Nancy K. Miller

My Brilliant Friends is a group biography of three women’s friendships forged in second-wave feminism. Poignant and politically charged, the book is a captivating personal account of the complexities of women’s bonds.

Nancy K. Miller describes her friendships with three well-known scholars and literary critics: Carolyn Heilbrun, Diane Middlebrook, and Naomi Schor. Their relationships were simultaneously intimate and professional, emotional and intellectual, animated by the ferment of the women’s movement. Friendships like these sustained the generation of women whose entrance into male-dominated professions is still reshaping American society. The stories of their intertwined lives and books embody feminism’s belief in the political importance of personal experience. Reflecting on aging and loss, ambition and rivalry, competition and collaboration, Miller shows why and how friendship’s ties matter in the worlds of work and love. Inspired in part by the portraits of the intensely enmeshed lives in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, My Brilliant Friends provides a passionate and timely vision of friendship between women.

The story of a girl who rebelled against conventional expectations for marriage, children, and suburban life, Breathless offers a glimpse into the intimate lives of girls before feminism took hold. Paris was a magnet for those eager to resist domesticity, and Miller was enamored of everything French. Upon graduating from Barnard College in 1961, she set out for Paris, with a plan to take classes at the Sorbonne and live out a great romantic life inspired by the movies. But after a string of sexual misadventures, she gave up her short-lived freedom and married an American expatriate who promised her a future of three-star meals and five-star hotels-and who turned out to be a con man. 

Essays from some of the foremost writers and critics on photography today, including Rebecca Solnit, Alfredo Jaar, Ariella Azoulay, Shahidul Alam, John Lucaites, Robert Hariman, and Susan Meiselas, address the question of the viewer's role in photos of violence and suffering. Are we desensitized by the proliferation of these images, and does this make it easier to be passive and uninvolved? Or do the images immediately stir our own sense of justice and act as a call to arms? Each essay focuses specifically on an iconic image, offering a distinct approach and context, in order to enable us to look again—and this time more closely—at the picture. Nancy K. Miller is a distinguished professor of comparative literature, English, and French at the Graduate Center. Geoffrey Batchen is an adjunct professor of art history at the GC, and Jay Prosser earned his Ph.D. in English at the GC.

After her father's death, Nancy K. Miller discovered a minuscule family archive: a handful of photographs, an unexplained land deed, a postcard from Argentina, unidentified locks of hair. Searching for their meaning, Miller followed their traces from one distant relative to another. Her story, unlike the many family memoirs focused on the Holocaust, takes us back earlier in history to the world of pogroms and mass emigrations at the turn of the twentieth century. Searching for roots as a middle-aged orphan and an assimilated Jewish New Yorker, Miller finds herself asking unexpected questions: Why do I know so little about my family? How can I understand myself when I don't know my past? Miller learns that the hidden lives of her ancestors reveal as much about the present as they do about the past. 

Miller has carved out a distinctive niche with her books of personal criticism, this time mixing memoir with a group portrait of a generation of literary women who grew up in an age of profound social change. But Enough About Me tells the story of a girl who matured in the 1950s, got lost in the 1960s, and became a feminist critic in the 1970s. But it becomes a transpersonal" memoir as it weaves in stories of other notable feminists of her age. Its stylistic blend of social criticism and deep anecdote, complemented by photographs that are by turns provocative and intimate, makes this a unique read: a candid autobiographical essay that is also a meditation on the social phenomenon of the "memoir" as genre.