Book Review: For the Love of Stories – Confessions of an Accidental Feminist by Wendy Doniger
1 min read
Namrata reviews Wendy Doniger’s For the Love of Stories (Speaking Tiger, 2026) and explores her journey of making a life from stories.
There is a revealing moment in Wendy Doniger’s For the Love of Stories: Confessions of an Accidental Feminist where she reflects on the strange pattern of her academic life:
“My academic life in retrospect seems to have been peopled by all sorts of men who seemed to like me for no reason, as well as all sorts of men who seemed to dislike me, again for no discernible reason. Many of my more outrageous stories are as much about the times as they are about me…”
The sentence captures the spirit of the memoir. It is self-aware without becoming self-important and it announces Doniger’s refusal to arrange her life into the neat arc of triumph that memoirs often demand. Instead, she offers a life lived in digressions, accidents, friendships, and intellectual passions with acts of defiance. The result is a memoir that is less concerned with explaining a distinguished career than with understanding how a self is made through stories.
