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 ability
to seduce and enthrall, define the major
periods in Rich’s life. Born in 1929, for the first 18 years of her life she is