Review: A New Biography Shows How Adrienne Rich Changed Her Mind
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution by Adrienne Rich W.W. Norton & Company, 416 pp., $16.95 The relationship didn’t last, and in a 1977 interview, Rich would say she “regretted airing her grievances with Sontag in print.” This anecdote, like so many others within Hilary Holladay’s capacious new biography of Rich, encapsulates the mixed-up and messy, personal and political shape and texture of Adrienne Rich’s life. It shows, too, how willingly she often looked back later on choices she’d made with regret. Commitments and reversals, a continually impressive abil...