'I need to say what I think is right, and the rest be damned'

Feminist icon Naomi Wolf's latest book is full of her 83-year-old father's good, old-fashioned wisdom. Isn't that a bit regressive? Not at all, she assures Fionola Meredith.

'Beautiful... so beautiful," croons the middle-aged man, his gaze fixed on American feminist writer Naomi Wolf as she talks animatedly in the sedate drawing room of the Merrion Hotel in Dublin.

All flashing violet eyes and eloquent hand gestures, Wolf barely takes this balding fan under her notice. She's far too busy describing her new book, The Treehouse, a passionate hymn to the "eccentric wisdom" of her father, Leonard.

But the starstruck passer-by is right. With her improbably luxuriant mane of chestnut hair, her purple silk and black lace camisole top, 43-year-old Wolf is a magnet for most of the male eyes in the room.

Those striking good looks have proved more of a hindrance than a help as a feminist revolutionary. Her international bestseller, The Beauty Myth, which was published when she was 28, urged women to stick two fingers up to the cosmetics industry and embrace their wobbly bits in all their imperfect glory. Yet many readers found this bracing advice hard to take from such a gorgeous young babe.

Wolf's arch-enemy Camille Paglia never misses an opportunity to ridicule her as a ditzy lightweight; variously describing Wolf as "a parent-pleasing, teacher-pleasing little kiss-ass" and "the Dan Quayle of feminism – a pretty airhead who has gotten any profile whatsoever because of her hair". In 2004, after Wolf alleged that she had been sexually harassed by Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom 20 years ago, while at Yale, Paglia snarled, "it really smacks of the Salem witch-hunts and all the accompanying hysteria. It really grates on me that Naomi Wolf for her entire life has been batting her eyes and bobbing her boobs in the face of men and made a profession out of courting male attention." While other feminist academics may be less vituperative than Paglia, many regard Wolf's work as feminism-lite: it goes down a treat, but lacks real sustenance. And it's true that her rather gushing, melodramatic style is more redolent of the self-help book than the serious intellectual critique.

Now that she's published a book of her father's folksy philosophy, the feminist teeth are grinding again. Didn't we just spend the past few decades trying to dismantle the "law of the father", that ancient repository of male authority, power and control? Of course, there's nothing wrong with Wolf affectionately tousling the old guy's head and telling him she loves him, but does she really need to kneel quite so reverently before his superior wisdom? (Wisdom which consists, in large part, of insights such as "be still and listen" and "identify your heart's desire" and "mistakes are part of the draft".) Isn't it all a bit regressive?

"My next book is about my mother and the gifts I got from her – so don't worry, it's not all about the paternal lineage!" she says.

"But I happened to have a father who profoundly believed that each of us is incredibly precious as an artist – and the girls are just as precious as the boys. My dad was a feminist before the word existed."

She sees her re-encounter with her father's world view as a kind of growing up, a mature reconnection with an approach she had once fiercely rejected.

"Women have to overthrow their fathers, to figure out who they are. So I did that in my 20s: it was developmentally appropriate for me to close the door to all the other voices in my head – to find my own voice."

Leonard Wolf, in his daughter's words, is a "wild old visionary poet", an 83-year-old Chaucer-quoting bohemian with a fondness for red flannel Basque shepherd's shirts. He has shaggy eyebrows, smiling hazel-brown eyes and an almost magical ability to make people he meets become happier. He believes above all in following the heart's desire, in the primacy of the creative urge – whether that manifests itself as a novel, a painting, a cake or "the gesture that brushes the hair away from the forehead of a hurt child".

He doesn't seem quite real, more like an idealised composite of twinkly old grandfather meets philosopher-poet Kahlil Gibran.

Wolf is quick to mention the only apparent flaw in Leonard's character: his failure to tell his family that he had a grown-up son from a previous relationship.

"He's by no means perfect – my God, he committed this Greek crime of having a child that he didn't acknowledge! I would say that's pretty far from perfect. But he was a great teacher. Not everyone can take a course by Leonard Wolf. All these students have passed through his life and his course in poetry, which is really about how to live, and he has changed their lives. Since he's 83 and he's not going to be around forever, and since not everyone can encounter him, and since my own life was changed by taking this course in 12 lessons, I thought it was important to distill that for readers."

Wolf has little time for the wilder excesses of feminist theory – and even less for its capacity to restrict, rather than encourage, creativity and imagination. In the book, she sends up her youthful appetite for wearing black jeans and thinking about "structures of oppression". She wryly notes that she could never say a phrase like "phallocentric patriarchy" to her father, even over the phone. But does her current move towards "poetry, not polemic" lessen her zeal for the feminist struggle?

"No, I'm still a feminist – more than ever. I keep fighting! But what is bumming me out is that I meet all these young writers and they've been given all this theory – they're just cutting things up, but they don't feel allowed to create, they don't feel allowed to imagine. It's like giving a scalpel to a surgeon or someone studying medicine. You don't say 'here's the scalpel, that's it now – don't think about health or healing.

"Identity politics, unfortunately, has created this awful rhetorical construct where you're not allowed to say 'I imagine your experience' because you might be white and they might be black. That's having a bad effect on their development as writers. It's like being told you have to confine your imagination to a tiny little box. It's just plain wrong. The great [black novelist] Toni Morrison wouldn't say white middle-class people couldn't understand her heroines."

Over and over again, Wolf starts talking about herself and ends up back with her father. She believes that Leonard's brand of good old-fashioned humanism is the answer to all that achingly right-on, emotionally-constipated postmodern thinking. "My dad's humanist message is that we can all use the imagination to empathise with each other. It's really important to me to resuscitate that, to dust it off. Post 9/11 the world is so polarised and so about rigid ideologies – west, Islam, women, men, gay, straight, Palestinian, Jewish... So I do think it's high time to reclaim renewed humanism, to tear this stuff down. Humanism will look different, informed by women's consciousness, gay consciousness, black consciousness, but – God! – it's time!"

Wolf thinks that humanism has been "demonised" as essentially secular by the American religious right.

"As if faith in art and in people's creative potential rules out faith in God," she scoffs. And there's a fleeting suggestion in The Treehouse that Wolf's reconnection with her father has coincided with her own renewed belief in a higher power. But it's terribly unfashionable to confess to a faith in God these days, isn't it – even more unfashionable than being a humanist?

Wolf laughs, a little shame-facedly.

"It was the most incredibly embarrassing thing I could say to my peers. It actually took a great effort of will to put even that tiny little hint. It's scary to talk about in our demographic. If you're on the left, you're not allowed to say it – sex addiction is less embarrassing! Kleptomania is less embarrassing! The big change interwoven throughout this book is that faith shifted into a central role in my life... But it is true."

Love, for Wolf, is "the greatest risk of all, but the one most worth taking".

Freud famously asked, "what do women want?" and Wolf may have the answer.

"Love and passion, I so think women want that! Eternal courtship – that could be an answer. Put it on billboards – keep courting her! Keep wooing her till she dies! I've been watching my dad put this into practice – he's been married to my mother for 43 years. So he's found the secret, he really has!"

But surely encouraging men to constantly woo their partner can't be the only key to relationship nirvana?

"But honestly, that seems to do it! I don't think every man is going to write a sonnet, but every man can bring home a candy bar!"

Her innocent, rather girlish enthusiasm is infectious. She propels you along with a kind of no-nonsense brightness and optimism.

Unprompted, she says: "I've got to address the elephant in the room. My marriage [to New York Times editor David Shipley] has ended since I wrote this book. But I would never, ever regret falling in love with that man. Just because it's broken doesn't mean it's not beautiful. You would never want to not have had love, not have had passion.

"My dad says there are no guarantees and that's right. But how dire to go through life in something safe where you're not taking that risk. I do believe everything is well lost for love."

Incorrigibly romantic, supremely confident, Naomi Wolf nonetheless exudes a warmth and empathy that draws in the listener. Even a discussion about obscure French philosophers feels like a cosy, girly chat. But does it bother her that so many feminists are hostile to her brand of emotionally-charged rhetoric, that she's the feminist we love to hate?

Wolf leans forward and whispers. "I don't pay attention! Life's too short. I mean, if there's constructive criticism that I need to pay attention to, then I'll pay attention to it. But I've really learned to stay focused on my dad's message. How can I pay attention to what the marketplace has to say? I need to say what I think is right, and the rest be damned!"

And with that she's off, with a toss of that famous mane.p