Nine Lives
by Claire Kahane
In this tell-all memoir, Claire Kahane, born during the Great Depression to Jewish immigrants, unveils her intimate self-transformations in the course of nine decades. Determined at an early age to prove herself a free spirit in a male dominated world, the young Kahane went on the road, hitch-hiking her way into and out of risky adventures and romantic affairs. But what started out as a “road book” takes a different turn in mid-life when, influenced by a psychoanalysis and the second wave of feminism, she becomes a feminist professor, mother, and wife, dealing with their contradictory demands.
“Claire Kahane has written a memoir for our times: an account of a life spent in pursuit of lived experience long before it was permissible for women like Kahane to do just that. Rich and lively, vivid and bold, Nine Lives is bound to reach a wide and responsive readership.” —Vivian Gornick, essayist, critic, and author of numerous memoirs, including Fierce Attachments, The Odd Woman and the City, and Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader.
“Claire Kahane’s memoir is a riveting account of a life dedicated to self-discovery. The early part of it involved living dangerously, but her later role as professor, mother, and wife grows naturally from those initial experiences. Her story is also a vivid mirror of the times, from the fifties to the present.” —Robert Alter, translator of the Hebrew Bible and author of numerous books and essays on European and American literature from the eighteenth century to the present, as well as literary aspects of the Bible.
“Claire Kahane’s Nine Lives recounts a history of wild wandering and wayward romance en route to self-discovery. A sophisticated scholar of psychoanalysis, Kahane is also a deft writer whose life journey takes her from an immigrant home in the Bronx to motherhood and love, with stops along the way in Mexico, San Francisco, Greenwich Village, Paris, Tangiers, Ibiza–and more. The decades she evokes in her memoir, starting with the fifties and culminating in the present, come vividly to life as she travels the world.” — Sandra Gilbert, poet-critic and-coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic, No Man’s Land, and Still Mad.
Available from Brandylane Publishers, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and your local independent bookstore.