My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism by Nancy K. Miller (review)

What was it like to be among the first feminist literary scholars, building careers in prestigious programs at elite universities? A combination of memoir and biography, Nancy K. Miller’s My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism describes how her scholarly career and her identity were defined and nourished by friendships with three women scholars: Carolyn Heilbrun, Naomi Schor, and Diane Middlebrook. Heilbrun, Schor, and Middlebrook, as well as Miller herself, shaped feminist literary studies during the 1970s, 1980s, and beyond. My Brilliant Friends offers fragmentary and compelling portraits of these four different scholars as they found ways to support each other while writing books, creating academic programs, and editing scholarly series. But the narrative Miller offers is no simple or nostalgic elegy for a sisterhood of scholars. Instead, it is an explicit meditation on how complicated female friendships can be and an implicit meditation on how challenging it was to give and receive support to each other in a male-defined academic world. Today’s feminist scholars will be both troubled and inspired by Miller’s evocation of female friendships in late twentieth-century academe.

Miller’s early and mid-career struggle to figure out how to survive and succeed in the academy, as woman, scholar, and writer, defined her friendships with all three colleagues. Each friend offered something different and necessary, Miller argues: Heilbrun was a kind of rock for her, while Schor more of a mirror and Middlebrook a companion. In the 1970s, Heilbrun was a tenured, influential but embattled feminist scholar in Columbia University’s English department. She was also the author of popular detective fiction, using the pseudonym Amanda Cross. At that time, Miller was a newly minted assistant professor in French, also at Columbia, who was “flailing, failing in my life, anxious about tenure” (p. 10). Their friendship was maintained through weekly dinners—a form of mentorship, although they never used that term. During Miller’s time as a graduate student at Columbia, she had connected with Schor, an assistant professor in French, who trained at Yale. By Miller’s account, they became semi-twinned in the discipline, “two middle-class, New York Jewish girls enamored of things French” (p. 87). They looked somewhat similar and were even conflated by a colleague, in one telling anecdote, as “Naomi Miller” (p. 110). Finally, Miller describes her brief but powerful friendship with Middlebrook, the Stanford-based literary biographer whom she met in 1999 while Middlebrook was dealing with cancer. Both were established in their careers.

A poignant section of the book describes the important female friendships Miller also formed in The Group: eight New York-based academic women in their 20s who, inspired by a 1971 New York Times article, formed their own consciousness-raising group. Their shared theme was “not knowing what we were doing, or why, and not being satisfied” (p. 93). They met regularly for almost ten years. The list of topics that emerged in their first meeting was written down, in shorthand: “love, sex, physical appearance. Images others have of us, bullshitting: honesty with our friends. Abortion, femininity, aging, motherhood, coming to The Group. Our mothers, marriage, money. Work, competition with women, competition with men. Do we exist?” (p. 93).

“Do we exist?” is not a question a male scholar would likely ask in the 1970s or now. But Miller argues that she needed her three women friends, as well as The Group, to create, define, and narrativize herself into existence as a woman scholar. Miller repeatedly describes how she did or did not see herself reflected in each woman. How were they alike or different? Which experiences shared, which not? What was real, what performed, what was discussed, what could not be?

In ways I remember from my own 1980s academic past, Miller indicates (but does not fully interrogate) what it was like to try to “exist” as a scholar within the constraints of the male gaze. Michael...