A CERTAIN TIME

In this memoir, Kasten looks back at her involvement in the women’s movement from the late 1960s into the 1980s.

The author has whimsically chosen to compose her memoir in the third person, joining the ranks of her readers as a spectator of her life. She writes: “I am she. I, not she, invite you to observe her as she observed herself in her own time and her own reality.” Kasten has changed all of the names and locations mentioned in the narrative, including her own. And so, this is a “biography” of Anne Lang, whom the reader meets in the spring of 1971, when she was a graduate student in clinical psychology at a Midwestern university. She impulsively decided to attend a debate on civil disobedience featuring civil rights attorney William Kunstler. Over the previous few years, she had become increasingly aware of society’s denigration of women. She was about to take her first step as an activist in a public forum: Walking onto the stage, she accused Kunstler of hypocrisy, advocating for the oppressed without ever acknowledging the oppression of women. After this pivotal moment, the narrative jumps back to 1968. Writing in the present tense, Kasten takes the reader through her three years in graduate school and her dawning realization that she was more comfortable with women than with men. This epiphany led to her dropping out of graduate school and immersing herself in a (mostly) lesbian subgroup of the women’s liberation struggle. As she recounts wrestling with her own sexual identity, exploring lesbianism but ultimately deciding she was straight, she provides an insider’s view of one branch of the movement. Her edgy writing is more often humorous than emotional, and her skewering of the male hierarchy is both funny and powerful, especially in the detailed descriptions of the characters she created for a one-woman comedy show that she took on the road. Occasionally, the wordy narrative rambles, but there is a poignant honesty to her unstinting self-criticism and acknowledgements of her frailties.

A well-crafted, contemplative chronicle of a woman’s journey through psychological, political, sexual, and social turmoil.