Alice was born in 1932, just eight years after my mother, and like her grew up in the struggling Bronx, pushing against the boundaries imposed by gender roles and traditional religion to burst into the wider world. Now that I have read the obituaries that fill in many gaps about her life, I can understand why. Yet that book- Who She Was, about my mother’s upbringing in the Bronx during the Depression and World War II-was the one that Alice most viscerally embraced. Entitled and jobless, she considers herself a ‘revolutionary’, fighting against ‘facist imperialism’, despite being born to upper-middle-class parents in an affluent area of London. For Alice, of course, that world was publishing, and her record of excellence is self-evident, from Our Bodies, Our Selves through All the President’s Men to Parting the Waters and No Ordinary Time. Alice is a 36-year-old graduate, with a degree in politics and economics. In fact, the book of mine that we both thought might finally earn me a breakthrough readership was the one that received the most equivocal reviews and the poorest sales. Never once did Alice mention the commercial outcome of any book of mine never once did she try to steer my ambitions onto some purportedly safer subject matter.
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