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In one of America's most outstanding critics and cultural commentators comes a long-awaited collection of penetrating autobiographical essays and a riveting brief memoir, novelistic however you like and ambition, about the pathos, humor, and devastation of early on love. Stanford professor and longtime contributor to the London Review of Literature, the Atlantic, the New Republic, Slate, and other publications, Terry Castle is extensively admired for the wit, panache, intellectual breadth, and emotional credibility of her writings on life, literature, and art. Now, at long last, she has collected some of the greater personal of her recent essays within a volume. Several items here already are acknowledged classics: "Desperately Seeking Susan," the famous account she wrote in 2005 of her droll and slightly bittersweet camaraderie with Susan Sontag; "My Heroin Holiday," a darkly humorous examination of cravings, her family and stepsiblings, and the overdue, great jazz saxophonist Artwork Pepper; and the picaresque "Travels with My Mother," a rollicking travelogue that brings together Castle's complicated romantic relationship with her mother, lesbianism, art, and the difficult yet transcendent work of the painter Agnes Martin. At the center of the collection, however, is the subject work, publicized here for the very first time: a candid and wrenching exploration of Castle's romantic relationship, during her graduate school years, with a female professor. At once entertaining and rueful, this is a pitch-perfect recollection of the fiascos of children: how we come to possess (or disown) our sexuality; how we understand (or don't) the emotional needs and needs of others; how the ordeals of desire can prompt a lifelong seek out self-understanding. On this account of any sentimental education, as in all the essays in The Teacher as well as other Writings, Terry Castle unveils herself as a truly remarkable copy writer: absolutely distinctive, wise, frank, and fearless.
