"The Professor"

I seem to be reading more memoirs than ever...hmmm...not sure what that means, if anything... I just finished a new one: "The Professor, and other writings" (HarperCollins, 2010), by Terry Castle. Castle is a professor at Stanford University, but is not the professor in the book's title. The book is actually a collection of essays, but each of them is written through a memoiristic lens. Whether the topic of the essay is the writer Susan Sontag, the artist Agnes Martin, the musician Art Pepper, or the author's mother, the real topic is always Castle herself. This is by design, as the author has found herself tiring of traditional scholarly writing, and choosing to include herself and her life in her writing. This focus does not come across as (very) self-centered or arrogant, but as an exploration of her life and experiences, and of how they shed light on other topics, and vice versa. The longest essay by far (at almost 200 pages) is "The Professor," which describes a lesbian affair Castle had during graduate school, some three decades ago, with a charismatic but destructive professor. The story is full of drama, intrigue, shock, despair, humiliation, and even a bit of humor. Although the affair was short-lived, it had a major influence on the author, and it is only now, these many years later, that she feels ready to process and write about what happened. As she tells the story, we also learn much about Castle's life before and after this episode. She is now a well-known professor, the author of several well-received scholarly books (e.g., "The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture"), and in a long, happy relationship with her partner Blakey. Castle is an engaging writer, adept at weaving her story into the various stories of others included in this collection.