Feminist Activist-Writer Alix Kates Shulman to Read

Alix Kates Shulman

Alix Kates Shulman, feminist, political activist, and celebrated writer, will read from her new memoir, A Good Enough Daughter, on April 13. It is a tender and candid account of her journey home at the end of her parents' lives.

Shulman is best known for the novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, the powerful story of a middle-class Jewish girl from the Midwest coming of age in the 1950s. Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, which sold more than a million copies, expressed the frustrations of a generation of women and became one of the first classics of a revived feminist movement.

More recently, Shulman has written the award-winning memoir, Drinking the Rain, which describes her decision, at the age of fifty, to leave New York City to live in solitude off the coast of Maine. In these and other books, Shulman chronicled what it means to defy the expectations of family and society in order to map one's own life. Now, in her newest memoir, A Good Enough Daughter, Shulman explores what it means to do what is expected--discovering in the process the surprising, complicated joys of going home.

After years of distance, Shulman finds that her daily involvement with her parents at the end of their lives turns out not to be the burden commonly dreaded but an engrossing, empowering experience. With grace, clarity, and insight, she navigates the emotional and practical difficulties of rescuing the parents from whom she had once tried so hard to separate, weaving together the parallel stories of their growing old and her growing up. In a culture where parent-blame is commonplace and many stories of old age are framed as narratives of resentment and decline, this is a memoir of affection and fulfillment for both generations.

Shulman, whom the New York Times called "the voice that has for three decades provided a lyrical narrative of the changing position of women in American society," is the author of ten previous books, including two nonfiction works on the anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman. She has taught at universities throughout the country, and her stories and essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Ms., The Women's Review of Books, and the New York Times, among other publications.

The event is cosponsored by the Five College Women's Studies Research Center and the Odyssey Bookshop.