Outlaw woman Chris Kraus It was such a hostile thing for her to do, is how an artist friend described

the recent suicide of another. And there you have it: you might think by cutting your wrists or hanging yourself by a sash from the edge of a loft bed that you will be finally free of the endless interpretability of your actions, the coded behaviour of female America in which every move you make can only possibly be a calculation of the effect you'll have on others, a sly cipher in the grand manipulative project that is the only life you'll ever know, but you'll be wrong. Even in death you won't be free. Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz's new book chronicles a life spent wholly in the pursuit of freedom. Because she is a political person, she doesn't see her own freedom as something that can ever wholly be attained while others aren't free. This is not the drippy kind of altruism that it seems to us, who no longer see the world in political terms. As an activist, Ortiz has always been acutely aware of the structural causes of her own oppression: believing that, until these structures have been overturned, no individual can be completely free. Her book is a powerful reminder of what it might be like to be driven by ideals. Like her life, the book is an imperfect and fragmented narrative about years spent as a "full. time revolutionary" on the American left and in the women's movement. It's an astonishing example of how it might be possible to misjudge all the particulars, but still be overarchingly right. Now in her early 60s, Ortiz teaches women's and ethnic studies at a state university near San Francisco. She is rail thin, with a shock of Warhol-white hair dyed pink near her forehead. She has a middle-aged daughter, and lives alone with her cats. Her book is called Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975.

Unlike Bill Ayers, the author of another memoir of leftist activism published earlier this year called Fugitive Days, Ortiz has made no effort to craft a "literary" memoir. While Ayers waxes contemplative about the nature of memory, Ortiz merely remembers and writes down what she can. Trained as a historian, Ortiz is free of that impulse that makes "memoir such an inherently stodgy, uninspiring genre: the compulsion to process the actions of youth through the mindset of late middle age. She is faithful to her youth. She never falls into the trap of thinking time must move towards greater consciousness, and the middle-aged self is somehow wiser than the youth. Because Ortiz is so militantly unreflexive in her memory, she doesn't ever grapple with the fact that a young American woman defining herself for a decade as a "full-time revolutionary" now seems totally whack and absurd. There was then and there is now, and Ortiz's book is the most faithful possible rendering of how it really felt in thinking, then, it might be possible to change the world. History is a bunch of jump cuts, her book seems to imply. The then and the now exist discretely as parallel worlds. The story of then is a story of trauma, but it's a trauma that grew too large to contain itself. For more than a decade, she and thousands of others like her actually believed that America was on the brink of a political revolution that would unfold something like Cuba's (a country that she visited as a member of the Venceremos Brigade). For them, the century-long tradition of the American left was still very much alive. This history didn't coalesce into the kind of future Ortiz passionately expected. But st ill, a very different future did arrive. The cultural feminism and identity politics that she promoted as a leader of the women's movement, but distrusted as an ideological leftist, became perhaps the only tangible legacy of that time.

There's hardly any self-analysis in this book, and this fact itself is fascinating -- because trauma trumps, pre-empts analysis every time -- in a traumatic situation it is the facts rather than the interpretation that tells all. The only analysis Ortiz and her collaborators engaged in during the "war years" was of the ideological kind -- long nights spent hashing out position papers on the relationship of feminism to the "revolution," which never did arrive. But still, the memoir chronicles fifteen years of an outrageously ambitious, daring and principled life. Married to a graduate student, and the mother of an infant daughter while studying history in her early 20s, Ortiz reads The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, The book confirms her nascent feeling that she'd rather not be married anymore. "Woman escapes complete dependency to the degree in which she escapes the family." Without much apology or explanation, Ortiz leaves her child and husband and moves into a tiny studio apartment with her Pakistani boyfriend, Omar, who turns out to be a drug dealer. She data-processes and shoplifts for a living, falls in love with Louis, one of Omar's friends, and follows him to graduate school at UCLA, where she works on a PhD in Latin American history. Her life is like this in the book, zigzagging around the way life does, without too much actual continuity. (Most memoirs fail because they rewrite life as if there was.) But what distinguishes Ortiz's life most greatly from our time is that all its most epiphanous moments, its joys and trajectory and turning points, happen in relation to ideas. On the fast track towards a professorship in Latin American studies, an activist in the anti-colonial and apartheid movements; she is vaguely nauseated by the invisibility of women. Two years later in 1968, stranded in Mexico City while waiting to leave for Cuba with the boyfriend who she's married for a visa, she

reads an excerpt from Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto, published in the Mexico City newspaper the day after Solanas shot Warhol. "Could it be that women," Ortiz wondered, "were finally rising up?" She ditches the boyfriend and heads back to the States. Recalling that two centuries ago Boston had been a base for early feminist movements, she chooses that city as a place to join -- or form -- a new women's movement. And she succeeds. In Boston, Ortiz began the No More Fun and Games collective, publishing one of the most influential early feminist journals of that time. There, she became a national feminist leader, featured on the cover of Time, before zig-zagging back again to New Left politics, teaming up with Homer, an SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) leader who was her sometime partner. The two devised an ideological package of revolutionary politics with feminism at its core. By the early 1970s the massive infiltration of leftist groups by the FBI's COINTELPRO and the strategic assassination of key Black Panther leaders led Ortiz and thousands like her to believe that the US was on the brink of civil war. Ortiz and Homer formed a cell in New Orleans, complete with a weapons arsenal and safe houses, and prepared to blow up gas lines. It was a period of permanent hallucination. When their explosive program was about to be discovered, Ortiz went into hiding in a trailer as the girlfriend of an alcoholic oil-rig worker. Living the life, they fucked and fought until she couldn't take it anymore and fled to Colorado where she spent several years of intermittent hiding. Her daughter, who she'd long ago lost custody of, was ten years old. I read Ortiz's book in one long gulp till 3 a.m., then had this dream: ... about being in Paris, alone, I was walking, lost -- the metro station was Septembre 4 -- there was an old lady who thought it was Las Vegas -- the

escalator kept going down, & I was with someone, a boy, a "boyfriend," a sulky guy who at some point stomped off because I wanted to write something in my notebook. There was a male therapist I saw, sitting in a chair, he kept putting me through these changes, i.e. sticking a speculum up my cunt & I went real sexual & then turned around being critical or pensive or wise, a cycle of moods & he was critical about this, he wanted to know Who Are You, you can't really be anyone, he said, if you can change so quickly. Confused & messy, ragged, brilliant, Outlaw Woman reminds us that there is a history even if it does not necessarily connect to how we experience and understand the present. Her writing is exemplary of what a life committed to ideas might be. Chris Kraus is an art critic and fiction writer living in Los Angeles.