About Women ─ Conversations Between a Writer and a Painter

A provocative and wide-ranging conversation between two distinctive women—one American and one French—on the dilemmas, benefits, and demands of womanhood.

Lisa Alther and Francoise Gilot have been friends for more than twenty-five years. Although from different backgrounds (Gilot from cosmopolitan Paris, Alther from small-town Tennessee) and different generations, they found they have a great deal in common as women who managed to support themselves with careers in the arts while simultaneously balancing the obligations of work and parenthood.About Women is their extended conversation, in which they talk about everything important to them: their childhoods, the impact of war on their lives and their work, fashion, self-invention, style, feminism, even child rearing. They also talk about the creative impulse and the importance of art. This is a charming and endearing dialogue between two intelligent and often funny women as they ponder what it means to be a woman.

LISA ALTHER was born in 1944 in Tennessee. She is widely known for her first novel,Kinflicks (1975), a feminist coming-of-age narrative that broke new ground in terms of what could be written and talked about. She is the author of seven additional works of fiction, a memoir, and a narrative history of the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Her books have been published in seventeen languages and have appeared on bestseller lists worldwide.

FRANCOISE GILOT was born in 1921 in Paris. She was a part of the emerging School of Paris. In 1943, she met Pablo Picasso, an artist forty years her senior, with whom she had a decade-long relationship. In 1964 Gilot publishedLife with Picasso, which sold over a million copies in its first year and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She is also the author ofMatisse and Picasso and other books. She married the French painter Luc Simon, and later, the American vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk. Gilot is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musee Picasso in Antibes, the Musee de Tel Aviv, the Women's Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Bibliotheque Nationale and Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris, among others. She was made Chevalier and then Officier de la Legion d'Honneur.