Nine Lives - by Claire Kahane

About the Book

Claire Kahane takes the reader on an adventurous coming-of-age journey over nine decades.

Book Synopsis

In this tell-all memoir, a woman in her eighties, born during the Great Depression to Jewish immigrants, unveils her intimate self-transformations in the course of nine decades. Determined at an early age to prove herself a free spirit in a male dominated world, as a young adult Kahane went on the road, hitchhiking her way into and out of risky adventures and romantic affairs, ceaselessly chasing new experience. But what started out as a "road book" takes a different turn in midlife when, influenced by the insights of psychoanalysis and feminism, she became a feminist professor, mother and wife. In later life her story changed tracks again when a visit to Auschwitz compelled her to confront her own family history of loss and renewal. The memoir ends with a surprising new twist that opens to a hopeful future. In this long and hard-earned coming-of-age story, readers will find a piece of themselves.

Review Quotes

"Claire Kahane has written a memoir for our times: an account of a life spent in pursuit of lived experience long before it was permissible for women like Kahane to do just that. Rich and lively, vivid and bold, Nine Lives is bound to reach a wide and responsive readership."

-Vivian Gornick, essayist, critic, and author of numerous memoirs, including Fierce Attachments, The Odd Woman and the City, and Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader

"Claire Kahane's memoir is a riveting account of a life dedicated to self-discovery. The early part of it involved living dangerously, but her later role as professor, mother, and wife grows naturally from those initial experiences. Her story is also a vivid mirror of the times, from the fifties to the present."

-Robert Alter, translator of the Hebrew Bible and author of numerous books and essays on European and American literature from the eighteenth century to the present, as well as literary aspects of the Bible

"Claire Kahane's Nine Lives recounts a history of wild wandering and wayward romance en route to self-discovery. A sophisticated scholar of psychoanalysis, Kahane is also a deft writer whose life journey takes her from an immigrant home in the Bronx to motherhood and love, with stops along the way in Mexico, San Francisco, Greenwich Village, Paris, Tangiers, Ibiza-and more. The decades she evokes in her memoir, starting with the fifties and culminating in the present, come vividly to life as she travels the world."

-Sandra Gilbert, poet-critic and co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic, No Man's Land, and Still Mad

"The noted feminist critic Claire Kahane looks back on the multiple surprising, often risky life roles she enthusiastically adopted in a restless quest to forge her own identity. The aptly named Clara Katz, Holocaust survivors' kid, finds herself code switching from good-girl Bronx high school student to country-western singer, Greenwich Village bohemian, San Francisco beat, expat nomad, graduate student and college professor, wife and mother, analysand and analyst, and happy late life partner. Each of these stories vividly brings to life the particulars of its own uniquely American subculture, fusing seamlessly into a highly satisfying read: the remarkable personal trajectory of one woman's bumpy but triumphant journey through eighty-plus years of our shared cultural history."

-Victoria Nelson, author of Neighbor George and The Secret Life of Puppets