Kate Millett’s tremulous and hauntingly beautiful 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.

Mother Millett is an intensely 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. Echoing Philip Roth’s Patrimony, Millett writes with great poignancy about caring for the person who brought her into the world, a role reversal that brings with it both devastation and grace.

“As young activists search for ways to define their own movements, Kate Millett contribues a novel idea: Think outside yourself and fight for your mother's, or father's – or grandmother's and grandfather's – rights. Eventually, they will be your own.” – The Nation

“Kate Millet opens the door of memories for all of us whose lives were changed by a magical relative, and whose families were crossroads of different social classes.” … Gloria Steinem

“A confession of a daughter. An extraordinarily rich and sensitive narrative, like good wine.” – Yoko Ono

Kate Millett is the author of Sexual Politics, Flying, Sita, The Basement, The Loony Bin Trip, and The Politics of Cruelty. She lives in New York City.
Publication
Cloth: May 2001
Paper: June 2002

260 pages

Cloth
1 85984 607 6
£17 / US$25 / CAN$36

Paper
1 85984 399 9
US$15 / £10 / CAN$22