ABOUT WOMEN A provocative and wide-ranging conversation between two distinctive women—one American and one French—on the dilemmas, benefits, and demands of womanhood.     Lisa Alther and Françoise Gilot have been friends for more than twenty-five years. Although from different backgrounds (Gilot from cosmopolitan Paris, Alther from small-town Tennessee) and different generations, they found they have a great deal in common as women who managed to support themselves with careers in the arts while simultaneously balancing the obligations of work and parenthood. About Women is their extended conversation, in which they talk about everything important to them: their childhoods, the impact of war on their lives and their work, fashion, self-invention, style, feminism, even child rearing. They also talk about the creative impulse and the importance of art. This is a charming and endearing dialogue between two intelligent and often funny women as they ponder what it means to be a woman.