My Brilliant Friends

Nancy Miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY and co-editor of the Gender and Culture series. Her books include the landmark The Poetics of Gender (ed., Columbia UP, 1987), Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (Columbia University Press, 1989), Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (Routledge, 1991), Bequests and Betrayal: Memoirs of a Parent’s Death (Oxford UP, 1996), But Enough About Me:Why We Read Other People’s Lives (Columbia UP, 2002), Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (co-editor, Columbia UP, 2011), and others.Nancy K. Miller teaches life writing and cultural criticism at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (1991) and But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives (Columbia, 2002), as well as the memoir Breathless: An American Girl in Paris (2013).

Hillary Chute, author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics:
I loved reading My Brilliant Friends. It’s a fascinating and revealing look at the texture—good and bad—of feminist friendships, and, crucially, academic life for women. It is also an inspiring testament to three remarkable feminists, each operating in her own style. An important book for generations of feminists—those established, and those to come.

Elaine Showalter, professor emerita of English, Princeton University:
Nancy K. Miller has a gift for friendship and a mind for memoir. Reflecting on feminism, ambition, competition, and loss in these candid, tender stories of three passionate women intellectuals who died too soon, she has given a gift to readers who know the importance and complexity of female friendship.

Catharine R. Stimpson, University Professor and Dean Emerita, Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University:
Nancy K. Miller writes with shimmering intelligence, grace, courage, and hard-won candor about her friendships with three other significant writers, all feminists, now all dead: Carolyn Heilbrun, Naomi Schor, and Diane Middlebrook. Miller herself is surviving cancer. Both heartbreaking and life-sustaining, My Brilliant Friends proves that death can be the mother of beauty.

Susan Gubar, author of The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination:
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.

Wayne Koestenbaum, author of My 1980s & Other Essays:
Of Nancy K. Miller's many illuminating books, My Brilliant Friends may be my favorite—for its sculpted lucidity, its lancing details, its interlocking plots, and its virtuoso attention to emotional ambivalence. Like Hilton Als's The Women, Miller's book is a classic triple-decker account of entanglement and rupture. She reminds us, with a witty yet mournful gracefulness, that every friendship is a complex work of art, demanding fastidious analysis and enraptured recounting.

Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, a finalist for the National Book Award:
In My Brilliant Friends, Nancy K. Miller depicts the life-altering importance of deep and nourishing friendships between and among women. Through vivid details and Miller’s singular point of view, we witness her transformative relationships with Carolyn Heilbrun, Naomi Schor, and Diane Middlebrook and their enduring love, growth, and collective power.

Siri Hustvedt, author of A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women:
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.