Sita - Softcover

Millett, Kate

3.82

299 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252068874 ISBN 13: 9780252068874

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2000

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'A wrenching and intimate autobiography, "Sita" is an unsparing, moment-by-moment record of the fading of love, with all of its agony and false-dawn respites. For the first time, the original text of "Sita" is accompanied by the first of Millett's moving prose elegies, written after Sita committed suicide. This lament lends new resonance to the original text and gives the reader a fuller understanding of the mercurial devotion that bound the two women to each other. This reissue also features a new preface by the author."Sita" follows the disintegration of Millett's love affair with a woman who is ten years her senior, a veteran of several marriages, and the mother of grown children. Fiery, seductive, elegant, and exotic, "Sita" captivates Millett in every sense, offering unimagined pleasure and much-needed emotional security. One day, however, all this changes. Arriving from New York to spend half the year in Berkeley, as they had arranged, Millett is appalled to find the house - their house - overrun with Sita's troubled children and their hangers-on.Amid this unexpected chaos, she struggles with searing jealousy and self-doubt to salvage her relationship with Sita, who is often preoccupied, impatient, and cold, and who frequently disappears for assignations with male lovers. With remarkable candor, Millett charts her months with Sita and the inexorable shift from passionate abandon to abandonment. As each fragile thread of their love dissolves, Millett dwells on what drew them together, recounting all the hopes, tricks, and evasions that made up their erotic dance. Obsessive and impassioned, "Sita" speaks with a sharp immediacy to everyone who has ever experienced the exhilaration and despair of love'.

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Review:

"A bold and passionate book named for the woman who was Millett's lover at the time she was writing. When Sita committed suicide in 1978, Millett composed four prose elegies in her memory... [This] edition includes one of these elegies, published for the first time. Its addition enriches the story of the woman it celebrates. " -- Ms. Magazine "I stayed with [the book] as compulsively as Kate stayed with her beloved Sita." -- Chicago Tribune Book World "Sita is the fervid and fragmented tale of a woman impassioned and in love -- with a woman. It is Millett's autobiographical account of her long affair with Sita... This 2000 edition is prefaced briefly by Millett, who reexamines the contemporary importance of the text as lesbian literature." -- The Bloomsbury Review "The impression the book gives is of total honesty... Not a single detail -- emotional or anatomical -- has been left out. What lies at its heart is the head-on clash between, on the one hand, the communal and permissive ideals of the period and, on the other, the simple human need for personal space, and the knowledge that one person on Earth is, in however qualified a way, your own... This was a time when everyone was high in one way or another, desperate not to impose an ideology on anyone else, yet at the same time hyper-conscious of the brevity of life, its beauty, and its possibilities. This, at least, is what comes across in this magnificent book, so that 1977 feels like a paradise lost, despite the anguish and frustration that burn in words of fire across every page." -- Bradley Winterton, South China Morning Post

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