Extraordinary Lives: Francine du Plessix Gray

In her long and varied writing career, Francine du Plessix Gray has been a fascinating cultural figure. She was born in Warsaw, spent her childhood in Paris, and grew up in New York. Regarded as a writer’s writer notable for her distinguished personal history and freewheeling candor, she is a longtime contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and the author of more than a dozen volumes of fiction and nonfiction, including her latest historical novel, The Queen’s Lover; biographies of the Marquis de Sade and Simone Weil; and the memoir Them, about her mother (Tatiana Yakoleva, onetime lover and muse of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky) and her step-father (Alexander Liberman, legendary editorial director of Conde Nast).

Extraordinary Lives explores great minds that have shaped our cultural landscape. In this series, Graduate Center President Bill Kelly has one-on-one conversations with a diverse group of vital contemporary thinkers, artists, and visionaries who have indelibly impacted the fields in which they work. Previous participants have included Patti Smith, Ira Glass, Chuck Close, and Danny Meyer.