Sally Kempton, who was as soon as a rising star within the New York journalism world and a fierce exponent of radical feminism, however who later pivoted to a lifetime of Japanese asceticism and non secular apply, died on Monday at her house in Carmel, Calif. She was 80.
Her brother David Kempton mentioned the trigger was coronary heart failure, including that she had suffered from a power lung situation.
Ms. Kempton’s literary pedigree was impeccable. Her father was Murray Kempton, the erudite and acerbic newspaper columnist and a lion of New York journalism, the ranks of which she joined within the late Sixties as a employees author for The Village Voice and a contributor to The New York Occasions. She was a pointy and proficient reporter — though she typically felt she hadn’t correctly earned her place as a journalist and owed it largely to her father’s status.
She wrote arch items about New Age fads like astrology: “One believes in marijuana and Bob Dylan,” she famous in The Occasions in 1969, and “astrology is a part of an environment which incorporates this stuff and others; it is without doubt one of the methods we communicate to our pals.” She profiled rock stars like Frank Zappa and reviewed books for The Occasions.
She and a buddy, the creator Susan Brownmiller, joined a bunch referred to as the New York Radical Feminists, and within the spring of 1970 they participated in a sit-in on the places of work of Women’ Residence Journal to protest its editorial content material, which they mentioned was demeaning to girls. That very same month, she and Ms. Brownmiller had been invited on “The Dick Cavett Present” to signify what was then referred to as the ladies’s liberation motion; the 2 had a set-to with Hugh Hefner, the writer of Playboy journal, who was additionally a visitor, as was the rock singer Grace Slick (who didn’t appear completely on board with the feminist agenda).
However what made Ms. Kempton well-known, for a New York minute, was a blistering essay within the July 1970 subject of Esquire journal referred to as “Slicing Unfastened,” wherein she took intention at her father, her husband and her personal complicity within the regressive gender roles of the period.
The fundamental level of the essay was that she had been groomed to be a sure form of vibrant however compliant helpmeet, and he or she was spitting mad at herself for succeeding. Her father, she wrote, thought of girls to be incapable of significant thought and was expert within the artwork of placing girls down; their very own relationship, she mentioned, was like that of an 18th-century rely and his precocious daughter, “wherein she grows as much as be the proper female companion, parroting him with such subtlety that it’s unattainable to inform her ideas and emotions, so coincident together with his, usually are not authentic.”
She described her husband, the film producer Harrison Starr, who was 13 years her senior, as “a male supremacist within the model of Norman Mailer” who infantilized her and provoked in her such frustration that she fantasized about bashing him within the head with a frying pan.
“It’s arduous to battle an enemy,” she concluded, “who has outposts in your head.”
The piece landed like a cluster bomb. Her marriage didn’t survive. Her relationship together with her father suffered. Girls devoured it, recognizing themselves in her livid prose. To a sure era, it’s nonetheless a touchstone of feminist exposition. Years later, Susan Cheever, writing in The Occasions, referred to as it “a scream of marital rage.”
4 years after the Esquire piece was revealed, Ms. Kempton primarily vanished, to observe an Indian mystic named Swami Muktananda, in any other case often called Baba, a proponent of a non secular apply often called Siddha Yoga. Baba was touring America within the Nineteen Seventies and accruing devotees from the chattering lessons by the tons of after which the 1000’s — together with, at one level, seemingly half of Hollywood.
By 1982, Ms. Kempton had taken a vow of chastity and poverty to dwell as a monk in Baba’s ashrams, first in India after which in a former borscht belt hotel within the Catskills. He gave her the title Swami Durgananda, and he or she donned the normal orange robes of a Hindu monk.
After she was ordained, as she advised the author Sara Davidson, who profiled Ms. Kempton in 2001, she ran right into a Sarah Lawrence classmate, who then wrote within the alumni e-newsletter, “Noticed Sally Kempton, ’64, who’s now married to an Indian man and is Mrs. Durgananda.”
As The Oakland Tribune reported in 1983, “The Sally Kempton who had written about sexual rage in Esquire now not existed.”
Sally Kempton was born on Jan. 15, 1943, in Manhattan and grew up in Princeton, N.J., the eldest of 5 youngsters. Her mom, Mina (Bluethenthal) Kempton, was a social employee; she and Mr. Kempton divorced when Sally was in faculty.
She attended Sarah Lawrence as a substitute of Barnard, she wrote in her Esquire essay, as a result of her boyfriend on the time thought it was a extra “female” establishment. There, she co-edited {a magazine} parody referred to as The Institution. She was employed by The Village Voice proper after commencement and started writing items, as she put it, about “medicine and hippies” that she mentioned had been largely made up as a result of she had no concept what she was doing. (Her writing belied that assertion.)
She had her first ecstatic expertise, she later recalled, in her residence within the West Village, whereas taking psychedelics with a boyfriend and listening to the Grateful Useless tune “Ripple.”
“All of the complexities and the struggling and the ache and the psychological stuff I used to be involved with as a downtown New York journalist simply dissolved, and all I might see was love,” she mentioned in a video on her web site. When she described her new perception to her boyfriend, she mentioned, he responded by asking, “Haven’t you ever taken acid earlier than?”
However Ms. Kempton had had a transformative expertise, and he or she continued to have them as she started investigating non secular practices like yoga and Tibetan Buddhism. She went to see Baba out of curiosity — everybody was doing it — and, as she wrote in 1976 in New York journal, should you’re going to get your self a guru, why not get one?
She was immediately pulled in, she wrote, charmed by his matter-of-fact persona in addition to one thing stronger, if arduous to outline. Earlier than lengthy she had joined his entourage. It felt, she mentioned, like working away with the circus.
Her pals had been appalled. “However you had been all the time so bold,” one mentioned. “I’m nonetheless bold,” she mentioned. “There’s simply been a slight shift in path.”
Ms. Kempton spent practically 30 years with Baba’s group, often called the SYDA Basis, for 20 years of which she was a swami. Baba died in 1982, following accusations that he had sexually abused younger girls in his ashrams; since his demise, the inspiration has been run by his successor, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. In 1994, when Lis Harris, a author for The New Yorker, investigated the inspiration and wrote an article that famous the accusations towards Baba and questions on his succession, she quoted Ms. Kempton as saying that the accusations had been “ridiculous.” Ms. Kempton by no means spoke publicly concerning the subject.
In 2002, she put away her robes and left the ashram, transferring to Carmel, the place she turned a well-respected instructor of meditation and non secular philosophy. She was the creator of numerous books on non secular practices, together with “Meditation for the Love of It: Having fun with Your Personal Deepest Expertise” (2011), which has an introduction by Elizabeth Gilbert of “Eat, Pray Love” fame.
Along with her brother David, Ms. Kempton is survived by two different brothers, Arthur and Christopher. One other brother, James Murray Kempton Jr., often called Mike, was killed in a automotive crash together with his spouse, Jean Goldschmidt Kempton, a school buddy of Sally’s, in 1971.
Ms. Kempton’s father, after his preliminary shock, was supportive of her new life. He was a non secular man himself, a practising Episcopalian, however humble about it. “I simply go for the music,” he favored to inform individuals.
Murray Kempton, who died in 1997, visited the ashram and met with Baba numerous occasions, David Kempton mentioned, and was respectful of the order’s ethos and historical past. He advised The Oakland Tribune that if his daughter had wished to be a druid he might need apprehensive.
“I assume she is aware of one thing that I don’t know,” he mentioned. “I respect her selection. Actually, I love the selection Sally made. In spite of everything, she is a swami, isn’t she?”
