My existence in the English Department at Michigan was exceedingly perilous and bumpy. … I was a garlic among the Anglican-convert lilies. I felt the wrong shape, size, sex, volume level, class, and emotional coloration. I fought, always with a sense of shame, for I could never define what I felt was being throttled in me.

Marge Piercy, Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt

In the fifties when I got pregnant I couldn't get an abortion, had to do it myself at eighteen and almost bled to death. In the fifties I was at the mercy of a male culture terrified of sex and telling me I was either frigid, a nymphomaniac, an earth mother, or stunted with penis envy, and there were no women's experiences available to compare with mine. In the fifties nowhere could I find images of a life I considered good or useful or dignified. Nowhere could I find a way to apply myself to change the world to one I could live in with more joy and utility. Nowhere could I find a community to heal myself to in struggle. Nowhere could I find space in which affluent white men were not the arbiters of all that was good and bad. I could not grow anywhere but through the cracks.

Marge Piercy, Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt

Marge Piercy's painful memories of what life was like for her as a young woman in the fifties, recorded in Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt, are metaphorically recounted in her novel Braided Lives; both personal confession and fictional analog comprise radical documents which critique her times and the role of women in them. Indeed, Braided Lives, Piercy's most self-revelatory novel thus far, represents a backward glance at the roots of her abiding social and political involvement and provides something of a personal and critical perspective on her five preceding novels, which, in rough chronological sequence, mirror her perceptions of and experiences with radical American movements of the sixties and seventies. Personally involved in the Civil Rights, anti-Vietnam War and Feminist Movements, Piercy reflects political themes in all her work, charging her novels with authenticity and vitality, rendering her characters and situations highly complex, and successfully engaging the reader in her female and male characters, most of whom are specifically identified as activists, revolutionists or would-be politicoes.

Piercy's interest in radical politics, especially feminism, is also significant from a comparative perspective because it places her already prodigious canon together with women novelists who share similar concerns— namely such writers as Agnes Smedley, Tillie Olsen, Zora Neal Hurston, Harriet Arnow, Meridel Le Seur, Grace Paley, and Alice Walker, among others. In “From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radical Tradition,” Deborah Rosenfelt raises questions about Olsen's “relationships of writing to political commitment; the circumstances of class and sex and their effect on sustained creative activity, literary or political; and the strengths and weaknesses of the radical cultural tradition in this country.” These concerns in addition to the dimension of Jewish ethnicity describe Piercy's themes and characterize her as a novelist whose relationship between political vision, personal commitment, and the creative process, like Olsen's, et al., is intimately linked.

A brief review of Piercy's novels up to Braided Lives helps locate her themes and concerns. In her first two novels, Going Down Fast （1969） and Dance the Eagle to Sleep （1971）, Piercy records, through the lives of working class women and men, a resistance to the pressures of mid-sixties urban economic expansion with its concomitant social dislocation and disorganization, and to the trials and tribulations within the Civil Rights and burgeoning anti-Vietnam War Movements. While there is implicit and strong criticism of the dehumanizing values associated with American political culture, Piercy also records the painful ways resisting women and men exploit each other while trying to work collectively toward change. Living the revolution is harder than fantasizing about or planning it. Thus, her vision, from the beginning, is unrelentingly honest, avoiding romanticization of the larger ideological currents and of the relationships among those on the edge of change.

Personally active in the Women's Movement since the mid-sixties, Piercy reflects this involvement in all her succeeding novels while maintaining a persistent sympathy with working class ethnic and racial minorities. In Small Changes （1973）, for instance, the personal evolutions of her two main characters, Miriam, a New York Jewish middle-class woman, and Beth, a working class, small town Protestant woman, are central to an understanding of the way they are molded by the first stirrings of Second Wave Feminism. Both torn and enabled by her New York Jewish family roots, which include political commitments and blacklisting during the McCarthy era, Miriam tries to balance her personal life against her strong, intellectual abilities in computer science and math. As an undergraduate in the Boston-Cambridge era, she becomes involved in three consuming relationships with men, the first two outside marriage—tumultuous, frustrating, and complex—and the last to Neil, the cad whom she marries and who leaves her and their two children for his secretary. Her personal life in pieces, she rebounds when she integrates again into the movement, teaching computer technology in an alternative educational setting.

Beth, Miriam's lesbian-feminist counterpart—strengthened by separatism, rebellious, painfully coming to terms with her abused childhood—dedicates herself to the feminist movement in Boston-Cambridge and finally goes underground to help her lover, Wanda, escape the Grand Jury and its judgment to separate Wanda from her children. As a committed rebel-feminist, willing to take great personal risks to fight the system, she somewhat prefigures the later Vida.

The men in this novel are complex political and social rebels who are sympathetic because they exist outside the Establishment and work to change it; in their personal lives, especially in their relationships with Miriam, they are, with one exception, archetypically patriarchal, dominating to greater or lesser degrees the women they live with. Yet this is not a political tract, with characters and plot lines serving the didactic purposes of their author; the characters are skillfully developed, the plot engaging and not melodramatic. Devoted to social realism, Piercy recreates, in detail, the uneven rhythms of her uncommon and common rebels.

A remarkable novel for its breadth and vision, Woman on the Edge of Time （1976） is Piercy riding the last great crest of the New Left before it recedes into underground paranoia and disguise, or is co-opted by the realities of late seventies politics. Piercy's vision here is part utopian-socialist, part seventies feminist extended to its ideological and imaginative limits. A future world, Mattapoisett, is an androgynous, collective society where gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation are truly chosen; indeed the prevailing, consummate ethos of choice, combined with a nostalgia for a lost variety in human culture, is realized through public policy in which humane multi-cultural laboratory birthing helps newly evolved persons realize a harmony and nirvana of body and soul: e.g., through freely chosen families with multiple mothers; egalitarian political structures; individuated art, not confined by the marketplace or state-imposed standards; freely chosen racial and ethnic identities; ecological harmony with nature, etc.

Piercy's hypothesizing and fantasizing in this quasi-utopian, quasi-science-fiction and half-realistic novel, is appropriate to the mid-seventies when radical and socialist-feminism reached its own apotheosis of mind and spirit, and feminist theory stretched to often romantic extremes. Thus, with her double vision of the utopian, of what a human and womanly possibility could be, Piercy also sees the present as unacceptable by comparison. Reality is harsh, phantasmagoric, and morally and spiritually hideous; it is so beyond redemption, with particular reference to women, that it allows for no other alternative but violent rebellion. Thus Consuelo Ramos, her Chicana heroine, a woman pushed to extremes, has no choice but to murder her oppressors, in this case psychiatrists who are the most powerful killers of women's minds and souls.

Piercy returns to a thoroughgoing realism in 1979, with Vida, and to the last remains of the New Left, in her fugitive heroine whose long period of hiding from the FBI comprises another of Piercy's glimpses at the culture, the loves and the conflicts of the Left's protagonists and the insular way in which it turns on itself （cf. Dance the Eagle to Sleep）; yet there is a continuing vitality associated with a radical critique, with all its failures.

Piercy takes a closer look at women's personal lives, those caught in a complex political web, often a repressive social and sexual one, in Braided Lives （1982）, and in the novel somewhat resembling it in theme and focus, The High Cost of Living （1978）. Here are women and men more put-upon than triumphant, confined by society yet without a movement as a counter-balance, and significantly, both novels take place in Michigan. The High Cost of Living is about lesbian and gay identity in an academic, Wayne State setting, with the major theme being the compromise of one's values and principles when faced with the pressures of succeeding as a graduate student, or as an aspiring writer or professional bound by a patronage system. Piercy's pen draws the academy's flaws, while uncovering as well the desperate and manipulative personal relations within a lesbian-gay community. Here personal relations mirror, to a large degree, the values of the Establishment. Society wins in this novel as Piercy lapses into an unprecedented cynicism.

Yet, if repression wins in The High Cost of Living, it loses in Braided Lives. This is encouraging since it appears to resemble Piercy's life closer than any of her other novels, and perhaps bodes well for the novelist. Jill Stuart, her fictional persona, is a sixteen year old Detroit high school senior at the novel's beginning—the same age Piercy was, growing up in Detroit in the fifties—of Eastern European, Jewish descent, possibly with some mixture of Tartar and Karan, anxious but wary about leaving her working class neighborhood for the status-conscious, elitist University of Michigan—again following Piercy's biography. This novel is about the emerging personality of a young Jewish woman yearning to be recognized as a beginning writer, looking for but not finding that recognition from an entrenched literary-academic establishment or from her young lover- confidants.

Ann Arbor in the fifties harbors its own Beat and Existential generation with literary heroes such as Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, John Dos Passos, Albert Camus （his novel, The Stranger, always pronounced in French）, George Orwell and Jean Paul Sartre. A part of this milieu Jill finds fascinating; another part she rejects or is rejected by because it is a male club. Jill is an outsider to the New Critical, high culture style of which Ann Arbor is a bastion, and to the social and political culture represented by Joseph McCarthy and the Korean War, by cashmere sweaters and being “preppy” before it became “neo,” by The Wild One and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. She is an economic outsider as well since in order to remain in school, she must steal her texts, supplies and incidental clothing. Jill is clearly a class apart in multiple ways.

Jill's distance from the norm as a young writer is reflected in a wonderful scene where she reads from her own poetry for the first time. The setting is an auditorium on the University of Michigan campus, and she feels anxious about appearing not only before an audience of her peers but of her instructors, who hope she has learned her lessons properly and can objectify her personal experiences, making them spare, unsentimental, unromantic, unemotional, in short, masculinized and New Critical. Interjecting her view from the present when she is in her mid-forties—the book is a reflection on the fifties and uses the same extended flashback technique as Vida—Jill recalls the critics' hostile comments toward a Mrs. Starini, a middle-aged poet and another reader on the program, “for her domestic themes and for being dumpy. She was punished for lacking appeal to their gonads.” Clearly, Starini's self-disclosing poems are the antithesis of the fashionably satiric, distanced, cynical works read by Jill's lover, Mike, another English major and aspiring poet, and by others that night. Indeed, Mike's complaint to Jill is that her poem is “‘soft, pumpkin. Too soft to waste on those jerks. … Of course it's formless and silly. It isn't art, naturally.’” Jill's struggle is to affirm her talent, the authenticity of her feelings, and her role as political rebel against McCarthyism with her men friends, and finally to rebel against that aspect of fifties repression which affected women most dramatically: the laws against abortion. She is as yet an artist and a lover without a movement.

The conflict between her emerging literary talents and the conservative academy is one of several Jill experiences. Two other important dimensions of Jill's identity, her ethnicity and working-class origins, compound the stress she experiences around her emerging sexuality, and she collides with the repressive and conforming fifties ethos. Again in Braided Lives, Jill's late teens and early twenties seem close to her creator's: she is a street-wise sophisticate whose obsessive relationship with her mother is at once cloying and tender especially when, after her father's death, emotion is less frozen, less formed by convention and the past; it is also central to her sexuality. For instance, her first clandestine （at least to her parents）, heterosexual affair—with Mike, by whom she becomes pregnant—is so disapproved of by both Jill's parents that they have her followed and force a false confession and promise of marriage from him. Finally Jill's pregnancy is ended by her mother's insistence that she perform the abortion, a violent act which brings her very close to death and causes an unbridgeable distance between her and Mike.

Men and their laws are the villains of this piece as Jill's father is shielded from any knowledge of her abortion for fear that he will harm both Jill and Mike; as Jill's mother supervises the abortion instead of going to a physician for fear of being apprehended; and as her lover Mike, uneasy and inexperienced, relinquishes responsibility. The development of Jill's sexuality comes at a terrible price to her body, her perception of self and her relations with men. Here is a real sense of what political and social repression in the fifties meant to women, how women like Jill were victimized but managed to survive and love again, and how men who were champions of social and political justice against McCarthy nevertheless gleaned the rewards of gender privilege, largely uncritical of conforming fifties sexual politics.

Astonishingly, Jill not only survives but prevails. Her last love in the novel, Howie, her gentle, warm Jewish childhood friend, wants to marry her yet finally cannot abide her independent spirit; her love for Howie lingers, but she is able to leave him, herself intact. Jill's recollection of her survival through a crucible of fifties' torment also reminds her that she has passed another danger zone—that moment between thirty-eight and forty-four when her mother, also the neighborhood fortune teller, predicted she would die. Via her persona Jill, Piercy revisits “that burned-over district where ＼she］ learned to love—in friendship and in passion—and to work.” This is a novel distinguished by its honesty and commitment to personal and social justice. The closeness of friendship, especially with women, the love on which she must have drawn to recover her mother's and her own heritage, and the general lack of cynicism and high degree of emotional engagement mark this as her most personal and self-revelatory work of fiction. Braided Lives is an explanation Piercy wrote both to herself and to the reader of her coming to maturity: it expands the feminist dictum that the personal is political in depth and dimension.

If Piercy is accused of being preachy, it is because her characters are struck by pain which they need to explain and about which they are enraged once they examine its social sources. So, when Donna, Jill's college roommate and closest friend, dies of an illegal abortion toward the novel's end, Jill's words are angry and pointed in their rage against the law which, in its false morality, kills innocent women and which almost kills her earlier. The brief political commentaries and up-to-date news inserts, italicized and set apart in Dos Passos fashion, inform the reader of the bedrock of reality on which this fiction is grounded. Braided Lives successfully draws the reader into its web of pain, compassion, and love. Piercy has written another moving novel in her continuing quest for personal and political knowledge.