In Writing a Woman's Life, Carolyn Heilbrun cites Nancy K. Miller to assert that "women's lives, like women's writing 'have a particularly vulnerable relation to the culture's central notion of plausibility.'" This is certainly more than true for feminists' lives especially at a moment when the "f" word can only be uttered in a whisper. Heilbrun's definition of "feminist" again includes some phrases of Miller's (the book is dedicated to Miller and is a testament to their intense conversations, and to the dialogues and collaborations that feminist life and work exemplify). "Feminist," she writes, is "'the wish to protest against the available fictions of female becoming.'" Have those "available fictions" changed significantly for our students, who, amazingly, are no longer feminists, and not even sure they are "not feminists, but . . .?" As one student said in a recent class: "Our mothers are feminists. Why do we need to be?"

When Jean Howard and I conceived the topic of this conference in honor of Carolyn Heilbrun, who herself had recently protested against available fictions by ending her own life, we wanted to explore the parameters of feminist lives, to be sure. But, more urgently, we wanted to push against the limits of feminist academic writing by looking at "academics and their memoirs." Why have so many late 20th-century academic feminists turned to the memoir, we wondered? In what ways is the genre of the memoir suited for feminist appropriation? What is its relationship to feminism's politics of the personal? At a moment when, as Carolyn Heilbrun herself observed in several of her last essays, feminist literary criticism and even feminist theoretical writing seemed to have lost some of their urgency, we wondered if the memoir might be providing a space for feminist reflection and theorization of a different sort. At the same time, we were anxious not to create a dichotomy between theory and autobiography, or to see one as an alternative to the other.

We invited our speakers to read from their memoirs and thus we invited them as "writers," not as "academics." But we also enjoined them to reflect on the relationship between their academic writing and their memoir writing. Does the memoir offer feminists another way of writing theory or feminist historiography? Or are these different forms, addressing different audiences? What narratives of feminism, more specifically, do these memoirs tell? These are the questions we hoped would be addressed in commentary and discussion, giving the conference some amount of coherence and even some scholarly weight.

Moderators posed these questions, some audience members reiterated them, but the speakers curiously resisted and even bluntly rejected them outright. From the first panel on, I began to have the feeling that they would not go anywhere and this inkling, accompanied by a knot in my stomach, was more than confirmed by the end of the day.

Right from the start, Deborah McDowell went right into reading from Leaving Pipe Shop, eschewing all prefatory comment but explaining later that this gesture was in itself a response, with no disrespect intended, to the questions we had posed. "All writing assumes its form," she insisted, and whether writing the memoir, or writing criticism, she was "just writing." Later in the day, when I posed the question to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, she did not hesitate to express her "impatience" with its very premise: "I think of myself as a writer. I've always thought of myself as a writer." In utter frustration, she added, "the idea that you turn off half your brain when you write anything seems just . . .." And Shirley Geok-lin Lim stressed that she would be mortified to have Behind the White Moon Faces read as the memoir of an academic: to her it was the memoir of a poet.

One might think that these resistances would have made the conference a complete flop, but, in spite of the fact that speakers refused to answer our questions directly, their presentations did provide a set of reflections on the feminist turn to memoir and left me with some things to ponder regarding feminist academic lives.

The most powerful image that emerged for me remains the one raised by Leila Ahmed in her evocation of the journals she keeps. Throughout her career, Ahmed said, she has kept journals and folders of clippings, placing items relating to her life and her political interests into one set of notebooks and journals, those relating to her work and her scholarly questions into another. After September 11, 2001, the system broke down and now she no longer knows where to file things. What is about life, what about her research on Muslim women? Thinking about this breakdown of a filing system, I realized that what drew me to the question of the conference, and perhaps more fundamentally to feminist work to begin with, was precisely this kind of breakdown. Coming to feminism, for me, has been the failure of my filing systems, the compartmentalization I had attempted to learn as a student and young assistant professor. Feminism gave me the permission to write about very personal issues - mothers and daughters, exile and emigration, the postmemory of the Holocaust - and to do so theoretically, critically, and, in more recent years, personally. It gave me the chance to work collaboratively and thus to blur any possible line between friendship and work, living and writing. And yet, as McDowell said at the conference, there is still a "tacit understanding, at least in academia, that the personal and the scholastic should be mutually exclusive. And that there is something rather illegitimate and nakedly self-aggrandizing about the personal." "Just writing" on the one hand; "fear of the disregard with which this [particular, personal] project might be met," on the other. Both this blurring, and this anxiety about separation and definition - "was it about my life or my work?" - are the marks of (just) writing and (just) living a feminist's life in academia. Carolyn Heilbrun wrote her academic books, and her personal ones, under her own name, her mysteries as Amanda Cross. Writing mysteries might have cost her her tenure. And yet, the speakers at the conference were implicitly insisting on, rather than subverting, distinctions between academic work and "just writing" - that which is outside of, rises above, the academic, marked by the work of teaching, committee work, administration, evaluation.

"Lucky is the person who likes to write . . . who has a topic that basically seizes them," Deborah McDowell said, describing how, when writing Leaving Pipe Shop, "stuff . . . was spilling out of my head, onto the page." She did this early in the morning, before turning to her academic work. I have had this experience on a few occasions, each time when my writing turned to the personal. In fact, my first piece of personal critical writing changed my relationship to writing altogether, enabled me to think of myself as a writer, rather than a critic or scholar, and that relationship has carried over into my academic writing - for me things remain blurred. The passion and urgency I felt during those moments was audible in the words and the tone of each of the memoirists, the urgency to tell a story that needed to be told. But the feminists at the conference insisted that academic writing is also an act of passion. "I'm finding out writing this thing how much I really like to write my obscure and terrible things," said Gayatri Spivak.

Most of these memoirs are acts of reclamation and sometimes reparation, acts of responsibility to a history and a community whose story needed to be told. They emerge from what Mary Ann Caws called the "interference" of narration that makes space for the little insignificant things to be looked at and be told. Telling the little things, the small stories about persons whose lives otherwise might have been erased from history, these are profoundly feminist acts of care and repair. These are dialogic memoirs, written in the first person plural, evoking and animating the relationality of women's and feminists' lives, giving voice to the mothers, sisters and aunties, the fathers and sons, who suffered similar experiences as the authors, the therapists who provided holding backgrounds.

But for whom, to whom are these stories told? Caws said she was writing for her friends and her children, the people she knew, perhaps for others who had had similar experiences but not for teachers. Spivak and McDowell stressed their desire to write for the women and men they are writing about, and Charlotte Baker movingly described the responses of her different audiences of women who heard the stories of rape she had collected. Surprised that she likes "long words," Eve Sedgwick nevertheless told us about the ordinary readers who struggled through her book. Here Ahmed refused the distinction: "I'm writing for at least sixteen dozen audiences," she said. But to my ear, venturing into memoir left each of these academic women anxious about finding a different audience, or about the responses of the same audience for whom they had written before. I can still hear the groans when the question of publishers came up and perhaps, as Nancy K. Miller suggested, the market is so "repugnant" that writers do not dare to admit that they care about audience and publication.

Do we ask something different of our reader in a memoir than in an academic work? Miller quotes Simone de Beauvoir: "when she talks about coming to writing . . . she says that she wants it to be loved, basically, like a heroine in a George Eliot novel. . . . When you write as an academic you write to be footnoted. You don't write to be loved." Sedgwick said she wrote A Dialogue on Love precisely to evoke "a listening space in which everything can be said." Everything cannot be said in either memoir or theory, but both are written in the context of dialogue, in the midst of multiple dialogues and conversations with at least sixteen dozen readers.

It might have been the force of our initial questions, or the location in Philosophy Hall at Columbia, but thinking back on it now, I can still hear the small, almost inaudible anxieties about writing memoir, the need for explanation, justification. Memoir writing, McDowell and Ahmed were intent on stressing, can be as academically rigorous, as intensely based on research, as "radically intellectually important," as academic writing. This in response to an astounding and telling question about whether one is not perhaps breaking one's contract by writing memoir instead of scholarship. Lim tells the story of her coming to writing her memoir during a seminar on autobiography with Miller, and the invitation of Florence Howe, the legitimation of Tillie Olsen. It takes a long feminist genealogy to motivate and legitimate this project. Is it these anxieties and ambivalences that themselves most specifically mark this feminist turn to memoir as feminist? Do feminists in academia still have to legitimate and justify ourselves if we traverse boundaries, fail to obey the law of genre - if, protesting against the available fictions of feminist academic becoming, we "just write?"

"I have never felt more blissful than when writing this book," McDowell exclaimed. Just writing? A space where everything can be said? Perhaps, but also a set of ambivalences and self-justifications, and, ultimately, the kind of pleasure that in the context of academia, even feminist academia in the twenty-first century, can never not be mixed with some amount of disavowal, if not guilt.