By Mary Daly

In the Fall of 1965 I took a train from Fribourg to Rome in order to conduct my own personal investigation of The Second Vatican Council. . .Among my serendipitous encounters was one special meeting with the gentle Irish journalist, Gary MacEoin. Sitting in one of Rome's friendly restaurants, Gary very simply described to me the secret art of how to write a book. It was true that I had written doctoral dissertations, but I was mystified by the problem of how to go about beginning to write a BOOK. The project seemed massive and unmanageable. When this friendly journalist showed me how he set up the structures of his books, the mystery was cracked in one easy lesson.

Gary dashed off a quick outline of his process. Although I cannot Now remember all of the details, I recall the basic structural elements. He suggested that I write a letter to a friend describing what I wanted to do. He said that he generally began with a chapter whose function was "setting the scene." This presented the contemporary context. Then there would be a chapter analyzing the problems inherent in "the scene." This was followed by historical chapters presenting the background of these current problems. His final chapters offered new approaches to solving these problems. Although all of this may seem very general, it was just what I needed to Spin off from. My block about structuring a book was gone forever. I was ready to begin writing The Church and The Second Sex.

This memory of the procedure was reconfirmed in a discussion with Gary while in the process of writing Outercourse (Conversation, Boston, June, 1990).

From Outercourse: The Bedazzling Voyage Containing Recollections from My Logbook of a Radical Feminist Philosopher. San Francisco: Harper, 1992.