My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism
Columbia University Press, 2019
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf famously called for new fiction by women in which two female friends—she called them Chloe and Olivia—would care for each other and work together. What might be the shape of a story, she wondered, whose premise was simply “Chloe liked Olivia”? In her new memoir, My Brilliant Friends, Nancy K. Miller takes up the challenge to tell that kind of story in a narrative that explores her relationships with writers Carolyn Heilbrun, Naomi Schor, and Diane Middlebrook, who all died too soon. These friendships, linking the worlds of work and love, and forged in the spirit of seventies feminism, changed her life for the better. The book’s title, Miller explains, pays homage to Elena Ferrante’s surprising Neapolitan novels, which portray the complexities and intensities of bonds between women.
A stunning elegy to the intimacy of friendships among women, and a book in which closeness is felt through the act of thinking.
— Maggie Taft, Booklist
A new book by Nancy K. Miller is always a treat. This compulsively readable triptych of her friendships with Carolyn Heilbrun, Naomi Schor, and Diane Middlebrook will touch, delight, and enlighten anyone who has grown up under the influence of feminism.
— Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love: A Memoir
In this astute, passionate, rigorously honest book about her friendships with three extraordinary women, Miller delineates the mysterious geography of those attachments we are not born into, but choose freely. The longing, pain, confusion, envy, and joy that inhabit the often unarticulated distance between “me” and “you” are so alive on these pages, they are still resonating inside me. I loved reading this book.
—Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women
Interviews:
“Bookforum talks with Nancy K. Miller,” Interview with Liz Kinnamon, Bookforum, April 11, 2019.
“Q&A: Nancy K. Miller on My Brilliant Friends,” Columbia University Press Blog, March 2019.
“My Feminist Friends,” News, The Graduate Center / CUNY, January 2019.
Podcast:
Nancy K. Miller and the “pals of her desk”, Nancy K. Miller in conversation with Jason Tougaw. Episode 25 from Indoor Voices Podcast.
Excerpts:
Prelude: The Art of Losing • Carolyn Heilbrun
Reviews:
“Brilliant Together: On Feminist Memoirs” by Megan Stephan in Public Books, Nov. 24, 2021.
“My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism” by Victoria Sanger in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 2021.
“Review of Nancy K. Miller’s My Brilliant Friends” by Claudia Moscovici in Literaturesalon’s Blog, June 19, 2020.
“Sometimes Women Do Like Women”: On Nancy K. Miller’s “My Brilliant Friends” by Jenny McPhee in Los Angeles Review of Books, September 11, 2019
“A Little Life” by Valerie Miner in Women’s Review of Books, May/June 2019
“Le mie amiche geniali” by Mattia Mossali in Doppiozero, February 19, 2019 (in Italian)
“Intimate Condolences: An Elegy to Female Compansionship” by Becca Rothfeld in TLS, The Times Literary Supplement, March 19, 2019
“My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism” (review) by Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Oxford Academic, March 27, 2019
Buy the book from…
Columbia University Press (Order online and receive a 30% discount. Enter code CUP30.)
Amazon • Barnes & Noble