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, rewards, and demands of womanhood.

Lisa Alther and Françoise 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, and their views on love, style, self-invention, feminism, and child rearing. They also discuss the creative impulse and the importance of art 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.

FRANÇOISE GILOT was born in 1921 in Paris. She was a part of the emerging School of Paris. In 1943 she met Pablo Picasso, with whom she had a decade-long relationship. She is the author of the bestselling Life with Picasso, which has been translated into more than a dozen languages; Matisse and Picasso; and other books. She married the French painter Luc Simon and later the American vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk. Gilot's work is included in the collections of many museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She was made Chevalier and then Officier de la Légion d'honneur.