I have a salt-loving tongue, not a sweet tooth, so the mass of papers I had collected from my printer tray and stuffed into an oversized envelope tempted less like a sack of candy or cookies, more like a packet of tasty chips or crackers. Nancy K. Miller and Victoria Rosner had just emailed me about the possibility of my adding something to the collection of talks given at Columbia University in honor of Carolyn Heilbrun. Hefting the transcript of the readings and responses delivered on the occasion, entitled Writing a Feminist's Life: Academics and Their Memoirs, I intuited immediately that I couldn't just sample one of them; I would have to start at the beginning of the manuscript and, I realized in my office, I would never be able to put it down until I had gobbled up the very last crumbs. But I couldn't begin reading there and then, so I stored the envelope in my car, and only started savoring its contents (oddly enough) in a waiting room at a surgical center (while a friend underwent a second operation on a finger that had become infected because a nurse had left a single stitch, around which scar tissue had formed after the first procedure).

Like the friendly readers of Nancy's wonderful Bequest and Betrayal, who admitted they relished her italicized autobiographical passages (whereas they skipped her critical analyses in regular type), I was ravenous (think - even in the depressing atmosphere of a surgical waiting room!) for the intimate details the memoirists would recount. Perhaps especially for those of us not on either coast (and abiding instead in what Mary Ann Caws considers the "oxymoron" of "Surrealism in Bloomington"!), the craving for connectedness with other feminist scholars is profound, or so it seemed to me, as I read from start to finish (though not in one sitting, with quite a few interruptions) a series of presentations that impressed me with what I already knew (the extraordinary diversity of backgrounds characterizing feminist academics) but also what I was pleased to discover I shared with a number of the speakers as well as those members of the audience who spoke up with questions or comments: an urgent desire to find forms of writing more supple and nuanced, less formulaic and tired than academic discourse as usual. With the help of Carolyn Heilbrun, are we on the brink of transforming critical prose in much the same manner we had earlier re-invented syllabi, courses, and degrees in too many disciplines and institutions of higher education to name?

Since most of my writing is not personal and since the book I had just completed is an experiment in what I am calling narrative criticism, I looked to see how narrating a feminist's life could modify the ways in which we craft feminist criticism. Breaking the conventions of scholarly writing was what I had set out to do under the auspices of Virginia Woolf, specifically in a revision of her classic that I have entitled Rooms of Our Own. (The tentative title of the manuscript-in-progress, "A Feminism of One's Own," had been vetoed even by supportive readers because "no one cares about feminism any more" or "feminism is a turn-off"!) For me, as for many others, the usual sorts of theoretical and critical discourses had started to seem stale, flat, or bland. The problem was not just obfuscatory or elitist jargon since one could produce perfectly lucid critical paragraphs simply by omitting the sorts of linguistic tics that too often twitch throughout the sentences of what is called highly theorized verbiage. No, it went deeper or wider than that (maybe explaining why too many people today feel that "no one cares about feminism any more" or "feminism is a turn-off"), for feminist criticism as usual (even when written with clarity and wit) has grown old enough to taste as canned or freeze-dried as any other brand of criticism. What the conference packet told me, then, was how urgent is the need to reinvent it. Many of the conference participants in New York shared that feeling and indeed may have been propelled into the composing of memoir by it, but Leila Ahmed put the sentiment most powerfully: normative critical language had come to feel to her "almost like a prison," and "that was where many of us found ourselves, in those years, at least many feminists, at the end of the '80s and early '90s."

Several of the participants expressed the view that what was exciting about the memoir form was its specificity, and also its ability to reach a wider audience than academic publications ordinarily attract. When embedded in particularity, insights about gender and about race, class, age, ethnicity, and sexuality seem to arise with more tonality, with a resonant timbre, and with less ideological grandstanding than they do when cramped under the theoretical rubrics usually used to engage them. Additionally, a host of differences surfaced in the snippets of memoir the participants read about their own therapies, the catastrophic deaths of relatives, their families' religious and social customs, and the horror of rape. But if abstractions transfigured into concrete instances bristle with accessible, evident vibrancy and if various differences surface when the borders demarcating the personal, the political, and the professional become malleable, then might they do so not only in the memoir but also in less autobiographical forms of feminist writing? Perhaps publishing houses are cutting down on their lists of criticism, perhaps criticism is no longer selling in part because the affective, emotional complexities of our private but also our pedagogic and collegial investments have been severed from the scrutiny we accord literary texts.

To be sure, there are anxieties and pitfalls awaiting those whose practices depart from traditional modes of feminist criticism. "At least in academia," Deborah McDowell cautioned at the conference, there reigns "the kind of tacit understanding that the personal and the scholastic should be mutually exclusive." Will innovative forms of writing "count" during, say, tenure and promotion decisions? Might they be disparaged as trivial interventions within the intellectual conversations of our peers? Do such attempts inevitably trap the writer in narcissistic self-absorption? Can younger, less established scholars risk the professional insecurity of experimental modes of composition? Such queries understandably trouble many aspiring authors in the academy. Of course, too, one needs to have somewhat of a substantive and self-consciously experienced past in order to elaborate upon it either in autobiographical or in other creatively conceived forms.

And then there are the daunting hurdles set by publishing houses and editors: because they have organized their catalogues by alphabetized and prioritized categories, anything hybrid in form can be summarily rejected out of hand. Even established authors, I am here to testify, may find it difficult nowadays to get into print work that fails to conform to prevailing and fairly rigid definitions of scholarship (though I am happy to say that Rooms of Our Own will be published by the University of Illinois Press this year). Quite a few editors at prestigious university presses have recently suggested in print that specialized investigations should appear in article form, that the authors of books need to address a more general audience; however, these same editors frequently turn down projects because their "boards" resist or oppose unconventional efforts. Whether or not approached through the mediations of an agent, trade press editors - at the risk of sounding petulant, let me exaggerate here to express my distress - often dismiss proposals deemed highbrow, insufficiently dumbed down for the dimwits they take to be their targeted customers. Needless to say, these minefields will detour some, but inevitably (and luckily) fail to deter others.

Despite daunting inhibitions, it seems to me that feminist critics have much to gain by exploring some of the techniques of memoir - and perhaps of the lyric, the novel, biography, satire, and drama as well - not just as an alternative to literary criticism but also as an effort to transform it. This, I feel, is an avenue open to pretty much anyone interested in traveling it, for when was the last time you could name a book of feminist literary criticism that you simply had to read, couldn't put down, purchased for your friends, and raved about to your aunt? When was the last time your goddaughter phoned you to say she had just ordered two copies of XX or XY on amazon.com, a book you simply had to discuss with her so you both could understand what you had been trying to understand for lo all these many decades? Is it just the nostalgia of older age that makes me think that there was such a time and that it was bliss then to be alive? If those at the Columbia conference who read from memoirs I already owned made me want to pull their books back off the shelves for a second look, as they definitely did; if those who read from accounts I had not known about made me want to run out and purchase their books directly, as they definitely did; if the few still working on their autobiographies made me hope that they would complete them with dispatch and publish them quickly - well then, couldn't some of this excitement also go into the vitalization of other feminist forms?

The pleasures of reading, but also the pleasures of writing, seep through the paragraphs I marked and flagged in the surgical waiting room, reminding me of two essays I thoroughly enjoyed drafting and revising precisely because they used autobiographical details and fictionalized characters. Emboldened by the introspection of the memoirists, I recalled then, as I do now, the delight I took in composing "Eating the Bread of Affliction," where I approached the relationship between feminism and Judaism through three stylized renditions of three consecutive Seders in my own family; and the sheer fun of taking a conduct-and-comic writer's stance toward the baffling personal and professional complexities of stressful midlife careers in "The Graying of Professor Erma Bombeck." The book in which they were finally collected, Critical Condition, called for less staid, more surprising linguistic strategies for feminist critics, but I was still partly unconscious then of all the various motives behind my own efforts to practice them.

That for quite some time intellectuals in general, and feminist critics in particular, have devised aesthetically diverse strategies - not only within the parameters of the memoir - is transparently apparent. From Plato's Symposium to Hazlitt's "My First Acquaintance with Poets" and Wilde's "The Critic as Artist," after all, philosophical texts and aesthetic meditations have employed characters, settings, dialogues, plots, and symbols. And in the history of feminist criticism, Virginia Woolf was not alone in honing a series of personae whose meditations required storytelling about, in her case, the fictional Judith Shakespeare imagined by one Mary Beton after a lunch at Oxbridge, followed by a visit to the British Museum. Noteworthy and experimental texts replete with lyrical repetitions, mystic images, and parodic parables have been produced by quite a few pioneers in the so-called second wave, including Gloria Steinem, Tillie Olsen, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, Joanna Russ, Angela Carter, Gloria Anzaldúa, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Jane Tompkins. Ruth Salvaggio's The Sounds of Feminist Theory and Linda Garber's Identity Poetics illuminate aspects of this phenomenon. Why shouldn't we - who study poems and novels, biographies and films, plays and memoirs - learn how to tap the aesthetic pleasures that drew us toward literature in the first place?

What, during the conference proceedings, Ann Douglas called the "extraordinary imperial candor" of Carolyn Heilbrun can still be experienced by readers of her detective fiction as well as her biographical, autobiographical, and critical books, all of which in various ways demonstrate her attempts to engage an audience beyond the academy. There is much to be learned, too, from the feminist journalists we all enjoy reading, writers like Katie Roiphe and Barbara Ehrenreich. In these reactionary times, warfare and welfare, religion and globalism, bioengineering and ecological disasters require the scrutiny feminists inside and outside literature departments have trained themselves to bring to such tangled but crucially important matters. Not just the topics and the forms, but the prevailing attitude toward publication itself needs scrutiny. The very structure of the Columbia conference - at which critics read from books in print - deviated from academic business as usual, since at a typical conference one is pretty much forbidden to read what is already in print, pretty much expected to churn out something new. More like a creative writing event, the format of the celebration honoring Carolyn testified to the ongoing value of the work that had been produced, the need to hear what might have been read before so as to be surprised by new meanings or renewed shocks at what must be apprized somewhat differently.

"Things vanish when you don't write them down," Mary Ann Caws explains in her memoir. And I believe that some of the things that have vanished from feminist criticism could be preserved by more innovative and capacious approaches to it. Teaching, the classroom, our relationship to the undergraduates in our discussion sections or to the graduate students in our dissertation seminars: these are subjects that could be more fully integrated into feminist criticism, as could our relationships with each other as colleagues on committees, editorial boards, and institutes, especially during a period when the hierarchical structures of the academy are exerting pressures detrimental to the equality for women that feminists always seek to foster. Given the downsizing of the humanities, feminists need to enter into conversations about education that will inevitably impinge on gender and sexuality studies classes within traditional departments but also in women's and gender studies programs and departments. What in particular the teaching of literature means could involve us, too, in discussions about the largely unaddressed subject of aesthetics - not just its ideological significance, but its affective import for people from various backgrounds and with divergent tastes and values.

The everyday routines of my personal life often feel rather boring, alas, but my interior life with feminism and its approaches to the cultures we encounter inside and outside the university - well, that's another series of stories altogether. Not everyone who reads the memoirs of the participants included in "Writing a Feminist's Life" will set out to compose a memoir, but many might use the personal, particular, anecdotal, and associative strategies of the memoirists in the criticism they undertake to produce. Literary criticism usually means criticism about the literary, but it might also suggest a criticism aspiring to produce the resonant effects of literature on its readers.

Perhaps the hunger I had experienced at the printer in my office had something to do with the surgical waiting room in which it was satisfied. We feminists, I mused as I considered all the ills flesh is heir to, are aging, and so now we will follow in Carolyn Heilbrun's footsteps, bringing into focus the manifold ways in which gender impinges on that later part of women's life cycle. It was Carolyn, I recalled (after a nurse informed me that my friend was coming out of anesthesia), who in her sixties made conscious decisions about her hair, clothes, diet, exercising, housing, and family, which she discussed with me over innumerable meals that fulfilled our common desire for not just intellectual intimacy together. Famished in my office and now gratified as I read straight through what would have otherwise seemed a very long stretch of time, I thought about those lively suppers and about my abiding hunger for (of all things) hunger. Did my craving for the printed pages in the envelope have something to do with my more general longing for the insatiable appetites I had had in the past, for all those feminist books, XY or XX, I had relished over the years with Carolyn, with my ill-fated friend (now undoubtedly struggling back to consciousness of a wounded hand), and with so many others?

When Elizabeth Bishop read "right straight through" a copy of National Geographic in a dentist's waiting room, she had been surprised by a cry from within, and then by a shocking realization about her "foolish, timid" aunt - that "it was me: / my voice, in my mouth . . . I was my foolish aunt." Was it the pains of the memoirists or the aches to which my friend was awakening that made me wonder now why Aunt Consuelo seemed so "foolish, timid" in Bishop's poem? Always before, I had assumed she simply appeared so through the eyes of the six-year-old Bishop was recalling. But perhaps it is the expression of another's pain - "Suddenly, from inside, / came an oh! of pain" - that shocks the child into disavowal and identification ("I was my foolish aunt"), not unlike the disavowals and identifications I felt toward the memoirists, toward Carolyn, and toward my cherished but now bandaged friend (she had attended Carolyn's memorial service with me); and so I marveled along with Bishop, "Why should I be my aunt, / or me, or anyone?" as I considered the strangeness - "I knew that nothing / stranger could ever happen" - of the voluntary, prized, but diaphanous connections between me, Carolyn, Mary Jo, and the conference participants with their international geographies. As Bishop did then, I asked myself the foolhardy question: "What similarities" - one dead, one Catholic or Islamic, another a rape or cancer or suicide survivor, yet others from this or that region of the mind - "held us all together / or made us all just one?"

Perhaps at 60, as at 6, we are still "In the Waiting Room," anticipating and dreading the arrival of whatever stage is next, losing a tenuous sense of self while reading and hearing others whose expressions reconfigure a new but just as tenuous self. Reading or hearing each others' writing, we experience the tug of our commonalities, but also our resistance, our need to find ourselves distinctive, unabsorbed, unique, itself an urgency we paradoxically share. The war was still on outside, as the surgeon beckoned me for post-op instructions and I made Bishop's hope my own, that we would dare vertiginous fears to look and see and write about what we have become and exactly how such "unlikely" similarities continue to hold us, different as we are, all together.