Daphne Merkin

The Bliss and the Risks

The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker’s ascension to greater visibility raises questions about how we assess artistic talent, how reputations are made, and how we reevaluate once-neglected artists, particularly women.

Consider the Diva

“I don’t think sexual attractiveness ever comes solely from looks . . . it often has to do with playfulness or even slyness.”

The Way She Was

“I never thought I was great,” Barbra Streisand writes in her capacious memoir, but the truth seems to be that for a large part of her life she has flirted with the possibility that she was.

The Golden Age of Glossies

Women’s magazines were once a well-paying forum for inquiry into the interior life.

‘A Very Lonely Business’

“How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom,” Virginia Woolf wrote. Is there a tradeoff between motherhood and artistic creativity?

FaceTime, with Lipstick

If identity itself is a construction, as we have all been given to understand ever since English departments across the country started referring to books as “texts,” surely our appearance is a vital part of that construction.

The Lost Art of Phone Conversation

The old-fashioned fuddy-duddy telephone—which once seemed as dated as Dorothy Parker’s short story “The Telephone Call,” in which a young woman waits desperately for a man to call—is suddenly back in style.

‘Closing Time’: My Lost Literary World

As one grows older and reaches one’s sixties and seventies, the world grows smaller and the air seems to thin, reminding one that mortality hovers. This sense of an ending comes with a melancholic recognition that everything, including vibrant and entrenched style of intellectual engagement, is fleeting.