Saturday's Child: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Robin Morgan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2000

The fascinating narrative of an amazing life: from child TV star to poet and feminist activist. Robin Morgan is known as a prize-winning author, a political theorist, and a founder of the contemporary women's movement. But these adult accomplishments eclipsed an earlier fame. "Saturday's child has to work for a living," and Morgan has--since the age of two. She was a tot model, had her own radio show at age four, and was a child star on television, including on the popular series "Mama." Unlike most child actors, she emerged to reinvent a life filled with literary achievement and constructive politics.

Here Morgan tells the whole story--the years as a child so famous she was named "The Ideal American Girl," her fight to become a serious writer, marriage to a fiery bisexual poet, motherhood, lovers (male and female), and decades working on civil rights, the radical underground, and global feminism. This is the intensely personal, behind-the-scenes story of her life.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Robin Morgan's brisk yet reflective memoir has all of the political and personal bite that you'd expect from someone who came out of the New Left to join the militant wing of the women's movement. It's written also with the elegance and formidable recollection of physical and emotional details that distinguish her poetry (Monster) and fiction (Dry Your Smile). And it contains a marvelously evocative rendering of what it was like to be a child star in 1940s radio ("The Little Robin Morgan Show") and 1950s television (Dagmar on "Mama") In short, there's little that this remarkable woman hasn't experienced and/or written about. Here, she goes lightly over the heady years of resurgent feminism (covered more fully in Sisterhood Is Powerful and Going Too Far), and concentrates instead on exploring less public areas of her life: her fraught relationship with her mother, who managed the performing career that young Robin didn't want, really; her single meeting with the father who abandoned them (described with a refreshing lack of sentimentality); her unconventional marriage to Kenneth Pitchford, which produced a beloved son and endured for more than 20 years, despite Pitchford's homosexuality; and her two long-term relationships with women. Naturally, there are political insights throughout (the first, expressed in a diary entry when Robin was eight), and Morgan chronicles at some length her ongoing engagement in the struggle for international women's rights. But she takes the time here to let us know the woman behind the causes more comprehensively than in her previous nonfiction; and, because she seems as self-aware as she is smart, it's a pleasure to make her further acquaintance. --Wendy Smith

From Booklist

Radical feminist, political activist, and writer Morgan focuses on her own life, identifying her early influences and examining how they shaped her beliefs. She recounts a tumultuous childhood in which her mother forced her into modeling and acting. Suffering under the pressures of fame created by her success as Dagmar on the TV series I Remember Mama, she decided to become a writer. Fighting her mother's insistence that she continue to act, she got a job at a publishing house, moved out of the apartment her acting career paid for, married fellow poet Kenneth Pitchford, and began a career in political activism. Becoming increasingly disenchanted with leftist politics, she turned to fighting rampant sexism. Mixing personal memories, historical details, and relevant statistics, she chronicles the sacrifices she and other women have made in the name of women's rights, reveals much about the power struggles within the women's movement, and details how her personal and political activities have affected one another. Morgan's compelling self-portrait is that of a strong, complex woman who fights for her ideals. Bonnie Johnston
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.; 1st edition (November 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393050157
• ISBN-13: 978-0393050158
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,467,347 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

ROBIN MORGAN is an award-winning poet and writer, author of the memoir Saturday's Child, the novel The Burning Time, and the best-selling The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism. One of the founders of contemporary American feminism, she is the author of numerous germinal books about the women's movement, and editor of the classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful, Sisterhood Is Global, and Sisterhood Is Forever.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful book on a wonderful life, November 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Saturday's Child: A Memoir (Hardcover)

Wow. Morgan survived child stardom but didn't become an alcoholic crazy; she took out her rebellion in progressive activism (civil rights, feminism) and saved her soul through a passion for language. It's very evident here that she's a first-rate poet--yet also capable of writing this friendly, funny, unpretentious, vulnerable, personal, and wise memoir. With sex,too! And high-grade gossip--about behind-the-scenes TV lives, the feminist movement, and the literary world. I confess that I LOVED every word.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Impossible to put down . . ., August 24, 2002

By 

Terryl Paiste (Fairfax, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Saturday's Child: A Memoir (Hardcover)

I picked up Morgan's "Saturday's Child" because I remembered her fondly from her acting days on "I Remember Mama," and I wanted to learn more about how she evolved from a child actress to a feminist activist. But I got more, much more. Full of insights, suspense, and wit, "Saturday's Child" captures
the many lives of Robin Morgan, all of them more vivid than fiction. But be careful not to start this book when you have miles to go or promises to keep because it's impossible to put down. Consider yourself warned!

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars meet a marvelous and funny woman, December 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Saturday's Child: A Memoir (Hardcover)

If you ever doubted that the personal and political are intertrwined, Robin Morgan's new book shows that they form a dramatic and dynamic interplay in her amazing life. It is a gripping story of a brave and funny and tenacious child-turned-woman who sees the world with the clarity of a great novelist and the sensitivity of the poet she is. But you don't have to read it for any of these high-falutin reasons. It's just a wonderful read and a juicy story.