Daphne Merkin

‘A Very Lonely Business’

“How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom,” Virginia Woolf wrote. Is there a tradeoff between motherhood and artistic creativity?

FaceTime, with Lipstick

If identity itself is a construction, as we have all been given to understand ever since English departments across the country started referring to books as “texts,” surely our appearance is a vital part of that construction.

The Lost Art of Phone Conversation

The old-fashioned fuddy-duddy telephone—which once seemed as dated as Dorothy Parker’s short story “The Telephone Call,” in which a young woman waits desperately for a man to call—is suddenly back in style.

‘Closing Time’: My Lost Literary World

As one grows older and reaches one’s sixties and seventies, the world grows smaller and the air seems to thin, reminding one that mortality hovers. This sense of an ending comes with a melancholic recognition that everything, including vibrant and entrenched style of intellectual engagement, is fleeting.