The 1960s were a time of unprecedented upheaval in American politics and culture. Protest movements challenged hierarchies of race and gender and a brutal war in Vietnam. College campuses exploded with unrest. Inner cities went up in flames. High-profile assassinations of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X shook the faith of young Boomers in a brighter future. The sexual revolution shattered traditional puritanical norms. This experimental spirit also upended the arts and academia as bold new styles of music, literature, theater and historical inquiry flowered.

The playwright Karen Malpede partook fully of that era. Her new memoir provides a fearless, unsparing account of her life: her many erotic adventures, her long running political activism, the historic figures she befriended (and sometimes slept with), the agony of watching many of those closest to her wither away from cancer and the hard-earned wisdom she has gained across her life’s journey.

Malpede grew up in a post-war suburb north of Chicago. Intense emotions filled her family’s home as her parents screamed and fought sometimes even in the nude while carrying makeshift weapons. She, in fact, opens the book with a forced kiss shared between herself and her father. Though the boundaries never pressed further than that, that event set the tone for the rest of her story, always full of raging desire and love, but never truly to a point of physical injury.

Malpede joined her first protests as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin before moving to New York to study dramatic literature at Columbia. While visiting a lover in New Haven, Connecticut in May 1970, she found herself in the middle of a tense standoff between police and radical antiwar and Black Power protesters. “On every roof stood National Guard and police snipers with rifles pointing down at us,” Malpede writes of that protest. “They could pick us off one by one. The book is filled with turning points in American protests, with the author stopping to reflect on how she experienced it.

Back in New York, Malpede joined the Living Theatre, where many of her friends, like Julian Beck and Judith Malina, would soon come together and eventually make a name for themselves as pioneers of Off- Off Broadway theater. This would also be where she would meet her future husband, George Bartenieff , who was both an accomplished theater and film actor. Malpede first takes us into the tales of her exciting youth. With enthralling honesty, she writes of Allen Ginsberg, Noam Chomsky, and Andrea Dworkin making appearances in her plays and her social circle, through scenes as diverse as hospital visitations, theater settings, and even sexual pleasure. Malpede is not one for censorship; she bares all on the page. No scene is censored in the slightest, as she takes us through sensual and surprising moments shared with Dworkin, Bartinieff and an unnamed lover who was at her side as she cared for her dear friend Julian Beck during his losing battle with cancer.

“This is also a play about sex,” said Malpede at a book launch event in November. Indeed, it is. In times of distress, sexuality can be used as a holding vessel for grief. “In joy that is grief, I will lose myself… I can scare death away with my joy,” writes Malpede. She is not one to let death kill her, too. This memoir is as much about getting lost in ecstasy as it is about getting lost in grief and sorrow.

Through Malpede, we catch a glimpse of her friends as she shares some of their most touching words. Feminist political philosopher Barbara Deming describes her decision to go off chemotherapy at the end of her life to allow her to “dance toward her death.” These artists danced until their death, and Malpede, forever dances into the lives of those around her through her unrelenting search to touch the deepest wells of her life in writing and directing. The uniqueness of the book lies in not just who she knew but in how rare her raw and passionate voice is.

The Love of Her Life

After Malpede met Bartenieff, she wrote many plays with him in mind, and became known for her psychologically and socially complex plays about topics such as the suicide of Iraq War veterans, the climate crisis and the U.S. torture program at Guantanamo. In her multi-layered plays, lead actors change gender, assume transgressed parent-offspring Oedipal identities, and transform from human into animal figures. Her works were often well-received by audiences but consistently panned by critics, especially at the New York Times. This, she notes, is something she shared with Julian Beck.

Malpede’s 35-year relationship with Bartenieff was all-consuming as was her grief following his death from cancer in 2022. They carry physical intimacy well into their old age when intimacy is often thought of as lost and hopeless. At the height of the pandemic lockdown, they cook candlelight dinners together at home and Karen reads George passages from great works of literature he is no longer able to read for himself. The two still-devoted partners decide that if the Covid-19 virus enters their home and steals their lives, they will go out doing what they love. There is no dark, dementing fear of reality. They face it and their worlds together.

As a millennial, I am surrounded by a culture where Malpede’s life can be interpreted as a distant fantasy. Where our generation suffers from endless loneliness epidemics, Malpede’s fantastical journeys to Italy, to Egypt, to various apartments to make love in New York City in the 1960s is a land far, far away from my own in my world of incessant internet usage, texting as a replacement for communication, and stardom only viewed through social media.

Malpede’s writing takes me to a time and place I knew existed in my heart but have not been able to find in many of today’s stories by my peers. Her story demands to be read, not only for its adventurous nature, but simply for the sheer reminder that life can be lived to its fullest. One needn’t become empty and dry as life continues, but rather, one can fi nd some of their greatest inspiration and joy lodged into the harrowing challenges of personal life. In her words, “I was immune to human frailty… I was ALIVE. So was he.” And so may we all be, too… through reading her.

Last Radiance: Radical Lives, Bright Deaths By Karen Malpede

Vine Leaves Press,

296 pages, Oct. 2025

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