Kate Millett

How the patriarchal bias operates in culture and is reflected in literature.

Sita is a woman of temperament, wit, artistry and power. Foreign, seductive, full of contradiction. For her, Kate Millett was willing to hazard her art, her feelings, her life. To continue to love even when she knew the time for loving was long past. With total honesty, she relates the fascinating account of her obsession with the woman, Sita. And with beauty and sensitivity, she evokes for us the terrible - and familiar - sadness of the end of love.

"Kate Millett's memoir begins with a telephone call from Minnesota where her mother is dying. Her return home to a severe, intelligent, and controlling matriarch is the catalyst for a meditation on her upbringing in middle America and her subsequent outcast status as a political activist, artist, and lesbian. She confronts members of her own family who make devastating decisions about Mother Millett's care, a health-care system that does not consult its patients about their futures, and her own fears and limitations as she encounters her mother in her final years." "Mother Millett is a personal journey through the author's interior life, a subject she has visited over the years in such classic texts as Sita and The Loony Bin Trip. In these pages are reflections on a life of political engagement, beginning with the sexual politics of the feminist movement, proceeding to the struggle for gay liberation, and culminating in her campaign for housing rights on the Lower East Side of New York where she and her neighbors currently face eviction. Throughout, Millett confronts her fears of losing her mother, the anchor to a world she has long ago rejected but which continues to define her."--Jacket.

This is a book about love and the influence of money. It is also a dialogue between artist and patron, student and teacher, and a story of growing up gay in a time and place where circumstances were sufficiently difficult to encourage dishonesty and dishonor. Kate Millett lied to her mentor, and confidante (and in a sense her first love), Aunt Dorothy - A.D. - in order to study at Oxford with her own first woman lover. A.D. is about education and art and patronage - and about being gay in 1950s America - an impossible time of silence and shame, of largesses encumbered by "strings," coerced promises ending in deceit.

A swarm of bees stings a man to death, another is eaten alive by ticks. The victims have one thing in common, they offended Myra Ludens. Is she causing those deaths, or is she the conduit for Goody Redman, a witch hanged 300 years ago and buried under her house? The setting is Connecticut.

The Loony-Bin Trip is the gripping personal story of Kate Millett's struggle to regain control of her life after being diagnosed as manic-depressive. Through a searing circle of events beginning with Millett's decision to go off medication, and a summer of increasingly ominous doubts about her own sanity and the loyalty of her friends, to a hellish sojurn in an Irish mental hospital and a paralyzing bout of depression, Millett shows us from the inside what devastation the specter of madness can cause. Shockingly honest, The Loony-Bin Trip may revolutionize the way we think about mental illness.