Hilary Holladay, "The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Lillian Barger
Guest: Hilary Holladay
Date: October 17, 2025
Book: The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2025)

---

Episode Overview

This episode features Lillian Barger in discussion with journalist, biographer, and American poetry scholar Hilary Holladay about her new book, The Power of Adrienne Rich. The biography provides an in-depth exploration of the life, works, and evolving identity of Adrienne Rich—one of America’s most celebrated modern poets and influential feminist figures. The conversation traces Rich’s formative years, her fraught familial relationships, her literary rise, radical politics, feminism, and lasting legacy.

---

Key Topics & Discussion Points

Hilary Holladay's Journey to Writing About Adrienne Rich

• Background (02:07–04:35):
  • Holladay has a life-long devotion to English and poetry, with academic and professional ties to Virginia and Massachusetts.
  • Her introduction to Rich’s poetry came as an undergraduate, with Diving into the Wreck leaving a profound impact.
  • Holladay saw Rich read publicly but never met her; she felt compelled to write Rich's biography after Rich’s death, building on previous biographical work.

Family, Childhood, and Early Influences

• Rich’s Upbringing (05:12–08:11):

  • Raised in Baltimore by an ambitious, learned father—a pathologist who expected intellectual greatness—and a musically-talented mother whose own ambitions were curtailed by motherhood.

  • Rich’s father, frustrated by not having a son, pushed Adrienne toward prodigy status in both music and poetry.

  • Rich’s childhood was highly privileged but marked by significant pressure, with physical ailments likely tied to stress.

  • Memorable anecdote: As a child, Rich dreamed her piano transformed into a writing desk, indicating an early, conflicted sense of vocation.

    “She wrote in her diary that as a young girl…she had a dream that she was at the piano. And then suddenly in the dream, the piano turned into a writing desk. And she knew that meant she was meant to be a writer.”
    — Hilary Holladay (07:02)

Complexities of Identity: Jewish Heritage & Gender

• Silence About Jewishness (08:58–10:33):

  • Rich’s father was conflicted about his own Jewish identity and suppressed it in the family, preferring Adrienne and her sister be raised Episcopalian.

  • Rich only engaged deeply with her Jewish roots during adulthood, feminism, and after meeting other Jewish women.

    “[Her] Jewish part of her identity became very important to her...a source eventually of great meaning and, I would say, joy and fulfillment.”
    — Hilary Holladay (09:50)

Ascendancy and Ambivalence: Radcliffe and Literary Celebrity

• College Years & Early Fame (10:50–14:28):

  • Rich excelled at Radcliffe, arriving with skills far ahead of her peers, mentored largely by male professors.

  • Won the prestigious Yale Prize for Younger Poets as an undergraduate, launching her as a literary celebrity.

  • Early self-possession: Even in correspondence with W. H. Auden, she asserted her own artistic vision.

    “She was already in command of herself as an artist.”
    — Hilary Holladay (12:08)

  • Fame created internal tension: Rich struggled between craving recognition and the desire to focus purely on art.

  • Retrospectively, she became ambivalent, noting a lack of women mentors and sexism at Harvard.

Personal Life: Marriage and Motherhood

• Marriage to Alfred Conrad (14:43–19:41):
  • Descriptions of Rich’s social life in college contrast with accounts from her sister, Cynthia, who noted Adrienne was not especially popular.
  • She was swept into early-50s expectations of marriage and motherhood, marrying economics scholar Alfred Conrad, with whom she had three sons.
  • Their marriage was tumultuous, both had affairs, and it ended with separation and Conrad’s suicide, leaving Rich to reinvent herself.

From Domesticity to Feminism and Radicalism

• Dissatisfaction and Transformation (22:00–24:17):

  • The marriage’s unevenness and mutual affairs played a role, but Rich’s self-discovery was gradual, not the result of sudden revelation about her sexuality.
  • Both partners became deeply involved in civil rights activism, particularly academic equity in New York.

• Immersion in Feminism (24:17–26:52):

  • In New York, Rich’s exposure to feminist thought and figures—like Audre Lorde—accelerated her engagement with feminism and women’s communities.
  • She sought both intellectual stimulation and friendship among feminist poets.

The Problem of Recognition and Awards (27:19–33:13)

• Rich was frequently honored, but also perceived as a "token woman" in male-dominated institutions, leading to complex internal and public reactions.

  “She wants it, but if she gets it, she’s a token. And if she doesn’t get it, it’s because she’s a woman, so you can’t win.”
  — Lillian Barger (28:10)

  • Famous National Book Award moment: Rich publicly accepted on behalf of all women, diverting prize money to women’s charities—a political act that marked a turning point in how she was perceived by literary institutions.

    “It was her way of putting a stake in the ground that I’m not playing by your rules anymore."
    — Hilary Holladay (31:45)

Literary Work and Activism

• Major Works & Prose (33:13–34:23):

  • Rich’s essays and prose, notably “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” and Of Woman Born, are highlighted as landmark feminist literature.

  • Of Woman Born juxtaposes Rich’s reverence for the experience of motherhood with her critique of its institutional oppression.

  • Reception was polarized; the book intensified her fame but also resistance from those unsettled by its challenges to social norms.

    “Some people are able to shake the dust motes loose from their brains and think, oh, maybe she’s onto something.”
    — Hilary Holladay (35:24)

Professional Relationships and Self-possession

• Editors and Publishing (37:28–40:01):

  • Rich’s interactions with editors were assertive; she saw the publisher as benefiting from her work at least as much as she did.

  • Maintained expert control over her publications’ presentation and content.

    “Her feeling was the publishing industry would make money off her book and it would raise their reputations.”
    — Hilary Holladay (38:11)

• Comparison to Other Women Artists (40:01–41:06):

  • Unlike self-possessed contemporaries who rejected feminism, Rich’s independence fueled, rather than negated, her feminism.

Evolution in Attitudes Toward Men

• Shifting Dynamics (41:06–43:09):

  • Post-1970s, following her husband's death and embrace of radical feminism, Rich's relationships with men became more distant.

  • For a period, she embraced lesbian separatism, sometimes cutting off male friends.

    "There was the … lesbian separatism. … I read correspondence and essays by men who said yes, … then she cut them off."
    — Hilary Holladay (42:37)

Sexuality: Discovery, Reinvention, and Politics

• Lesbianism as Political and Personal (43:09–47:48):

  • Rich's lesbian identity was intertwined with the politics of the era; it emerged within a milieu of other women exploring lesbianism as a feminist act.

  • Reinvention and transformation were central to Rich—her sexuality, like her poetry and activism, a site of ongoing exploration.

    “She was a woman of reinvention. She was a woman of transformation. And she put the transformations into her art…”
    — Hilary Holladay (46:03)

Partnership with Michelle Cliff

• Their Complex Dynamic (47:48–52:58):

  • Sought equality in her partnership with writer Michelle Cliff, but Rich’s fame sometimes overshadowed Cliff, causing tension.

  • Despite struggles—illness, alcoholism, professional imbalance—the relationship was deeply loving, sustained by shared wit, affection, and mutual support.

    “[Michelle] said that after Adrienne passed away … she could still feel Adrienne’s feet cuddling up against hers. And I think she was lost without her.”
    — Hilary Holladay (51:35)

Disillusionment and Shift Toward Anti-Racism

• Later Years: Feminism and Beyond (52:58–56:42):

  • Rich became disenchanted with feminism’s limitations—particularly its struggles with inclusivity and racism.

  • Influenced by housemate Michelle Cliff (a light-skinned Jamaician who identified as Black), and by Audre Lorde.

  • Physical limitations from rheumatoid arthritis precluded public activism, so Rich’s advocacy was channeled through her art.

    “She took her message to her art form, and that’s what she was meant to do anyway. Not everybody’s good at marching in the streets. Not everybody’s good at writing poems.”
    — Hilary Holladay (56:09)

Enduring Legacy

• Lasting Impact (56:42–58:33):

  • Rich’s poetry stands as her primary, most enduring contribution, especially Diving into the Wreck and The Dream of a Common Language.

  • Her willingness to reckon with difficult truths and personal transformation marks her as an exemplar of dedication, courage, and artistry.

    “She was a true poet. And yes, it was put upon her at a young age by a domineering father. That does not change the reality of who she was and the woman she kept becoming decade after decade after decade.”
    — Hilary Holladay (57:42)

---

Notable Quotes

• On her early pressure to be exceptional:
  “Her father had wanted a boy … he would groom her to be the next best thing, a little girl genius.” — Hilary Holladay (05:48)

• On the impact of her success:
  “She really was famous in her college community … she knew then that she was a star in Cambridge, in the whole Harvard community.” — Hilary Holladay (13:34)

• On her public feminist statement at the National Book Awards:
  “Her statement to the big audience … she would not accept the award for herself … it was her way of putting a stake in the ground that I’m not playing by your rules anymore… from here on out, I am a feminist.” — Hilary Holladay (31:45)

• On the cost of radicalism:
  “Her reputation as a very difficult person to deal with took off … it very likely cost her other awards like the Pulitzer or the Nobel.” — Hilary Holladay (32:33)

• On partnership and love:
  “[After Adrienne died, Michelle Cliff] said that … when she would go to bed at night, she could still feel Adrienne’s feet cuddling up against hers. And I think she was lost without her.” — Hilary Holladay (51:35)

• On Rich’s legacy:
  “I see in her life, although it was often difficult, an exemplar for women and men, of a truly courageous person who was deeply dedicated to her art and to living a truly informed and ethical life.” — Hilary Holladay (58:22)

---

Important Timestamps

• [02:07–04:35] Hilary Holladay’s background and why she wrote about Rich
• [05:12–08:11] Rich's childhood, family dynamics, and early pressures
• [08:58–10:33] Silence around Jewish heritage
• [10:50–14:28] Radcliffe years and early literary fame
• [14:43–19:41] Marriage to Alfred Conrad, social context and eventual separation
• [22:00–24:17] Marital dissatisfaction, affairs, and shift toward feminism
• [24:17–26:52] Meeting feminist icons and immersion in 1970s feminism
• [27:19–33:13] Awards, tokenism, and National Book Award statement
• [33:13–34:23] Of Woman Born and its reception
• [37:28–40:01] Relationship with editors and professional self-possession
• [41:06–43:09] Shift in relationships with men and lesbian separatism
• [43:09–47:48] Lesbian identity, reinvention, and the partnership with Michelle Cliff
• [52:58–56:42] Disillusionment with feminism and shift toward anti-racist activism
• [56:42–58:33] Rich’s lasting legacy—poetry as her primary contribution

---

Conclusion

This conversation richly excavates the life and work of Adrienne Rich, revealing a woman of remarkable talent, restless intellect, and courage—unafraid of continual transformation. Holladay’s biography and commentary foreground how Rich’s art, activism, and personal journey continue to resonate well beyond her lifetime, embodying the complex intersections of gender, sexuality, family, and identity.

---

Transcript

[Miu Miu Advertiser]

Your teen adjective used to describe an individual whose spirit is unyielding, unconstrained, one who navigates life on their own terms, effortlessly. They do not always show up on time, but when they arrive you notice an individual confident in their contradictions. They know the rules but behave as if they do not exist. New Teenagers the new fragrance by Miu Miu defined by you.

[Home Depot Advertiser]

The holidays have arrived at the Home Depot and we're here to help bring the excitement with decor for every part of your home. Check out our wide assortment of easy to assemble pre lit trees so you can spend less time setting up and more time celebrating. And bring your holiday spirit outdoors with unique decor like one of our Santa inflatables. Whatever your style, find the right pieces at the right prices this holiday season at the Home Depot.

[Liquid IV Advertiser]

Some days call for working up a sweat, working on your passion and endless action. Ditch the glitch with Liquid IV's new energy multiplier, sugar free refreshing flavors like strawberry, kiwi and BlackBerry lemonade scientifically formulated to support physical energy, hydration, focus, mood and social stamina. Liquid IV's new energy multiplier Sugar Free Hydrating energy. Tap the banner to learn more.

[Hilary Holiday]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Lillian Barger]

This is Lillian Barger, your host for another episode from the New Books Network. I'm talking with Hilary Holiday, journalist, scholar of American poetry and biographer. Her book the Power of Adrienne Rich offers a fascinating look into the complex life of one of America's most celebrated modern poets and her journey to activism and feminism. Let me know a little bit about yourself. Tell the audience who you are, where you came from, and how you came to write this amazing biography of Adrienne Rich.

[Hilary Holiday]

Lillian, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. It's a real pleasure and an honor. I am a writer and poetry scholar and I live in Orange County, Virginia, which is farm country in central Virginia. I went to the University of Virginia as an undergraduate and you might call me a lifelong English major. I then went on to earn my Master's at the College of William and Mary and then my PhD in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I had a long career as an English professor in Massachusetts and then in Virginia, and I'm currently the Sharp Writer in Residence at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. I got interested in Adrienne Rich a long time ago when I was a first year student at the University of Virginia. I had a wonderful poetry writing professor who assigned Rich's Diving into the Wreck as part of our Reading for the course. I immediately loved Rich's poetry. I found it very moving, inspiring, and a little bit mysterious. Over time, I had the opportunity to hear Adrian Rich read a couple of times. One time in Virginia, another time in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those were important events for me. Just to hear her voice, to see her in action. I did not have the opportunity to get to know her, unfortunately. But after she died, I thought, well, someone better write a biography of this really important poet. And I had written a previous biography of a man named Herbert Hunkey, who was a member of the Beat Generation. And I just thought, all right, I want to write about a woman. I want to write about someone more famous than Herbert Hunker. And since Hickey had been a thief and a junkie, I wanted to write about someone who was a little more reputable. So that's basically how I got moving on the Rich biography. I admired her. I followed her career. I had read her poetry for a long time, and I sensed that her life would be fascinating to research. And it was.

[Lillian Barger]

Well, the story is just packed with highlights. So when I was coming up with questions I might ask you, there were so many things in the book that were so interesting. You know, her relationship with her father, her husband, her time in New York, Radcliffe, Oxford. I mean, it's just on a notch, and all the honors in the books. And she was prolific, and it's amazing. I knew who she was, but I didn't know she was that prolific. So tell me about her. Let's start just at the beginning of her life, about her family, which really set her up for what she became.

[Hilary Holiday]

She grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father was a very prominent pathologist at Johns Hopkins University Hospital. Her mother played the piano. She had aspired to a career as a concert pianist. But marriage and motherhood cut that off. She had a younger sister, Cynthia, whom I had the great pleasure of getting to know and interviewing for this book. While Adrienne was growing up, she was the preferred child of these two daughters. Her father had wanted a boy for his first child and, in fact, had wanted a boy for his second child, too. And he didn't get his way because of that. He decided that with his firstborn, Adrienne, he would groom her to be the next best thing, a little girl genius. So he had her learning poetry, writing out poetry as a means of learning how to write when she was very young. In the meantime, her mother was teaching her piano. And when she was just maybe four years old, she would sit on top of a big book so that she could reach the keyboard. And she was a prodigy. She was playing, I believe it was Mozart when she was not even five years old. And one anecdote that I've always loved and found fascinating, she wrote in her diary that as a young girl, and she was writing this diary entry when she was a girl, she had had a dream that she was at the piano. And then suddenly in the dream, the piano turned into a writing desk. And she knew that it meant that she was meant to be a writer. And she really struggled with it because she knew she would have to tell her parents. And eventually, of course, she did. That anecdote sums up the stress Adrienne Rich was under from such a young age. She had an extraordinarily privileged childh. Her family wasn't wealthy, but this was a household of many, many books. And her father was, I would say, a genius or very close to it, very much a Renaissance man. And her mother had the music skills. But alongside that privilege, there was so much pressure on her, and she felt it. She had some childhood ailments that seemed connected to the pressure she was under. So it was a bifurcated childhood that she looked back on in wonder and sadness.

[Lillian Barger]

Well, what's interesting about what hit me was if you know anything about Margaret Fuller, the 19th century writer, she had the same sort of thing with her father. Her father trained her and pushed her to become a scholar and learn.

[Hilary Holiday]

And.

[Lillian Barger]

And this happens a lot, I think, in. In women who have become brilliant, whatever, there seems to be a father there or a father figure who pushes them. I found that very interesting, especially what happens later in her life. But I wanted to know. There was. Her father was Jewish, but there was a lot of silence about that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[Hilary Holiday]

Yes, there certainly was a lot of silence about Jewish heritage in the Rich family household in Baltimore. Her father was, I would say, very conflicted about being Jewish. He did not want to bring up his daughters in the Jewish faith. Adrienne's mother wanted her daughters to identify, shall we say, as Episcopalian, because she thought that would help them just in getting into college and just making their way through life. Adrienne really didn't know much about her Jewish background as a girl. And it was only once she got to Radcliffe, the female division of Harvard University at that time, that she started learning more, more and more and more. And then once she got older and was coming into her identity as a feminist and then as a lesbian feminist, the Jewish part of her identity became very important to Her. It became something, a source eventually of great meaning and, I would say, joy and fulfillment. She found real community with other Jewish women. She was not one to go to synagogue, but she embraced the history, the heritage and the community, especially with Jewish women.

[Lillian Barger]

Well, you talk about Radcliffe in the book, and she has spectacular college career. I mean, this was not an ordinary undergraduate woman. She from get go. She was a celebrity almost.

[Hilary Holiday]

She really was, Lillian. She had an astonishing undergraduate career at Radcliffe, just the sort of college career one would dream of. And she. It's interesting because here we have one of the most prominent American feminists of the 20th century going into the 21st century. But she got a head start in large part because of the men in her life. Her father had prepped her to write good metered, rhyming poetry. So she arrived at Radcliffe with skills beyond what most of her peers had, whether they were male or female. She found wonderful mentors among the faculty at Radcliffe who were men. They encouraged her to apply for the Yale Prize for younger poets. She, at the time, was dating a young man, planning to get married. So she consulted her fiance, you know, should I apply for this prize or not? And she had the poem. So then she thought, well, I'll just go for it. And so she applied for the Yale Prize, and lo and behold, she won it as an undergrad. She hadn't even graduated from college. All of a sudden, she was corresponding with W.H. auden, who was the judge for the contest. He was in Italy at the time. And while I was researching this book, I had the opportunity to read their correspondence. He wrote lovely, constructive criticism to her, and she would respond with her own tact and stylish way of writing. But she wouldn't. It wasn't like she would just accept everything he told her. She was already in command of herself as an artist. Once that book was published, it was in all the bookstores in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And you're right, she really was a celebrity. She really was famous in her college community. And in one anecdote, and I think this was in a letter she sent home to her family. She had gone to a poetry reading, and she was sitting there, and a couple of young men came and sat down next to her. And she glanced over, just by chance, and she saw that one young man had written a note to the other saying, you're sitting next to Adrienne Rich. And so she knew, if she didn't know already, she knew then that she was a star in Cambridge, in the whole Harvard community. And in the letter home she told the anecdote. She wasn't shy about sharing it, but she said it just made her feel kind of weird. And I think her whole career she went back and forth between wanting attention really, as we all do, and wanting to just be a pure artist who focused on her art and didn't get too distracted. But that college career, later she looked back on it and had ambiguous or, excuse me, ambivalent feelings because she remembered that she had not had women professors. And she felt that there was a lot of sexism at Harvard. But in the moment it was brilliant and wonderful.

[Lillian Barger]

What was her personality like in college and her social life? I mean, this has all got up. She was way ahead of her peers intellectually. So how did this affect her social life? And I mean, she ended up marrying Alfred Conrad. What was that about?

[Hilary Holiday]

That's a good way to put it. What was that about? I'm still working on that. Well, in her letters when she was in college, you would think that it was just a social world from the first day she got there until the time she graduated. When I talked to her sister Cynthia, who Cynthia also went to Radcliffe, she said it wasn't quite the way it might have appeared in those letters home. She told me that growing up that Adrienne had not really been very popular with her schoolmates. And she went, as did Cynthia, to an all girls prep school. But even so, there were still opportunities for dating. And Cynthia said that Adrienne just wasn't all that popular. And Cynthia wasn't looking to badmouth her sister. They did have a really complicated relationship, but she wasn't talking her down. It was just the truth of it. At Radcliffe, she got so much attention. And she did have some friends. She had a very good friend, a female friend, who, when she looked back on her later, she realized she probably been in love with this woman. But at the time, she was intent on dating, and she did. And then she found a man, a graduate student she hit it off with. And they started dating. And that man proposed. And so she got engaged. And it was the thing that young women did. She. When she got to Radcliffe, it was in the late 40s. She graduated in the early 50s. And so she was right on that cusp of the era when, during the war, women were working and doing more very interesting things. And then once the 50s hit, that changed. And women were expected to just get married and raise a family. And Rich got caught up in that mindset to her peril. She was not really made for that. And she broke off that first engagement. And that was the right thing to do. Then she met Alfred Conrad, and He was a PhD student in Economics at Harvard. They clicked, shall we say? But he was as complicated as she was, if not more so. And there was just that immediate, you know, we're talking about someone who became so famous for being a lesbian feminist. But in that time, when she met Alfred, they just had a real physical chemistry. He was married at the time, and he needed to unplug from that marriage before he could marry Adrienne. And so there was a lot of turmoil in their relationship early on. She had been brought up to be a very proper young woman. And so here she is dating a married man. Eventually, he somehow figured out how to divorce the woman who he was married to, who had been in a mental institution. It sounded like a really messy situation. Then Adrienne, who was in Oxford doing. She was studying in Oxford, she had to tell her family about this engagement to Alfred Conrad, and her father went ballistic. Alfred Conrad was Jewish. And you would think, well, why was he so upset? But it turned out that Adrian's father very tragically had an anti Semitic streak in him. I would add to that, though, that perhaps he saw something in Alfred Conrad he simply didn't like. And the way it came spewing out was in the form of this antisemitism. Adrienne and Alfred married, had three sons. She began coming into her own more and more, and she needed to separate from him to pursue, I wouldn't say lesbianism, but truly feminism. And it was not long after they separated in. Was it 19? I think it was 1971. I would have to double check that date. But at any rate, they separated. And not too long after that, he committed suicide. It's terrible. And so she was left on her own to begin her life again. So good, so good, so good.

[Nordstrom Advertiser]

Just then, thousands of winter arrivals at your Nordstrom rack store. Save up to 70% on coats, slippers and cashmere from Kate Spade New York, Vince Ugg, Levi's and more.

[Hilary Holiday]

Check out these boots. They've got the best gifts. My holiday shopping hack.

[Lillian Barger]

Join the NordicLub.

[Nordstrom Advertiser]

Get an extra 5% off every rack purchase with your Nordstrom credit card. Plus, buy it online and pick it up in store the same day for free. Big gifts, big perks. That's why you rac.

[WhatsApp Advertiser]

When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn [e-mail] Limu Imu and Doug.

[Hilary Holiday]

Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.

[Lillian Barger]

Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.

[Hilary Holiday]

Cut the camera. They see us.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings. Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates.

[Hilary Holiday]

Excludes Massachusetts.

[Lillian Barger]

Now, how did that marriage dissuade her or made her uncomfortable or dissatisfied with conventional marriage as it was at that time? Was that dissatisfaction with that marriage the reason why she began pursuing relationships with women, getting to know women versus friends? Was that it? What was going on in that marriage? Was it a bad marriage or was it just messy?

[Hilary Holiday]

I think that it was complicated and messy. And they both had affairs, which is the definition of messy. I also think that she had affairs with men. Yes, Yes. I think that they both wanted it to work. They wanted the marriage to work. She wasn't sitting around thinking, oh, I'm a lesbian, I should go find a girlfriend. It was just over time, as they got more involved in civil rights causes, and Alford especially was very caught up in the turmoil at the universities in New York. He wanted the admissions process to be fair to people of color. The process was not fair. He became completely absorbed in that. They had lived in Cambridge for a long time, and then he had a job opportunity in New York at cuny, at the City University of New York. So they moved to New York, took their sons, three sons with them. Of course. Adrienne was thrilled. She loved being in the literary capital of the world. Alfred got caught up in all the politics. She did to a certain extent, but I think that it just became too much for him. And while she was very much caught up in it herself, she still was a poet and she was thinking about feminism, whereas that wasn't something he was too concerned about.

[Lillian Barger]

How did she. The feminism. How did she get into that? Did she meet some feminists? I know she read the Second Sex by Sima de Vivoire, which is one of my area of studies. So how did she. And she met some very important feminists and got connected to them. Did she seek them out? Did they seek her out? How did that happen?

[Hilary Holiday]

Well, I would say that it was a little bit of both. She was becoming more and more prominent as a poet. She had had a brilliant start, and she followed it up with book after book. And in New York, it was easy to meet important people and people who would become important, like Audre Lorde, a black woman who was a colleague of hers in the teaching world and an excellent poet. Lorde was on her way to becoming a very famous black lesbian feminist poet. And they became friends and bounced ideas off each other. Rich was meeting all sorts of women through her teaching, through her poetry. And it was just, I think, natural for someone like her, who was always looking to, you might say, reinvent herself, to be interested in new ways of being, to go back to her marriage for a moment. I would like to say that while they were living in Cambridge, she was. Once they got married, she was publishing, but she was a faculty wife. And she was expected to go to cocktail parties with Alfred, who by then had become an assistant professor in economics at Harvard. And so she was very busy playing the wife and then the mother. And she tried to do the best she could, but it didn't work. It didn't suit her. Motherhood was not easy for her at all, as the world found out from her book called Of Woman Born. She got along better with her three sons once they got older. She has one letter I read where she was talking about one of her sons, and she was saying, now that I can have a real conversation with him, it's a lot better. But as to go back to your question about her entry into the feminist world, I think I would just say she was in New York. She was immersed in the culture of the late 60s, early 70s. And so it was inevitable. And she was so hungry for new ideas. And she had been brought up to be obsessed with learning and knowledge. So I would say her successive transformations were inevitable.

[Lillian Barger]

Now she goes to New York, and she's really part of the literary, intellectual world. And this is when she would meet prominent feminist women or women who are on their way to becoming prominent because they're writers. So did she at this point in time, she was getting lots of awards. Lots of awards. Seem like she's getting awards every day.

[Hilary Holiday]

You know, it's funny when after. Near the end of her life and then after she died, people commented on that, that she was one of the most decorated poets of practically any era.

[Lillian Barger]

Even though she was men early on, her father and her professors were men. The men who were the men who were in control. The people who were in control of the literary New York were men who promoted her but at the same time, she had this kind of weird. And she was good, okay, but she thought, they're just giving me this because it's a token. I'm a token woman. But if they didn't give it to her, then she would think, well, it's because I'm a woman. So she, she couldn't win either way. You know, she was. Did you see that in her?

[Hilary Holiday]

I saw that.

[Lillian Barger]

I thought, okay, wait a minute, she wants it, but if she gets it, she's a token. And if she doesn't get it, it's because she's a woman, so you can't win.

[Hilary Holiday]

Well, I think her thoughts about being a token came along after she embraced feminism and there was a bit of personal revisionist history going on. So when she would look back at earlier stages of her life, she sometimes would express resentment and she would see sexism that she didn't see in the moment. And I suppose on some level we all do that, that we have their experience in the moment, and then when we look back on it, maybe we see those experiences differently. It's more noticeable in the life of Adrienne Rich because she had such spectacular experiences. It would be different if it were just run of the mill things, but she was winning the Yale Prize. And then later she would look back on it and think, well, I'm not sure everyone liked the points in that book. And maybe Auden's introduction to my book really wasn't all that friendly to me. And in a way, she was right both times. She was right to be thrilled in the moment when the male literati embraced her, the white male literati, because it would have felt really good and she was meeting people who were really important and very interesting. But then later, once she found these really important, fascinating women friends and they were teaching her about feminism, which she really didn't know much about, then she saw things differently. And she had a very interesting way of just updating her impressions of her own life. When you were talking about the awards, the big awards she won early on after the Yale Prize was the National Book Award, and this was in 74, and it was for diving into the wreck. And what most people don't know know is that she had to share that award with the poet Allen Ginsberg. So they were the co winners. And really, by all rights, she should have won it by herself. Ginsburg is certainly worthy of prizes, but I would say that the book that he had up for that prize was not as powerful as diving into the wreck. At any rate, she Decided that when she accepted the award that she would make a statement. And so her statement to the big audience in New York, this glittering, literary, powerful group of people, editors, publishers, fellow writers, all their friends, she wanted to get it out there that she was not accepting the award for herself, that she would accept it on behalf of all women, and that the prize money she received would go toward a charity benefiting women. At that point, it wasn't the first time a famous person had rejected an award by any means, but it was her way of putting a stake in the ground that I'm not playing by your rules anymore. Yes, I'm here. I will sort of accept the award, sort of not. But from here on out, I am a feminist, and that's just how it's going to be. This is who I am. And her reputation as a very difficult person to deal with took off. Beginning of rich being for many people, a very problematic person to deal with. And it very likely cost her other awards, like the Pulitzer or the Nobel. And she did, of course, get many prizes. But the ones you really want to hang on your mantle, like the people of her writers of her level, would be the Pulitzer or the Nobel. She didn't get them. And she didn't get another National Book Award either. And it was partly, if not largely because the people awarding these prizes were afraid she would do again what she did at that National Book Awards ceremony, that she would be ungrateful and that she would somehow embarrass the organization awarding the prize. People didn't want a part of that. There may have been sexism involved on their part, but you have to appreciate where they were coming from at the same time.

[Lillian Barger]

Yeah, I just. I just found her. I thought. I thought it was very interesting because she had such a successful career, published many, many books on poetry books. And then she went and started writing. She was writing prose and she was writing. She wrote this one about compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian and the lesbian experience. She wrote a lot of essays and advocacy, you know, for women and race and all kinds of issues. So I thought that was very interesting. But of course, the book she's known for now, the feminist book, is of course, a Woman Born, which is a feminist classic, which will be read forever. But again, that book was very interesting because on one hand, she said, she talks about motherhood is an experience that women have in a very elevated way. But then she wants to do away with the institution of motherhood. So she's caught between experience in the institution, but it's still. It's A Do you have anything to say about that particular book and how was it received early on?

[Hilary Holiday]

Well, she worked extremely hard on it, I can tell you that it totally absorbed her. And this was going on after her husband's suicide. She wanted to work in prose as well as poetry. She saw an opening there for getting out her thoughts on these topics that sometimes fit into poems and sometimes didn't. And as a feminist, she wanted to contribute to the conversation. And boy did she ever. A woman born was brilliantly accepted by women who were ready for it, and it was considered just trouble by women and men who were not ready for it. Of course, there were some men who appreciated it when it came out. People don't like change. They don't like different points of view when it totally upsets their way of looking at the world or their way of looking at their own relationships. And some people are able to shake the dust motes loose from their brains and think, oh, maybe she's onto something. So I would say it vaulted her to a much higher level of fame, which she, as I was suggesting earlier, wasn't necessarily what she wanted. But along with the fame came the real acknowledgement of her intellect, which she did want.

[Nordstrom Advertiser]

This episode is brought to you by Rakuten. If you're shopping while working, eating, or even listening to this podcast, then you know and love the thrill of a deal. But are you getting the deal and cash back? Rakuten shoppers do they get the brands they love, savings and cash back? And you can get it too. Stack sales on top of cash back and feel what it's like to know you're maximizing savings. It's easy to use and you get cash back sent to you through PayPal or check. The idea is simple. The brands you love pay Rakuten for sending them shoppers, and Rakuten shares the money with you as cash back. Download the free Rakuten app or go to rakuten.com to start saving today. It's the most rewarding way to shop. That's R A K U t e.

[Liquid IV Advertiser]

N rakuten.com learning through play starts with Lego Duplo. With Lego Duplo, toddlers can develop real life skills while having fun with colorful bricks made just for them. Large, easy to grip and safe to explore. When children express themselves with Lego Duplo, they build patience, problem solving and empathy. See your child learn perseverance and self expression with everything they imagine and create. Visit lego.com preschool to learn more.

[Lillian Barger]

So what was her relationship? I'm going to backtrack a little bit with her editors. Did she have good relationship with editors or editors having to fight with her a lot or how did they view her? How did they treat her?

[Hilary Holiday]

Well, I would say by and large, she had pretty good relationships with her editors. She was always in command in those relationships. If she had a book accepted for publication, she did not fall all over herself saying, oh, thank you, thank you for accepting my book. She took it as her due. Her feeling was the publishing industry would make money off her book and it would raise their reputations.

[Lillian Barger]

She was doing them a favor.

[Hilary Holiday]

Well, in a way, one way to put it, I think that she saw it as a professional transaction. It's rare for someone for his or her whole career to be that self possessed. Even during the time when she was bowing to the pressures of 1950s life, she still stood strong in her relationships with editors. She had some female, some women editors along the way too, but for the most part she was dealing with men and they were typically working very hard to accommodate her. And so she would get some suggestions from her editors and she would think about those suggestions, whether it would be for her poetry or her prose. But she did things her own way. And once she settled on Norton as her publisher, she was really very comfortable with that publishing house. But she was always strong and always very aware of the details of publishing and wanted to make sure that the poems looked the way she wanted them to look on the page. And she kept a close eye on everything.

[Lillian Barger]

She's very remarkable. I was just in awe all throughout the book, like, oh my goodness, she's really self possessed. Which is interesting that she would be the kind of woman who would become a feminist. The reason I say this is there've been other women who were very self possessed too, who denied feminism. You know, I'm thinking of Georgia o', Keeffe for instance. She just didn't think she had any use for it because she was self possessed. And she didn't, she didn't need feminism. She wasn't oppressed in any way. That's what she thought. So that is, you know, not all women who are like that become feminists at that point in history. A lot of them just thought, well, I'm just special, I'm not like other women.

[Hilary Holiday]

You know what I mean?

[Lillian Barger]

So how did her relationship with men. Men changed? Was there a point where it started to change and she started seeing the men in her life, the editors, her father, her husband or whoever, Differently?

[Hilary Holiday]

Well, yes, I would say that in the early 70s, after her husband committed suicide. And she gradually embraced radical feminist identity and then embraced lesbianism as well. But, yes, she really did see men very differently. She did not like the wholesale oppression that women experienced. She was extremely articulate in her ways of pointing that out to people in person as well as in her writings. Some people found that off putting. She wasn't being the demure, apologetic woman that people were used to. And I'm not speaking just of Rich herself, but that feminine approach of, oh, I'm so sorry, but yeah, blah, blah, blah, apologizing, yeah. And so she wasn't going to do that. She wasn't going to play that role anymore. And she had played it, I would say, sporadically early on, but never as consistently as some. But as for the way she dealt with men in the 1970s, she went through a phase where she really didn't want to talk to men. There was the. You would, of course, be familiar with this concept, the lesbian separatism. So she really. It's a little hard to pin down exactly how strictly she followed this, but I was in touch with Matt and I read correspondence and essays by men who said, yes, that they've been friends with her, and then she cut them off. And it was during that time when she was embracing lesbian feminism, lesbian separatism.

[Lillian Barger]

Well, what about the lesbianism? She comes into that kind of gradually, I think, as she gets more and more with women. Was it a political statement or was it really foundational, like a sexual orientation that she had had since all her life that never had an opportunity to be expressed? You see what I'm saying?

[Hilary Holiday]

I do see what you're saying. And I would say that it was a political expression. It was not a coincidence that she became a lesbian in the early 1970s. It just wasn't. Even though she pointed back to that early friendship with her classmate at Radcliffe as a sign that she was already a lesbian then. She was part of a great many a large group of women in the 70s who experimented with lesbianism as part of their feminist awakening. She stayed with it. Not all women did. There's no way for me to know, but there certainly were women who experimented with lesbianism and then went on to get married to men. In her case, she had had a husband who killed himself. And I think it would just to look at it a different way, it might be hard to move on to another man after that experience. That's not something I talk about in the book, but to me, it could have been a factor. At any rate, it was part of who she became. I would put it like that. And she was a woman of reinvention. She was a woman of transformation. And she put the transformations into her art, into her poetry, and into her prose as well. She wasn't one to stand still. Her way of knowing herself was through these transformations, it was invigorating for her to take on new identities. Not all poets do that. I'm writing about Louise Glick now. I'm writing a. Researching a biography of her. Time and again, people have told me Louise Glick knew herself better than anyone I've ever met. No one's said that to me about Adrian Ridge. She seemed to me always on a search for discovering who she was. And I think that almost desperate search stems from her early childhood, when her parents really. Especially her father, mostly her father, when he was telling her, this is who you are. You're a writer. You're going to be a great writer. And so if you're five, six years old and that's being put into your brain and then you start growing up, I think the question would be, well, who am I? And you keep asking yourself that. And then she had to cut ties, more or less with her father after he was so awful about her husband. He did not live to see her husband commit suicide or to know that she became a lesbian. But I think her search for herself played out beautifully in her art. But her life was hard. She had rheumatoid arthritis. Her first lesbian relationship was with her own therapist. Then the woman she settled down with, Michelle Cliff. A. You were talking about her editors. Michelle Cliff was one of her editors, was a copy editor at Norton. So that was an interesting author editor relationship. But I guess what I came away with in working on Rich was here was someone truly brilliant who earned her brilliance through her hard work. Also someone who really struggled a lot with her circumstances.

[Lillian Barger]

Yeah, she had a. She was ill all her life, and it got worse and worse as she grew older. What was her. The nature of the relationship between her and Michelle Cliff? You mentioned her. Was she the dominant person in the relationship because she was famous and Cliff was also writing and doing things too, but never rose the devil that Rich did. So was there a imbalance in their relationship? Or did she think that marrying a woman or being with a woman couldn't get married? There was an opportunity to have an equality in the marriage, in a relationship.

[Hilary Holiday]

She wanted it to be that way. She wanted it to be equal and balanced. She tried really hard to make sure that Michelle was included and treated as an equal. When they would get together with friends and other writers. Unfortunately for Michelle and for their relationship. Because Adrienne was the really famous one. Sometimes Michelle would just be ignored. That would be really tough, especially since they were in the same field. They were both writers. Michelle came to her writing career later than Adrienne did. And her prose, her fiction is. It's not everybody's cup of tea. It's harder to get into, at least for me, than Rich's poetry and prose. But she does have a following. And it could be that years from now, who knows, maybe Michelle Cliff will be more famous than Adrian Richard. Only future generations will know that Michelle Cliff was an alcoholic. And Adrienne Rich drank to self medicate because she so often was in great physical pain from the rheumatoid arthritis. All that drinking did not help the relationship at all. Now, I've said a lot of negative things about the them as a couple. But when I went to Santa Cruz to talk to their neighbors, I had the good fortune of meeting a few neighbors who had known them really well. And one neighbor told me that she remembered when Adrienne and Michelle would be outside just chatting of an evening. That she wouldn't be able to make out their conversation. But she would just hear Michelle say something. And then Adrienne would laugh and say, oh, Michelle, Michelle. Everybody I talked to who really knew her said, oh, she was so funny. She had this biting wit. She knew a ton about popular culture. And she could say the funniest things she could. She had a wicked sense of humor. And Adrienne really loved that about her. So I would say that's important to know that they could laugh together. That's so crucial to a happy relationship. And I think they really did love each other. I have no reason to think that they didn't. I talked to some people who had known both of them. And after Adrienne died, this couple had been talking to Michelle Cliff. And Michelle's health really declined after Adrienne died. But she said that after Adrienne passed away that when she would go to bed at night, she could still feel Adrienne's feet cuddling up against her as. And I think she was lost without her. I really do. I think they were not going to break up as a public couple. They weren't going to let the public see that. To see them see one or the other walk away. I guess all marital or. Or pseudo marital relationships are pretty complicated. And theirs was exactly that. It was extremely complicated. Two difficult women who had not had the easiest upbringings, but had both experienced privilege and emotional hardship. He put two women or any two people together like that, and you'll have profound conversations going on between them. And also times of mistrust and misgivings.

[Lillian Barger]

Adrian, she lost some confidence in the feminist movement towards the end of her life. At some point she was a little disillusioned. Is it because she thought that she had gone through this phase of feminist separatism and she thought if you build a community of women, that it would be different. But she found that in a community of women there were other issues, like racism, for instance. So can you talk a little bit about her disillusionment with feminism?

[Hilary Holiday]

Yes. She became more and more concerned with racism. And that was going back to her concern with it during her marriage to Alfred Conrad, when they were both trying to make sure that college admissions in New York would be more equitable. So it wasn't brand new. But even though Michelle Cliff was a light skinned woman, she identified as black, she was Jamaican. And so it was personal, it was in the household. Rich was thinking about it a lot because of Michelle. She was thinking a lot about racism. And I think that also she just got a little bit bored with feminism. And this goes back to what I was saying about Rich being restless and always looking for new avenues of exploration. Racism opened that up for her. We also can't discount the influence of Audrey Lorde. Lorde, of course, was such a powerful voice and continues to be for the necessary empowerment of black people and the empowerment of black women and the empowerment of black lesbians. They were, Rich and Laura were in very frequent communication, learning from each other. So Rich went down that path. Some people, I feel that Rich's best poetry came in the early, middle of her career with the dream of a common language, diving into the wreck. And then her later poetry doesn't grab some people as much, but I would say her explorations into other movements, other causes, were all of a piece with who she was. A questing woman, someone who was always reaching out for the next cause, that needed someone to fight for it. I had people tell me, oh, you know, Adrienne was not an activist like some feminists because she wasn't out in the street marching. But she couldn't be because of the rheumatoid arthritis. I mean, there are better treatments for it now. But as a young woman struggling along when she was just in her 20s and 30s, there were times when she needed to walk with the cane. She had knee surgery, knee replacement surgery early on, bouts of intense Pain. She couldn't be out marching in the streets, so she took her message to her art form and that's what she was meant to do anyway. Not everybody's good at marching in the streets. Not everybody's good at writing poems.

[Lillian Barger]

Well, there's nothing better, no activism better for women than a woman who does something really extraordinarily well. I mean, that's the best thing you can do. And I agree. And you know, writing poetry definitely can be activism. And she did it at a very high level. So with such a prolific poet, essayist, lecturer, she's a cultural critic, she was a feminist, she was honored, she was recognized. What is her most important or enduring legacy, do you believe, for this generation of women?

[Hilary Holiday]

I would say that her most important and enduring legacy is her poetry. It takes reading, diving into the wreck and the dream of a common language and however many other books of her poetry one has time for to see the breadth and depth and pure eloquence of this woman's art form. She was a true poet. And yes, it was put upon her at a young age by a domineering father. That does not change the reality of who she was and the woman she kept becoming decade after decade after decade. I truly admire the beauty and integrity of her art. And I see in her life, although it was often difficult, an exemplar for women and men of a truly courageous person who was deeply dedicated to her art and to living a truly informed and ethical life. Wow.

[Lillian Barger]

Okay, that's. I mean, that really blows me away. Okay, thank you, Hillary Holiday, for a remarkable book. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in to another podcast for New Books Network. This is your host, Lillian Barger.

[Ryan Reynolds]

Hey, Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's Premium Wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try. @mintmobile.com Switch a broad PA in a.

[Lillian Barger]

$45 per 3 month plan, $15 per month equivalent required.

[Liquid IV Advertiser]

New customer offer first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. Cementmobile.

[Hilary Holiday]

Com.