"We are interested in how you became a feminist scholar and how your feminism affects the way you write about and teach literature."

That question came to me at the end of the 1980s in a letter from Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn, who were planning to co-edit an anthology about feminist literary scholarship. The letter was addressed to a number of feminist critics and resulted in an anthology titled Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism, published by Routledge in 1993. Greene and Kahn began with the premise that the critics invited to tell their stories belonged to a "generation" that had "come of age" (1) at a particular historical moment - emotionally in the psychic space of the 1950s, professionally in the post-'68 upheaval of the 1970s. The editors were looking for "personal, anecdotal stories" that the authors were asked to "theorize" (their emphasis) "so as to bring out their historical and political dimensions" (2). They wanted stories that said "I" but in a way that added up to a "we" (1). My contribution to the project was an autobiographical essay I called "Decades." (Shirley Lim also contributed an essay to this volume, and Carolyn Heilbrun wrote the afterword.)

In 1988 Carolyn Heilbrun published Writing a Woman's Life, arguably her most successful academic book, in which, among other things, she briefly becomes the biographer of Amanda Cross, telling the story of her own creation as a writer of detective fiction. Seventeen years later, the organizers of this conference have adapted Carolyn's title to a new constellation that book helped create. In 2005 enough feminists have published memoirs that go beyond the autobiographical essays of the late 1980s for today's event to have been twice as long. So what has changed since that retrospective moment? We have another Bush in the White House and another war in Iraq. Conservatives are spending large amounts of money trying to dismantle Roe v. Wade and curtailing women's reproductive rights. Is this just déjà vu all over again?

Probably the shortest answer to the "what has changed" question would be Bill Clinton (as in Bill and Monica) and the memoir biz of the 1990s. The success of the memoir in the marketplace generally, along with that of biography, has made the form appealing to feminist critics who in other eras might have written an academic novel. As Vivian Gornick puts it in The Situation and the Story, "Thirty years ago people who thought they had a story to tell sat down to write a novel. Today they sit down to write a memoir. Urgency seems to attach itself these days to the idea of a tale taken directly from life rather than one fashioned by the imagination out of life" (89).

But we have also been invited today to speak as individual feminist memoir writers and rather than impose a universal narrative on the phenomenon - which, as we've just heard, has more than one history and a multiplicity of origins - I want now to turn instead to my own attempt to write a memoir, currently titled "Out of Breath" (in homage to the movie Breathless), a memoir I seem to have been trying to write since 1988, around the time Greene and Kahn invited me to join their project - a narrative I've been excreting sporadically in tiny pieces. The history of this process is intimately bound up with two words: "French" and "mistake."

I wrote a paper called "The French Mistake" for a panel that Alice Kaplan organized at MLA in 1988. At the time Alice was working on the book that was to become French Lessons, then titled "Confessions of a Francophile." In 1988 I was exiting from my former francophilia and took the occasion of the MLA session to expose my obsession with French mistakes - mistakes I had made in speaking. My linguistic history, naturally enough, took me to France: I tell the story of the six years I lived in Paris (the subject of the current memoir) in less than one paragraph. I relate the story of my career in and out of French departments in another two. All the anecdotes I present have to do with making mistakes: in pronunciation, gender, and men.

While a French major at Barnard [I explain], I go to Middlebury summer school where one signs a pledge not to utter a word of English for six weeks, under threat of expulsion, and makes a vinaigrette for one's dinner companions once a week. At Middlebury summer school where I have signed up to "perfect" my spoken French, I discover the irresistible, if not fatal, attraction between French and sex (or at least French professors and American girls). This lasts a long time. I go to Paris after graduation from college . . .. I get involved in speaking French, eating French and having French health . . .. I say "euh" when speaking English, which I speak as though it were a foreign language . . ..

After six years of trying to be French, I return to the States, my life a shambles ("The French Mistake," 54).

In "Decades" the narrative of my becoming a feminist critic involves exiting from the story of my early twenties, in which I exhibited very bad taste in men, including my choice of husband (I married an Irish-American expatriate, living in Paris), and going to graduate school in French at Columbia, where I wrote a dissertation about the fictional destinies of women in the 18th-century novel, who shared, if not inspired, my foibles. Looking back from the turning point of age represented by the number 50 at my graduate student existence, I saw myself in retrospect as leaving behind the tendency of my younger self to copy the heroines of novels in which the women were victims, in order to become a different kind of heroine; renouncing the plots of seduction and betrayal to embrace what Carolyn in Writing a Woman's Life called a quest - writing myself into a new narrative.

In the summer of 1993, I felt the need to take a break from the project I had been working on about the memoirs of dead parents - Bequest and Betrayal - in which I described the experience of witnessing my parents' illnesses and death. I very quickly wrote a 30-odd page autobiographical essay that I called "Wars of Independence," in which I told the story of the marriage and the Paris years, invoking the winding down of the Algerian War. I almost published it in a small literary magazine - an editor wanted to call it "Confessions of a Feminist Masochist" - but a writer friend convinced me that I should try and develop it into a full-fledged narrative. I put the "Confessions" in a drawer, and instead finished the "dead parents" book, as I always thought of it, in which I experimented alternating critical and autobiographical writing, putting the personal narrative in italics. The challenge of the book had been to place the autobiographical passages in dialogue with the critical ones. But even friendly readers often confessed sheepishly that they only read the parts in italics. I tried to smile.

When the book came out, I was on sabbatical in Paris and eager to put the subject behind me. I returned to my only slightly more cheerful feminist confessions to see whether I could expand the essay and tell the story as a straight memoir, minus the penetrating critical passages that my readers had so endearingly skipped. My parents had saved all the letters I had written to them from Paris. I set out to try and document my sentimental education from the letters, returning to all the places I had lived in, taking pictures, eating again in restaurants where I had eaten almost 30 years earlier (most were still there), checking memory against evidence, including the archive of the letters home. That year I wrote 100 pages that everyone on my informal reading committee suggested I put back in a drawer.

When I returned from my sabbatical, I decided to write a different sort of book, a book that would integrate the voices of autobiography and criticism, abandoning both the memoir and the strategy of setting off the personal in italics I had used in Bequest and Betrayal. I would write instead a defense of the memoir form by showing what it could do. In particular, I wanted to look at a coming of age story - the trajectory of coming to feminism that I had already sketched out in various places. In two of the chapters of the new book, "But Enough About Me: What Do You Think of My Memoir" and "Circa 1959," I pieced together yet another version of that narrative of feminism. Naturally, I also revised "Decades" itself and an essay about women and aging I had also already published.

(Reader, do you see a pattern here? I realize that I'm telling a story about how I can never let go of anything, or let anything alone. I think my obsessive-compulsive disorder has something to do with the insecurity of immigrants transmitted to me from both sides of my family: saving everything and fixing whatever you've managed to hold on to. I'm not sure there is a drug for this condition. If there is, I haven't found it.)

What interested me, as I was turning 60, as I contemplated something resembling if not the end of my life, the end of my career - the end of the narrative of becoming anything besides old - was to see how much my life had in common with other women of my generation, or at least with the stories they had published as memoirs. An avid reader of autobiography, as Carolyn was of biographies, I was looking for my own life in the stories of others - feminist stories for the most part.

I discovered that I could have more sympathy for my younger self - my mistakes - when I started to see myself more as a generic girl true to her time than as "myself." Or rather a certain kind of girl, mostly middle-class American but sometimes also English, an adventurous girl on a quest. Reading Sheila Rowbotham's memoir, Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties, I discover that in 1961 we might have sat through the same boring Cours de Civilisation at the Sorbonne - French culture packaged for foreigners. Her memories of the crowds of students "spilling out over the pavements of the Boulevard St Michel" sent me hunting for a photograph taken that year by the roving photographers who would snap your picture without asking - and sell it to you for a small sum. Rowbotham describes un-chic English students in duffel coats and there I am in my American boyfriend's dark blue duffel coat strolling down the Boul Mich with a girlfriend. True, not up to the standards of Parisiennes who in winter like spring would wear thin suede jackets, straight skirts, and heels (often without stockings) and not seem to feel the cold ("Circa 1959," 67-69).

I had come to Paris inspired by the images of intellectuals as seen in the pages of Life magazine, not to mention our French classes at Barnard. My friend Rachel Brownstein put it best in Becoming a Heroine:

Ideally, one would be Simone de Beauvoir, smoking with Sartre at the Deux Magots, making an eccentric domestic arrangement that was secondary to important things and in their service. One would be poised, brilliant, equipped with a past, above the fray, beyond it, foreign not domestic. (And ideally [as she put it in a throwaway parenthesis] Sartre would look like Albert Camus.)
                                                      ("Decades," 27)

In But Enough About Me, I wanted to tell not just the story of my generation's literary girls' coming of age, I wanted to think about that same generation's coming into age, turning 60, dealing with loss. I turned, in the chapter about generational aging, to The Last Gift of Time.

The title to Heilbrun's recent book The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty is a provocation to acknowledge that there actually is life after 60 and that it might have something to offer. Her most moving chapter, entitled "Time," concludes with a metaphor about time's gift. Commenting on a diary entry of Sylvia Townsend Warner's about spontaneously dancing (at age 69) for joy to a piece of music, Heilbrun writes: "The greatest oddity of one's sixties is that, if one dances for joy, one always supposes it is for the last time. Yet this supposition provides the rarest and most exquisite flavor to one's later years. The piercing sense of 'last time' adds intensity, while the possibility of 'again' is never quite effaced" (55).

When I was making the final revisions for the book in the fall of 2001, I had to add a parenthesis to account for my own changing sense of time, as I moved from my fifties to my sixties.

(It's only in one's sixties, I think, that it becomes possible to see the anxiety about appearances that haunts one's fifties as a way of displacing - or postponing - the crisis of mortality. Far easier to obsess about the signs of aging - the cosmetics of time's passage - than to reflect upon death. Recently, my most intimate friend [Naomi Schor, though I did not name her in the book], my contemporary, and the one with whom for many years my life unfolded in an always complicated dialogue, died at age 58 of a cerebral hemorrhage. We liked to tape our important conversations when we were apart, living on different continents, and called ourselves "les parleuses" in honor of Marguerite Duras's book by that name. Looking at her life from the decade of my sixties, it now seems to me that dying in one's fifties is dying young.)

Moving through the mirror to contemplate the limits more than the marks of time, I feel another kind of urgency: this is my life, and so much of it is already in the past tense. Now what?
                                        ("The Marks of Time," 108)

When I was about to hand in the manuscript of But Enough, I gave it to Carolyn to read. She said it was fine except for the fact that she didn't appear in "Decades"; I had not included her in the Columbia part of the story. I wrote a parenthesis that after some back and forth finally satisfied her:

(At the end of the decade [of the 1970s], through one of the rare institutional arrangements at Columbia that - inadvertently - worked on behalf of women, I met Carolyn Heilbrun, then a senior member of the English department, who performed several small miracles that saved both my writing and my career. We twice taught a seminar together called "The Heroine's Text," in which we read French and English, male- and female-authored novels and tried to figure out - only occasionally agreeing - whether the limited arrangements of female plot turned out differently either in national tradition or according to authorial gender.)
                                        ("Decades," 39)

Looking at that passage today, it strikes me that I had failed to mention Carolyn's quite important role in the history of my institutional narrative because I had continued to think of my life solely in terms of male power arrangements. That was not an entirely erroneous view of the world at Columbia, but it did leave out of account what other kinds of interventions women, and notably Carolyn, were sometimes able to make on behalf of other women.

In the Afterword she wrote to Changing Subjects, Carolyn sets herself apart from the authors included in the book:

To me, roughly a decade and a half older than these women, the stories are both strange and achingly familiar . . .. [B]y the 1950s . . . I was already married, having children . . . and organizing my life around them . . .. Those years are largely a blur, but I remember when I was teaching full-time at Brooklyn College, a man asked me what I did with my children while teaching: I told him I locked them in a closet. Or perhaps I only wanted to tell him that. Anger seethed, and went on seething until the '70s and early '80s.
                                        ("Afterword," 268)

In the '70s and '80s, Heilbrun writes, her life and

the lives of the women writing in this collection coincided. Older than they, I was, I suspect, happier, if only by contrast. Suddenly the world, and above all the place of women in that world, righted itself and began to sing. When I published Toward a Recognition of Androgyny in 1973, it was greeted by men as though I had been advocating S&M. But that was the year of Roe v. Wade, and Billie Jean King beating Bobby Riggs: anything seemed possible.
                                        ("Afterword," 269)

Carolyn goes on to lambaste Columbia for not understanding that the world was changing and locates the time of writing this piece at a dramatic moment: when the English department "threatens to turn down for tenure a brilliant feminist woman" (270). This was, most of us will remember, the catalytic event that brought Carolyn to the decision to retire early. That turning point here, however, is necessarily, and silently, proleptic (if I can put it in a way Carolyn would hate). Writing before the departmental decision not to tenure Susan Winnett, Carolyn reviews her life as a feminist in somewhat disturbing terms:

Columbia has stopped hurting me, but like someone who has escaped a battering marriage - and the analogy is, in many ways, not a far-fetched one for feminist women faculty - I cannot wipe out the terrible years. I cannot change the isolation of all my time at Columbia. But the friendships I have found among women, and what is still referred to as my private life, have made that isolation, if not welcome then benign: it's not cancerous, but it doesn't do anyone any good.
                                        ("Afterword," 270).

A few months after writing this, Carolyn left Columbia in a very public fashion.

In retelling her life - which she did more than once and in more than one way - the narrative of feminism Carolyn produces is not the triumph of belonging and community, but a chronicle rather of consolation and change, occasions for joy, and, to a degree, a process of repair. At the very least, through her writings, she showed there could be life as well as death in a tenured position, even for her, but especially for us. At last year's MLA panels honoring Carolyn's legacy, various people remarked on Carolyn's insistence on age - and usually in decades: "Virginia Woolf in her Fifties," where Carolyn defends Woolf's choice of suicide; The Last Gift of Time, whose subtitle is Life Beyond Sixty, and where Heilbrun announces that while she enjoyed her sixties and lived past 70- beyond the year she had contemplated as her last - how much longer the choice to remain alive will hold is left in abeyance.

It struck me as I prepared for this conference that in writing about my feminist life in decades I had created a narrative rather different from Carolyn's, but not only because we did not belong to the same generation or share an age; my decades did not line up with hers in part because I never had children; in part because I never enjoyed the success she had from which to measure my decline; in part because I haven't yet retired - though everything she has written on the subject fills me with the dread of identification. Writing the memoir "Out of Breath" as a full-fledged narrative in which I finally tell the story of what happened in those years of Paris when I was young has been my way of doing something with the time that remains before retirement, doing something I have never done.

Before I conclude with some thoughts about the end of Carolyn's feminist life, I'm going to read a few passages from the epilogue to the memoir.

By the time I went to Paris in August to collect my belongings from the apartment, the events of May '68 had become part of the city's mythology. I had missed the excitement of the barricades, but like the young American hero of Bertolucci's The Dreamers, who walks away from the scenes of violence eagerly greeted by his French lovers, I knew I lacked the courage to heave paving stones at the cops, set cars on fire.

In the Latin Quarter where the students had taken to the streets when the police invaded the Sorbonne, I cruised the bookstores. Books about the events of May and souvenirs were proliferating, already objects of kitsch, like little Eiffel towers, as though what had happened months before were already past history. I bought posters from what the date "May '68" had become - "The more I make revolution, the more I make love," "Forbidden to forbid" - to decorate my bedroom walls.

I loved Paris - even in August, when it was embarrassing still to be in town.

A Bout de Souffle, the French title of the movie that had set me gasping after experience, means two things: breathless with anticipation, and out of breath. Between the time I saw the movie in New York and the time I left Paris, I had exhausted the dictionary definition. At the end of Breathless, Belmondo as Michel's life is over, but Jean Seberg as Patricia's isn't. The movie doesn't let us know whether she will ever write her novel, whether she'll go home again after she finishes school at the Sorbonne to please her parents who are paying for it, or just keep selling the New York Herald Tribune until the next man comes along - we already know she won't have to wait long. We don't find out whether she's really pregnant or what she'll do about it. But we figure she'll make out.

My copycat adventures had always been doomed to failure because that was precisely what had to happen for me to grow up. Wasn't that really the lesson of Breathless? It's not for nothing that the movie begins with Belmondo imitating Bogart's trademark gesture of passing his thumb over his lips. Belmondo can't even make it as a successful hood, as my father would have said then. Paris was full of Americans suffering from the disease of imitation. Jim [my ex-husband], who couldn't write, took himself for James Joyce in exile from a country that his parents had already left. Jim thought marrying a Jew would save him from the priests. I thought marrying him would save me from the rabbis. Dr. Mendelsohn [the shrink I consulted in New York when my marriage was falling apart] was right: Jim was not the worst choice I could have made. But we were so busy using each other to avoid becoming the people we didn't want to be that we missed recognizing who else we were - what we wanted from the world when we weren't reading books, or eating. I couldn't stay married to someone who was making everything up all the time, including me.

You never get over your first great love, Colette says in one of her novels, alluding to the wounds inflicted by the first of her husbands. Tucked away in a secret compartment, that hurt lives on - a permanent resident with a lifetime visa. How could the circuits of hope have collapsed so quickly, you wonder, stunned by the evidence of your misery. When did the paths leading to the happy ending veer off into the grooves of despair? The answer never matches the question. You just know that you won't ever be the same. Eventually, that's the good news.

In thinking about the memoir for this event, I started to see something about the shape of the story I've been telling that I had missed. It suddenly seemed to me that what I liked so much about Seberg in the movie wasn't just that she could have sex without guilt but that she could walk away from her mistakes and see them as material for the novel she said she was writing. My French mistake, then, wasn't so much about making gender mistakes and obsessing about them as in not noticing what else I had learned in the process - a failing of mine (accentuate the negative) Carolyn never hesitated to point out.

What have we learned from Carolyn's life? And in particular from the way she chose to end her story, to write it, as she had rehearsed it in her fiction? This is the question I've been wanting to avoid but find that I can't, even if I can't answer it either. I had dinner a couple of weeks ago with a woman who had just turned 50. She had been a student of Carolyn's at Columbia but decided not to go on for a Ph.D. She and Carolyn had been having dinner once a month for several years. We talked about the suicide and what it meant for us. She shared her thoughts on the subject with me a few days later on email because I told her I was finding it hard to figure out what to say at the end of my paper about . . . the end of Carolyn's feminist life. This is part of what Rachel Kranz wrote: "If Carolyn taught us anything, it was that women who could write new lives, couldn't necessarily live them - and vice versa. For me, as a writer, that is very liberating. It means I'm allowed to imagine beyond what I'm capable of achieving. If someone else reads what I write and lives beyond what I could live, I've done my work. And so, I think, she's done hers."

As I imagined this event, I felt that it would have satisfied Carolyn's (not to mention Amanda Cross's) sense of irony to have eight academic women talk about their feminist lives in Philosophy Hall where she fought so many battles on behalf of the women at Columbia. I imagined telling her that I had spent many hours in this very lounge as a graduate student in the early '70s, in the years before we became friends, consuming cookies along with the tea graciously poured from a large copper urn by women identified solely by their husbands' names. I didn't think I'd end up pouring tea; too much had already changed for that, but I wondered, as I smoked with friends in the late afternoons, whether we would ever succeed in a world in which, despite the first glimmers of affirmative action, faculty wives dramatically outnumbered women faculty.

I doubt that I'll ever really get over the end of Carolyn's life, but as Rachel said, she did her work; we can only continue doing ours. She wrote a feminist's life; how we live the rest of ours remains to be seen.

Works Cited

Brownstein, Rachel M. Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels. New York: Viking, 1982.

Gornick, Vivian. The Situation and the Story. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.

Greene, Gayle and Coppélia Kahn, eds. Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Greene, Gayle and Coppélia Kahn. "Letter to contributors." September 9, 1988.

Heilbrun, Carolyn. "Afterword." In Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

-----. The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. New York: Dial Press, 1997.

Kaplan, Alice. French Lessons. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993.

Kranz, Rachel. Personal communication.

Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. "Asians in Anglo-American Feminism: Reciprocity and Resistance." In Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism, eds. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Miller, Nancy K. "The French Mistake." Getting Personal: Feminist Acts and Other Autobiographical Occasions. New York and London: Routledge, 1991.

-----. "Decades." In Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism, eds. Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn. London and New York: Routledge, 1993; rpt. But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

-----. But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

-----. "The Marks of Time." But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Rowbotham, Sheila. Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties. London: Penguin, 2001.