never kvetched more than in dealing with the fate of my Paris
My Memoirs Made Me Jewish
In the year 2000 I received a phone call from a real estate broker who informed me that I had inherited a small plot of land on the
Resentful, moi?
Is it just me? Why do certain epithets remain attached to the term feminist, no matter how erroneous or out of date? Bra-burning, man-hating, angry, strident, and thanks
Promoting Someone Else’s Self
Ann Beattie, a well-known writer and a vice president for literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has a problem: she’s tired of writing letters of
Lemurs and Leaders: The Cooperation Thing…
I recently came across the obituary of Alison Jolly, a primatologist who studied lemurs and wrote definitive studies of this species. I might not have stopped over the
When a Friend You Love is Ill
Right now, I am at my desk preparing my seminar for tomorrow, but my thoughts keep straying from Holocaust testimony―this week’s subject, as it happens―to the fate of
Bad Boys, encore?
You have to wonder what kind of anxiety about masculinity drives the editors at the New York Times. Last week it was “bullish on boyish-boys,” a survey of
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.