Alix Kates Shulman - Writing

Writing

Shulman first emerged as the author of the controversial "A Marriage Agreement," which proposes that men and women split childcare and housework equally and details a method for doing so. Originally published in the feminist journal Up From Under in 1969, it was widely reproduced in magazines (Life, Redbook, Ms., New York) and anthologies, including a Harvard textbook on contract law. It continues to be debated, for instance in January 2007 in a Washington Post Blog.

Three years later, Shulman published first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (Knopf, 1972), which examineed the contradictions and pressures on a young woman of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s through the story of Sasha Davis from childhood through marriage and motherhood. Almost continually in print, it was reissued in a 25th anniversary edition in 1997 by Penguin and in a 35th anniversary "Feminist Classics" edition in 2007 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Her second novel, Burning Questions (Knopf, 1978), recreates the rise of WLM and sets it in a historical context. Her third novel, On the Stroll, takes on the themes of homelessness and abuse through the story of a shopping-bag lady and a teenage runaway who is preyed upon by a pimp over the course of one summer. Her fourth novel, In Every Woman's Life... ), explores marriage, children, and singleness in a contemporary comedy of manners. After that, in her next three books, she turned to memoirs: Drinking the Rain, about her experience of living alone on an island without electricity, road, or phone, as she undergoes a midlife change; A Good Enough Daughter, about her life as a daughter to loving parents whom she sees through their deaths; and To Love What Is, an account of caring for her husband following a 2004 accident that left him seriously brain-impaired. In addition, she has written two books on anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman (To The Barricades, Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader ), and three children's books (Bosley on the Number Line, Finders Keepers, Awake or Asleep ).

Shulman has taught writing and women's literature widely in the U.S., including at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (Honolulu), where she held the Citizens Chair in 1991-2; also at the University of Maine, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Yale. She received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Case Western Reserve University in 2001.