"Claire Kahane has written a memoir for our times: an account of a life spent in pursuit of lived experience long before it was permissible for women like Kahane to do just that. Rich and lively, vivid and bold, Nine Lives is bound to reach a wide and responsive readership."

"Claire Kahane's memoir is a riveting account of a life dedicated to self-discovery. The early part of it involved living dangerously, but her later role as professor, mother, and wife grows naturally from those initial experiences. Her story is also a vivid mirror of the times, from the fifties to the present."

"Claire Kahane's Nine Lives recounts a history of wild wandering and wayward romance en route to self-discovery. A sophisticated scholar of psychoanalysis, Kahane is also a deft writer whose life journey takes her from an immigrant home in the Bronx to motherhood and love, with stops along the way in Mexico, San Francisco, Greenwich Village, Paris, Tangiers, Ibiza-and more. The decades she evokes in her memoir, starting with the fifties and culminating in the present, come vividly to life as she travels the world."

"The noted feminist critic Claire Kahane looks back on the multiple surprising, often risky life roles she enthusiastically adopted in a restless quest to forge her own identity. The aptly named Clara Katz, Holocaust survivors' kid, finds herself code switching from good-girl Bronx high school student to country-western singer, Greenwich Village bohemian, San Francisco beat, expat nomad, graduate student and college professor, wife and mother, analysand and analyst, and happy late life partner. Each of these stories vividly brings to life the particulars of its own uniquely American subculture, fusing seamlessly into a highly satisfying read: the remarkable personal trajectory of one woman's bumpy but triumphant journey through eighty-plus years of our shared cultural history."