On Inheriting Curiosity – Notes from reading For the Love of Stories: Confessions of an Accidental Feminist by Wendy Doniger
Some people inherit money. Others inherit family businesses, heirlooms, or old recipes passed down through generations. The luckiest, I have come to believe, inherit questions. There are homes where books exist because every respectable home ought to have books. They line drawing-room shelves in matching bindings, gathering equal parts admiration and dust, brought down occasionally when guests arrive or when a school assignment requires them. And then there are homes where books refuse to stay on shelves. They migrate to bedside tables and dining tables, travel in handbags, accumulate on staircases, interrupt conversations, and begin new ones. They are quoted absent-mindedly over breakfast, argued over after dinner, and lent to friends with the faint anxiety that they may never return. In such homes, children learn that ideas are not remote, intimidating things belonging to universities or libraries but living companions, capable of changing shape every time they are spoken aloud.
The older I grow, the more I realise that environments shape us long before ambition does. We celebrate extraordinary individuals while overlooking the ecosystems that nurture them. We praise the writer without noticing the childhood that taught her to ask questions. We admire the scholar while forgetting the parents who answered one question with three more.
Reading Wendy Doniger's For the Love of Stories brought me back to that distinction. Her part memoir- part intellectual self-portrait dwells sentimentally on childhood and reveals how profoundly our intellectual lives are shaped before we begin to call them intellectual.
We often talk about books that change our lives. We talk far less about the homes that make those books possible.
There is something disarming about the way Wendy Doniger writes about herself. One expects, perhaps unfairly, that a scholar of her stature will produce a memoir weighed down by achievements, a procession of universities, publications, celebrated teachers, and intellectual triumphs. All of those are present, of course. Harvard, Oxford, Calcutta, Chicago; Sanskrit, mythology, censorship, academic battles; friendships with remarkable minds and encounters with people whose names have become part of twentieth-century intellectual history. And none of these forms the emotional centre of the book. Instead, what emerges is a woman who has remained, above all else, a reader.
Books fill every corner of her life. She reads voraciously, but does not restrict her reading to only books. She also reads myths, landscapes, conversations, dreams, friendships, betrayals, chance encounters, and the curious ways in which human beings explain themselves to one another through stories. Scholarship, in Doniger's hands resembles a prolonged act of listening, an acknowledgement that stories often know more about us than we know about ourselves.
That may well be the reason mythology continues to endure while so many other forms of knowledge date so quickly. Facts grow obsolete. Arguments are replaced. Histories are revised. Stories, however, possess an uncanny ability to survive each generation that attempts to explain them. They wait patiently for another reader, another interpreter, another restless mind willing to ask a slightly different question. Doniger has spent a lifetime returning to the same myths, because she herself does. Every reading becomes, in some way, an autobiography. All reading is.
Reading the memoir, I found myself thinking unexpectedly about Anne Lamott. At first the connection seemed improbable. Their lives, their subjects and even their temperaments could hardly be more different. They share an instinct that increasingly feels rare. They believe that writing begins with attention. Lamott pays attention to faith, grief, motherhood, and the stubborn comedy of being human. Doniger pays attention to myths, languages, ancient texts, and the strange persistence of stories across centuries. Both understand that before one can become a writer, or even a scholar, one must first learn how to look carefully. The habit of noticing is the first inheritance every reader receives.
The phrase that continued to linger, however, was confessions of an accidental feminist. It is an evocative title that carries with it the suggestion of surprise, as though feminism arrived unexpectedly, almost by chance, somewhere along the long and winding path of a life devoted to stories.
I found myself resisting that idea, though I never doubted Doniger's description of herself. I have come to believe that very few women arrive at feminism accidentally. They may discover the word late. They may encounter the books years after they have already begun asking difficult questions. They may even resist the label for a time. But the instinct itself often takes root long before it acquires a name. The strong insistence that dignity should not depend upon gender, that curiosity ought never to be mistaken for insolence, and that intelligence is not something a woman must apologise for. Feminism is less an awakening than a recognition.
Doniger's memoir reminded me that some women do not become feminists because life corners them into it. They become feminists because equality feels so self-evident that every inequality strikes them as absurd.
The memoir returns, in ways both obvious and subtle, to the experience of being a woman in worlds that admired intelligence until it became inconvenient. Doniger moves through universities, conferences, and scholarly circles that celebrated intellectual brilliance while remaining deeply uncertain about what to do with women who possessed it in abundance. She recounts these moments with characteristic wit rather than indignation, and yet the pattern is unmistakable. Again and again, one encounters institutions willing to welcome women, provided they did not ask too many unsettling questions.
There is, I think, a particular anxiety reserved for women who refuse to choose between warmth and intellect. We have learnt, often unconsciously, to imagine these qualities as opposites. A woman may be brilliant, provided she is not intimidating. She may be outspoken, provided she remains likeable. She may be ambitious, provided that ambition is wrapped in enough self-deprecation to reassure everyone around her. Doniger has spent a lifetime refusing these negotiations. She does not perform certainty, nor does she apologise for knowing what she knows. She asks questions because questions are, for her, the beginning of every meaningful conversation.
One of the stronger undercurrents running beneath the memoir is the price of being a woman who thinks publicly. Doniger writes about censorship, intellectual freedom, and the resistance that often greets ideas refusing to remain obedient. Reading those sections, it became impossible not to think about how little has changed. Technologies have changed. Platforms have changed. Outrage has become instantaneous. The discomfort with intelligent women remains astonishingly familiar. It is tempting to imagine this as the story of another era that is safely contained within the corridors of twentieth-century academia. The feeling it evokes is curiously contemporary.
A woman who asks inconvenient questions has always been considered threatening. Before social media, she unsettled classrooms, conferences, and publishing houses. Today, she unsettles timelines. The medium evolves. The anxiety survives. And still, the memoir never becomes bitter. That refusal to diminish oneself in order to make one's thinking more palatable may be one of the memoir's most enduring lessons because it demonstrates what an intellectually honest life can look like.
In many ways, For the Love of Stories never reads like a memoir about achievement. Its deepest concern is the freedom to pursue an idea wherever it leads, even when it unsettles cherished beliefs, and to change one's mind in the light of new evidence. The freedom to remain curious in a culture that increasingly rewards certainty. And above all, the freedom to build a life in which stories are never reduced to answers but remain, always, invitations to think again.
When I think back on For the Love of Stories, I realise that very little of what has stayed with me belongs to the usual architecture of memoir. I remember remarkably few dates, fewer achievements, and almost none of the milestones by which successful lives are ordinarily measured. What lingers instead is a sensibility, a way of inhabiting the world that feels increasingly rare. Doniger moves through life with the unhurried confidence of someone who has never believed that the purpose of reading is to arrive at certainty. Stories do not confirm what she already knows; they complicate it. They invite her to linger over contradictions, to resist easy conclusions, to distrust any interpretation that claims to be final. There is something deeply humane about that refusal to reduce either literature or life into neat moral lessons.
It also made me think about reading itself, about the reasons some of us continue to return to books long after they have ceased to be instruments of education or professional necessity. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, reading changes its character. At first, it is a means of discovering the world. Then, almost imperceptibly, it becomes a way of discovering oneself. Every reader eventually realises that the books which alter us most profoundly are the ones that rearrange the furniture of our minds so much that, months later, we find ourselves thinking differently without quite remembering when the shift occurred.
Doniger's memoir belongs to that second category. It does not persuade through argument so much as through example. It offers the portrait of a woman who never allowed curiosity to become subordinate to certainty, whose scholarship remained animated by wonder rather than authority. Even after decades spent reading, teaching and writing about myths, she approaches stories with the humility of someone who knows they will always exceed the interpretations we impose upon them. There is an almost childlike generosity in that posture, a willingness to remain surprised by texts one has spent a lifetime studying.
It is impossible not to admire the formidable scholarship, the courage with which she weathered censorship and public controversy or even the extraordinary range of her intellectual life. What stayed with me was the conviction that a life devoted to stories is also a life devoted to paying attention. To people. To language. To history. To myths. To the strange and often invisible threads that connect one human experience to another.
Over the past few years, I have found myself gravitating towards memoirs by women who write. Anne Lamott. Mannu Bhandari. Wendy Doniger. On the surface, they have little in common. One writes about faith and writing with irreverent tenderness, while another maps the emotional terrain of middle-class India with devastating clarity. The third has spent a lifetime moving effortlessly between Sanskrit texts, mythology, and lived experience. Still, all three have been answering the same question for me: What kind of life allows a woman to keep reading, thinking, and writing?
Doniger's memoir offers one possible answer. For the Love of Stories is part memoir, part intellectual autobiography, but neither description quite captures its spirit. It reads less like the chronicle of an academic career than the autobiography of a curious mind. Stories spill across its pages with delightful unpredictability. It talks about teachers, scholars, lovers, dogs, ballet lessons, Sanskrit classes, political movements, friendships that last decades, and myths that refuse to remain confined to ancient texts. Doniger moves effortlessly between the deeply intellectual and the wonderfully gossipy, reminding us that ideas rarely emerge in isolation. They are born in conversations, disagreements, friendships, and accidents.
For the Love of Stories is the record of the life, of one of the world's most distinguished scholars of mythology, that never lost faith in the inexhaustible possibilities of stories. In an age that prizes speed over reflection, certainty over inquiry, and opinion over understanding, Doniger offers a gentle reminder that curiosity is a moral habit. It asks us to approach the world with humility, to accept that every story contains another story beneath it, and to recognise that the questions worth living with are rarely the ones that can be answered quickly.
Closing the book, I found myself thinking once again about the inheritance of temperament. The kind of inheritance that teaches a child to ask why one more time than everyone else, to follow a footnote simply because it promises another story, to believe that books are less repositories of knowledge than companions in an endless conversation. If there is one gift Wendy Doniger's memoir offers its readers, it is the hope of building a life in which curiosity remains intact despite everything that conspires against it.
And that is the truest love story this memoir has to tell. It is neither a love story between people nor between a scholar and her discipline. It is the story of a woman who spent a lifetime falling in love with questions, trusting that if she followed them patiently enough, they would always lead her back to another story.
Books rarely leave me wanting to become someone else. The best ones send me back to my own life with different questions. For the Love of Stories did precisely that. It made me wonder about the invisible architecture of a thinking life, of the conversations that shape it, the teachers who redirect it, the friendships that sustain it, and the shelves one grows up browsing without realising they are becoming part of one's inner landscape. More than anything else, it left me thinking about the extraordinary privilege of remaining curious in a world that rewards certainty, and about the women who have insisted, across generations, that stories are not an escape from reality but one of the deepest ways of inhabiting it. From Wendy Doniger's memoir, I carried away gratitude for another woman who chose to build a life spacious enough for books, ideas, arguments, and wonder to coexist, and who reminds the rest of us that there is still so much left to read, to question, and to understand.
By the final page, the memoir had changed the way I thought about scholarship. It made intellectual life seem less like a profession and more like a practice of paying attention. Reading became an act of love. Curiosity became a discipline. Stories became less about escaping reality than learning how to inhabit it more fully.
When I finished the book, I realised my envy had been misplaced. It wasn't Wendy Doniger's career I longed for. It was the freedom to build a life around curiosity. A life where books are discussed as naturally as weather. Where difficult questions are welcomed rather than feared. Where changing one's mind is considered a form of growth instead of defeat. Where stories are not treated as diversions from life but as one of the ways we learn to live it. And maybe that is the greatest gift For the Love of Stories offers.
This book is reminder that a life devoted to stories is, at its heart, a life devoted to remaining curious. The luckiest people inherit questions. The rest of us spend our lives trying to catch up.
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