Female Of The Species

I love being a woman. We are courageous and emotionally wealthy," Patsy Clairmont declares. The silver-haired author of Normal Is Just a Setting on Your Dryer is framed by four overhead TV screens as she roams a circular stage of the Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Ore., one of a series of speakers commanding the attention of the 12,000 women gathered there. She stops abruptly and pulls hundreds of rubber bands out of a bag, an embarrassment of riches meant to represent the psychic entanglement she has had to deal with. "This is me," she says. "All of me." Agoraphobia, fear of...