My Brilliant Friends is a group biography of three women’s friendships forged in second-wave feminism. Poignant and politically charged, the book is a captivating personal account of the complexities of women’s bonds.

Nancy K. Miller describes her friendships with three well-known scholars and literary critics: Carolyn Heilbrun, Diane Middlebrook, and Naomi Schor. Their relationships were simultaneously intimate and professional, emotional and intellectual, animated by the ferment of the women’s movement. Friendships like these sustained the generation of women whose entrance into male-dominated professions is still reshaping American society. The stories of their intertwined lives and books embody feminism’s belief in the political importance of personal experience. Reflecting on aging and loss, ambition and rivalry, competition and collaboration, Miller shows why and how friendship’s ties matter in the worlds of work and love. Inspired in part by the portraits of the intensely enmeshed lives in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, My Brilliant Friends provides a passionate and timely vision of friendship between women.

"A stunning elegy to the intimacy of friendships among women, and a book in which closeness is felt through the act of thinking." - Booklist (starred review)

"The result is a compassionate homage to the book’s three extraordinary subjects. My Brilliant Friends is not memoir as therapy, but memoir as monument....Unlike so many confessional documents, My Brilliant Friends is written in a genuinely exceptional circumstance by a genuinely exceptional person." - Times Literary Supplement

"A pellucid and absorbing study on the ambivalent and less frequently explored facets of friendship – the painful coexistence, for instance, of envy, competitiveness, and resentment, on the one hand, and love and admiration, on the other." - Contemporary Women's Writing

"Miller is a nimble writer, more than capable of exploring a larger world. And the world of women's friendships contain multitudes." - Women's Review of Books

"It really doesn't get much better than this for me." - What Would Virginia Woolf Do?

"Miller’s book, a brave and beautiful act of storytelling, is itself a gift — to her brilliant friends, to feminism, to friendship, to the literary endeavor, and to all of her readers." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"The book offers contemporary feminist literary scholars an evocative, resonant chance to consider the nature of scholarly friendship, as well as how much has (and has not) changed for women in academe." - Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

"It is a conversation, not only with lost friends, but with the reader. . . Recommended." - Choice

"The retrospective look at the fabric of her life as interwoven with the lives of other women is as much an homage to her friends as it is an elegy to friendship itself." - Literature Salon

"Valuable to students of literary criticism and feminism as well as history and even psychology. It is such a specific evocation of a particular time and place, and it simultaneously engages the emotions in its reflection on love and loss." - RGWS

"Miller recognizes the transformative power and centrality of the nitty-gritty in women’s outer and inner lives, and the vital, enduring friendships they form." - a/b: Auto/Biography Studies

"Miller characterizes these friendships as collaborative, competitive, nurturing, and occasionally confounding." - Public Books