I had the privilege of interviewing Robin Morgan this summer. It turned out to be her last ever interview, as it was only a few weeks for her death.
On a hot afternoon in August, I arrived at Morgan’s New York home, situated on a tree-lined block. “Come in, come in!” she exclaimed, gesturing with her hands from her front door.
Then there were the rows upon rows of books lining nearly every wall, all neatly organized. There were no nooks and crannies in Morgan’s apartment, only books. “I wish I’d written more,” she said to me quietly, looking at her overstuffed shelves. “I should have written more. I know I’ll be on my deathbed thinking, ‘I should have written more.’”
As we walked outside, she smiled and gestured at the true source of her pride: her garden. I marveled at the lush greenery and took great pleasure sitting under the shade of a large, ancient-looking linden tree while listening to the gentle bubbling of a small water fountain.
“I used to sleep out here,” Morgan said, pointing to a reclining day bed and smiling wistfully. Parkinson’s disease had reshaped her body, her speech, the ability to travel freely and her relationships. She was trying to “make something of the disease, rather than what it would make of me.”
Her formal politicization, not surprisingly, was rooted in the liberal left—and then it was not. The left, like all ideological political groups in those days, was male dominated. She joined leftist movements believing in shared liberation and thinking the genders “were marching together toward freedom and we were all equal—but we weren’t,” she said.
“The women were doing all the shit work, and the men were running around being leaders and heroes. It made me furious.” Her fury lit a spark under her and she wrote “Goodbye to All That,” a direct name-naming attack on the male left.
