About Women: Françoise Gilot in Conversation with Lisa Alther

Lisa Alther and Françoise Gilot, who have been friends for more than twenty-five years, are the authors of About Women: Conversations between a Writer and a Painter (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2015). 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 discussion 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.

Their discussion at La Maison Française will be in English.

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. Gilot’s work is included in the collections of many museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

La Maison Française New York University
16 Washington Mews
New York, NY 10003