Part memoir, part intellectual self-portrait, For the Love of Stories traces the making of one of the most original and subversive scholars of religion and mythology of our time.
Wendy Doniger writes here not as an authority pronouncing from above, but as someone trying to understand the accidents, desires, friendships and silent rebellions that shaped a life spent among stories. She moves from Great Neck in New York to Harvard, Calcutta, Oxford, Moscow, Berkeley and Chicago; from ballet studios and Sanskrit classrooms to battles over censorship, women’s equality and academic freedom. Along the way appear an astonishing and sometimes eccentric cast of figures—teachers, lovers, students, scholars, filmmakers, dogs and horses—rendered with wit and an often disarming candour.
What emerges is the story of a celebrated academic career, but also a vivid account of a vanished intellectual world—characterized by the peculiar freedoms and prejudices of mid-century academia, the frequent and uneasy entanglement of scholarship and desire—and the opening of Sanskrit and South Asian studies in the West to new questions and concerns. Doniger is especially good at recovering what this world felt like: the conversations, friendships, rivalries that formal accounts leave out, as well as the ways women managed to navigate institutions that rarely knew what to do with them.
Whether she is writing about Hindu myths, old friends from the British aristocracy, or the disillusionment with Communism, Doniger returns always to the human need to make meaning through narrative. This restless memoir, full of both intellect and gossip, is a book about how a life is made from the stories one inherits, studies, and then retells.