Saturday's Child: A Memoir

Robin Morgan's brisk yet reflective memoir has all of the political and personal bite that you'd expect from someone who came out of the New Left to join the militant wing of the women's movement. It's written also with the elegance and formidable recollection of physical and emotional details that distinguish her poetry (Monster) and fiction (Dry Your Smile). And it contains a marvelously evocative rendering of what it was like to be a child star in 1940s radio ("The Little Robin Morgan Show") and 1950s television (Dagmar on "Mama") In short, there's little that this remarkable woman hasn't experienced and/or written about. Here, she goes lightly over the heady years of resurgent feminism (covered more fully in Sisterhood Is Powerful and Going Too Far), and concentrates instead on exploring less public areas of her life: her fraught relationship with her mother, who managed the performing career that young Robin didn't want, really; her single meeting with the father who abandoned them (described with a refreshing lack of sentimentality); her unconventional marriage to Kenneth Pitchford, which produced a beloved son and endured for more than 20 years, despite Pitchford's homosexuality; and her two long-term relationships with women. Naturally, there are political insights throughout (the first, expressed in a diary entry when Robin was eight), and Morgan chronicles at some length her ongoing engagement in the struggle for international women's rights. But she takes the time here to let us know the woman behind the causes more comprehensively than in her previous nonfiction; and, because she seems as self-aware as she is smart, it's a pleasure to make her further acquaintance. --Wendy Smith