The Private I

The Private I: Privacy in a Public World, edited by Molly Peacock
These candid, daring, engaging, and decidedly literate writings address the dual question of how we find privacy in this day and age and how we lose it. Comtemporary writers from a wide array from backgrounds-among them Dorothy Allison, Jonathan Franzen, F. Gonzalez-Crussi, Wayne Koestenbaum, Yusek Komunyakaa, Wendy Lesser, Kathleen Norris, and Robin West-tackle the issue of privacy on many levels, including the global, communal, and very personal.
Specific essay topics include the implications of surveillance technology; teen web sites and the lives of the girls who create them; the culture of sexual relations in today's prisons; "Privacy in the Films of Lana Turner;" and the polarity of warm, sometimes claustrophobic, Latin communities versus their cold, sometimes isolated, North American counterparts.

Molly Peacock, Introduction
Janna Malamud Smith, Privacy and Private States
Josip Novakovich, Secret Spaces of Childhood
Bronwyn Garrity, Some Cyberspace of Her Own: DrRogue's Intelligent Life
Dorothy Allison, Privacy Is Not the Issue
Vivian Gornick, On the Question of Invaded Privacy in Memoir Writing
Michael Groden, Privacy in Bloom
Molly Peacock, Sweet Uses of Adversity
Cathleen Medwick, An Inside Story
Yusef Komunyakaa, The Devil's Secretary
F. Gonzalez-Crussi, On Privacy
Victoria Roberts, Two Cartoons
Anita L. Allen, Lying to Protect Privacy: A Walk on the "Wilde" Side
Jonathan Franzen, Imperial Bedroom
Wendy Lesser, Enter a Murderer
Evans D. Hopkins, Sex and the (Somewhat) Celibate Prisoner
Wayne Koestenbaum, Privacy in the Films of Lana Turner
Barbara Feldon, Template from a Nightingale
Robin West, Lifting the Veil of the Right to Be Left Alone
Kathleen Norris, Extravagance on a Small Scale: Gossip and Privacy in a Rural Area