Well, I loved The Women’s Room, and after rereading still appreciate its merits and especially its ending. But this book—not to be disrespectful of the dead— I’m less enamored. From 1992-1996, Marilyn battled esophageal cancer, the result of her inveterate smoking habit. Though her ensuing battle with the disease is indeed harrowing, affecting nearly every part of her body, she engages in it from a position of privelege. Her recovery takes place in one of her three homes, in New York City and the Berkshires, and Florida, with some sojourning in expensive hotels in London and Australia.

Her three children, Gloria Steinem, E.M. Broner, Charlotte Sheedy and other top 2nd Wave feminists offer emotional and physical support. She spends over $1k a month on uninsured medications, and $500 a month on uninsured physical therapy. She was treated at Sloan-Kettering, so had top medical care. She emerges battered, but alive.

The end of the book is about death, which she welcomes as “a friend, into whose arms one sinks gratefully when it is time.” She has learned not to live for the future: “I am no longer driven. I no longer imagine that I can do much to help bring about the millennium of the humane ideal…” The book was published in 1997, and Marilyn lived another 12 years, until she was 80. During that time she published the 4-volume From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World and another novel called In the Name of Friendship. Pretty Prolific.

Certainly Marilyn, with her scholarship and incisive feminism, was a gift to the planet, and she's sympathetic to those less fortunate, but she seems to have only the vaguest idea about how they actually, um, live. ( )

Autobiografisch relaas van de Amerikaanse schrijfster (1929-...) over haar strijd met ogenschijnlijk terminale kanker in der periode 1992-1997 ( )