book reviews

For this month’s column, I had the pleasure of emailing with Chris Bobel, Ph.D. about her new book which deftly tackles a taboo topic.

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You explore new feminist activism that focuses on menstruation. Historically, how have feminists viewed menstruation, and why menstrual activism now?

The issue of menstruation has not been a top feminist priority, though, since at least the 1970s, a few bold feminists have recknoned with socio-cultural and political dimensions of the menstrual cycle. I argue that the menstrual taboo–which impacts us all, even feminists–often puts the issue off-limits. In mainstream culture, the only menstrual discourse that gets any play is making fun of women with PMS. I studied menstrual activists who want to widen and complicate the conversation. Menstrual activism is part of an enduring project of loosening the social control of women’s bodies, moving women’s bodies from object to subject status–something absolutely foundational to addressing a range of feminist issues, from human trafficking to eating disorders to sexual assault.

What do you think of Kotex’s new ad campaign “Break the Cycle,” which lampoons traditional menstrual product ads?

The new campaign could be a game change, but I’m doubtful. First, the campaign only works as long as the menstrual taboo persists; otherwise, their frank talk doesn’t stand out, does it? While I can join in the joke of the industry poking fun at itself–and I love the message of “no more shame”–in the end, it’s the same, just repackaged.

Second, I resent this campaign for exploiting shame to sell product for nearly a centuray and then exploiting THEIR overdue pronouncement–“enough with the euphemisms, and get over it”–to sell product.

Also, you’ve got to wonder if not only Kotex but their whole industry is now pulling out all the stops to try to hold onto its market share as menstrual suppression drugs–like Seasonique and Lybrel–are gaining interest.

So, what do you think of pharmaceutical industry arguments that support these menstrual suppressants?

Their quasi-feminist arguments co-opt feminism to push drugs. Big Pharma is marketing suppression as a ‘lifestyle choice’, but what most don’t realize is that “menstrual suppression” is actually cycle-stopping contraception that does not only reduce or eliminate menstrual bleeding but also suppresses the complex hormonal interplay of the menstrual cycle. We don’t yet have adequate data to really show if this is a safe long-term practice for otherwise healthy women. Check out this position statement.

Furthermore, ad campaigns represent the menstrual cycle as abnormal, obsolete, and even unhealthy. These messages underscore that women’s natural functions are defective, dysfunctional and need medical intervention. This can lead to negative body image, especially in young women. How is this feminist? ‘Choice’ without good, fact-based information based on thorough medical studies isn’t real choice, and a campaign that exploits women’s negative attitudes about their bodies isn’t feminist either.

Your work uses menstrual activism as an analytical lens through which to view continuity and change in the women’s movement, from what some call the “second wave” of feminism through the “third wave.” So, given that the ‘wave’ distinctions are not without controversy among feminists, what do you see as setting third wave feminism apart? Is it truly unique, or is it merely a label that recognizes the next generation?

There’s a lot of continuity between the waves–mostsly in the tactical sense. Today’s feminist blogs are yesterday’s zines, which reflect earlier mimeographed manifestos; radical cheerleading recalls street theater and public protests, like early second-wavers at the 1969 Miss America pageant. Second-wavers practiced what third-wavers call DIY (Do It Yourself) healthcare when they modeled pelvic self exams. But, most third-wavers depart from most (but not all) second-wavers by troubling the gender binary. For example, the radical wing of menstrual activism movements reers to “menstruators”, instead of assuming that everyone who menstruates gender-identifies as a woman.

Tell me more about that!

Most assume that a female-bodied person, with breasts and a vulva, is a woman, and usually that’s true. We also assume that menstruation is a near-universal experience for women. Radical menstruation activists question these assumptions. Menstruation is not and has never been EVERY woman’s experience. Women don’t menstruate for lots of reasons, and they don’t menstruate their whole lives. Also, some transmen and intersex people DO menstruate. So, equating menstruation with womanhood is problematic. Saying “menstruators” makes room for more people, more experiences. This linguistic move is boundary smashing, inclusion-in-action and bodes well for feminism’s future.

But, you’ve written that menstrual activists are not successful at all attempts at inclusion.

The first face of the feminist movement may have been white and middle class, but poor white women and women of color across the class spectrum have always been there, often toiling in relative obscurity. This could be the case with menstrual activism, too. However, I’m a white, privileged academic, and this biases my world view. I looked for women of color doing this work and found a few. But, was I looking in the right places? Was I using the right language? One activists of color said that I was likely missing Black women because I wasn’t clarifying how race and gender intersect in menstrual health. Also, menstrual activism is risky business for all, and especially for women of color, whose bodies have been denigrated throughout history. Taking on the menstrual taboo can make others see you as nasty, gross, improper…and if you’re already struggling to be accepted and taken seriously, then why go “there”?

Well, I and many other women’s health activists appreciate that you ‘went there’!

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For more on this topic and her research, check out Chris’s new book — New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation (Rutgers University Press, 2010), previewed in the Our Bodies, Ourselves blog and in a provocative article in the Guardian last fall.

The Intersectional Feminist proudly presents June’s guest writer, Jillian Schweitzer. Jillian is a writer and photographer, currently pursuing graduate work. She is working on a book of poetry and lives in Maryland.

Everyone has seen the media reports alerting us to the fact that feminists and the feminist movement is out to destroy families, cast children out in the street and encourage government handouts.

Safe to say that I was worried.
Then I picked up the latest from Seal Press Studies, Motherhood and Feminism by Amber E. Kinser. Kinser, a mother herself, sets out to debunk myths about feminism and motherhood and get the conversation started about mothers today. The book starts with the Industrial Revolution and continues up to present day, all the while describing how feminists have a long history of fighting for mothers and mothers’ rights, as well also helping mothers fight for themselves. Of course, feminism hasn’t always been accommodating to every mother, which is why Kinser also highlights many groups or individuals that sought to help everyone regardless of race, class, ability or sexual preference.

Motherhood changed dramatically with the start of the Industrial Revolution, with the “shift…from an agrarian and domestic economy to an industry based one.” Men went to work and women were at home; dualism between private and public spheres had begun. Kinser neatly divvies up the next two hundred years into easy-to-digest chapters, which includes Seneca Falls, Black Women clubs, both world wars, the oft nostalgic 1950’s (which, interestingly enough, was the decade with the highest rate of teen pregnancy to date), the Civil Rights movements, the bloated and consumer driven 1980’s with Reagan at the forefront, then moving into the late 20th century and finally, the blogging world. Her research is extensive, including many areas of intersectionality, such as race, class, ability, gender and sexual orientation. Admittedly, able-bodied privilege and LGBT issues are not mentioned as much as I would have preferred, but she does touch on them periodically throughout the book. While the book does mention activists and movements that range internationally, the book does have a Western slant to it, although admittedly it would be difficult to do a starter book globally about motherhood and its history.
The reader does get a good grasp on both motherhood’s recent history and how feminism has helped with the progression of the movement. One of the big themes in the book is how motherhood and the mothers involved challenged the aforementioned dualism between the public and private sphere to push for social and economic justice. In the later chapters, several organizations are mentioned, including United Mothers Opposing Violence Everywhere (UMOVE), The Motherhood Project, Mothers on the Move or Madres en Movimiento (MOM), INCITE! Women of Colors Against Violence, Ariel Gore’s Hip Mama community, Family Equality Council, and Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights (MOTHERS). These are just some of the many groups advocating and providing resources for mothers and children.  

The book wraps up with a long quote from theorist and feminist writer Patricia DiQuinzio, stating six concerns that the motherhood movement must contend with — readers will note that her critique, in a more broad sense, applies to contemporary feminist movements:

“Resisting the mass media’s tendency to use stereotypes of mothers that divide and pit them against each other… stretch the movement so that every kind of mother can fit comfortably… the movement must refuse to adopt a good mother/bad mother dualism… movement activists must work to bring young women into the movement… to be vibrant and promising movement, a mothers’ movement must forge alliances with mothers and others who do different kinds of caregiving work… finally, the mothers’ movement must support reproductive and abortion rights as part of the movement agenda.”

Kinser has delivered another great addition to the Seal Studies library, examining a history which many of us do not stop to consider as being important.  While feminist movements have certainly not been perfect or completely inclusionary, many activists throughout history have continued to make great strides for mothers.  Perhaps more importantly, these movements have helped mothers to make their own strides.  Motherhood and Feminism is an enjoyable and informative read and one that I would recommend.

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For those who care about the po’ biz, as the “business” side of the poetry world is sometimes called, the details of who gets published, how, when, and why, often seem to be of utmost significance. Although this might be a small subset, it’s heartening to see how many others are tracking and fighting for better gender parity within publishing now. And for those who like to dig into gender theory, especially the exploration of what Helene Cixous coined “l’ecriture feminine,” it’s gratifying to know these debates are still active. Finding a book that addresses all of these issues serves not only as an exemplar of hybridity but also as a daring act of new publishing practice.

Feminaissance: A Book of Tiny Revolts, edited by Christine Wertheim, just out from Les Figues Press, serves all these purposes. For one, it acts as a journal from the conference of similar name (Feminaissance: A Colloquium on Women, Writing, Experiments, and Feminism) held in 2007 at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. For another, it offers not only innovative writing from intriguing poets, but each offers commentary about what it means to be a woman writing now. Some essays grapple with Cixous’s idea of l’ecriture feminine and what it means to “write as a woman”; some offer a meta-level response through the work itself.

“Another anthology of women’s writing!” is how Wertheim wryly starts out her dedication, followed by the inevitable rhetorical question, “Don’t we live in a post-gendered, post-subjective age where isolating the work of specifically defined groups is outmoded?” Her answer comes in the book’s subtitle, taken from contributor Dodie Bellamy’s piece that “grand revolutions are passé” but, as Bellamy writes, “tiny revolts” are still necessary. Wertheim offers that this book is meant to serve as a “display of the many different avant-garde experimental, innovative and conceptual modes that women themselves conceive.” Issues explored include “whether there can be specifically ‘feminine’ forms of text; the economic position of women as writers in the academy and marketplace; mothers, real, symbolic, and imaginary; questions of aesthetics and representation in relation to women’s work” and more.

While all of these questions are vital, and the work of Les Figues is both exciting and crucial, the volume itself requires either a natural ADD-like ability to accrete meaning from scattered forms, or earnest retraining in how to read a text, an admirable challenge, but one that most readers are not likely to bother with. I applaud the subjects addressed in this volume, and the quality of deep thought that most (but not all) offer in their responses, but the material book’s construction, an act of innovative publishing, made it difficult to absorb the texts.

Each page in Feminaissance is divided into three sections, with the author identified in a tiny vertical byline in the page’s margins. Until I caught on to this, I kept trying to read down the page, puzzled by the glitches in sequence.  As the publishers and editor write in the forward this allows for “multiple reading strands on each page” and “uses the space of the page as a visual arena for a public conversation.” By allowing, as they write, for “multi-vocality” they enable different styles of reading, both discursive and narrative as well as, they write, and “a more poetic meditation.” I admire this, but also found it detracted from the power of the authors.

The contribution most compelling to me is one that rippled before the book came out, stirring new controversy into a sadly evergreen debate. The essay “Numbers Trouble” co-written by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young was published, post-conference, in the Chicago Review. Their essay was a response to a previous article (Jennifer Ashton’s “Our Bodies, Our Poems” published in American Literary History) which contended, (in brief summary), that gender parity is no longer an issue within publishing, writing programs, etc., and that commitment to a “notion of difference” is essentializing and regressive. Spahr and Young confront Ashton’s notions of parity by literally counting pages and the result is dismaying. Things are, in fact, worse than they thought in terms of female representation in literary journals. (Much of this debate, including Ashton’s rebuttal, is collected at this site by scrolling down to “Gender.”)

When they published their essay the poetry world bristled at claims of sexism. I find their research admirable and their outrage constrained, given their findings. The essay authored just by Spahr (“Gender Trouble” a nod to Judith Butler’s book) is also a lucidly sobering recounting of gender performance and politics inside the creative writing program Spahr attended from 1989-1995, with its concomitant issues of power around gender representation within academe, (“the heroic male literary tradition”) mentorship and publishing, and then, full circle, who gets hired to start the cycle over again. Spahr and Young’s essay canvasses the whole of the book, in a two-line couplet-like form that looks like a running headline. Intrigued, I paged onward almost as if gleaning a story from a flip book, but couldn’t take in their whole meaning until I printed the essay whole.

The mix of poems included is admirable, although some are less successful than others. I found Wanda Coleman’s poem “Rape” (which I heard her read at the LACE book party) to be baffling to comprehend in tone. The essay by poet Tracie Morris (“Embracing Form: Pedagogical Sketches of Black Women Students Influenced by Hip Hop”) was especially interesting for its intersectional address of race and gender, as well as interplay of music and poem, with reference to contemporary performing artists and her breakdown into “craft specifics.”  Some of the more innovative styles, such as work by publisher Vanessa Place, and certainly, editor Christine Wertheim’s visual poems, are an acquired taste, undoubtedly most appreciated by those fully engaged in avant-garde aesthetics. I had the pleasure of hearing Wertheim “read” one of her poems at the book’s debut and her vocalizations were astounding, but without this rendering, the poem’s dimensionality on the page loses a reverberation of meaning.

“Where are the Whitmans? The Steins?” asks Lidia Yuknavitch in an epigraph. This is a book ripe for a graduate school classroom and I wished I had a cohort of poets and academics to hash through it with, particularly to discuss the issues raised around gender identity, essentialism, and how l’ecriture feminine can be understood currently, nevermind is bounded by race, class, and other markers. It is successful in drawing attention to critical issues, both theoretical, aesthetic, and practical, about women’s writing. What it is not is easy to absorb, something I don’t think its editor or contributors will mind in the least.

This phrase, coined by Sharon Cameron for the title of her book about Emily Dickinson’s fascicles (the sewn bundles of folded poems found after her death) references Dickinson’s refusal to abide by the conventional poetic prosody of her time, and through her creation of the fascicles, her rejection of set sequencing of her work.

A little over a century later, New Yorker Rachel Lehmann-Haupt chronicles how contemporary women are eschewing linear expectations for family-building and creating innovative combinations of choice. The stakes couldn’t be more different, but this phrase (choosing not choosing) — about Dickinson’s deliberate resistance to restriction into categories — strangely fits as Lehmann-Haupt navigates the channels, islands, and walking-off-the-edge-of-known-territory-into-new-frontiers changes with reproductive options.

In Her Own Sweet Time: Unexpected Adventures in Finding Love, Commitment, and Motherhood recounts Lehmann-Haupt’s reach toward motherhood.  She details her relationships, some pulsing with hope they will lead to a walk down the aisle, some clearly just had for fun, but all viewed through the lens of wanting a child and cognizant of her likely decline in ability and aching increase in awareness of these limits.  She interweaves personal narrative with factual research and first-hand interviews as she educates herself about freezing her eggs, freezing embryos, single motherhood, donor eggs, donor sperm, and the attendant issues each topic brings – ethical, scientific, financial – and how this clashes with the still-longed-for- “dream.” She explores the consequences of creating an “insta-family” as women (and some men interviewed) grapple with dating and mating under the pressures of time.

Her voice is engaging, although some of the boyfriends grow tiresome. Lehmann-Haupt thinks so too, hence the succession as she also winnows down to what she most wants.  I found the book most rewarding when she’s not recounting the quirks of her dates or her busy, jetsetting life, but rather working hard to compress the vagaries of all the reproductive options now available.  I wished she would linger longer on the knottier topics that these choices generate.

There is “Luc” who thoughtfully donates sperm and is thrilled to meet the woman who will receive it, yet who becomes far less enchanted when he learns she plans to offer up extra frozen embryos for “adoption” to other families he won’t have the chance to know.  Or the doctor who suggests that while reproductive technology can extend the fertility shelf life for many women (at great price), why not work to undermine the system that tells women they should focus on their careers and delay childbearing in sync with their male counterparts?  Or the 46-year-old woman who has twins through donor sperm and donor egg but admits she could have been just as happy never having kids.  I hoped Lehmann-Haupt would dig deeper into these contradictions, but the book skates back to her dating life and internal wrestling with risk, reality, and wistfulness.  When the scientific facts square off with ethics and are then pressed through the powerful feelings her interviewees express, Lehmann-Haupt’s acuity is at its best.

“I don’t like not getting what I want,” says one woman interviewed by Lehmann-Haupt about her decision to become a single mother by choice.  And she realizes she feels the same way too.  While “choice” has become a highly charged word for women, “options” and wanting to keep them open, seems far less loaded.  Lehmann-Haupt ultimately decides to freeze her eggs to keep her reproductive potential likely available for longer into the future, despite knowing the success rates with pregnancy from frozen eggs are still quite variable.  In this thoughtful book, Lehmann-Haupt grapples with what “having it all”– or at least trying to – means when modern technology can make the path to motherhood wider or longer, and realizes glad as she is for this, she also really wants a partner to travel beside her. “But nature, in the end, will decide whether I have children or not; science can go only so far,” she writes towards the book’s end.   Her story starts when Lehmann-Haupt is in her early 30s; she finishes it on the cusp of 40, older, wiser, and leavened with the sobering sagacity more knowledge often brings.

One of my  favorite new websites is www.sweetonbooks.com.  Founded, written, and edited by two book-loving moms who live in my hometown of Larchmont, New York, Sweet On Books offers children’s book recommendations for kids at all literacy levels, from picture books and short chapter readers to novels for middle-schoolers and beyond.  This appealing, user-friendly website is ideal for anyone on the lookout for top-notch children’s lit:  parents and kids obviously, but also teachers, librarians, grandparents, relatives, and friends.

As described by co-founders Melissa Young and Melissa Gaynor, the website guides visitors through an annotated “virtual bookstore” showcasing books that might not be on a reader’s immediate radar or that they might not pick up on their own. The editors write all of the entries themselves, and they add new content every week.  While it’s hardly a comprehensive database, their lively reviews embody the principle of quality over quantity.  Beyond plot summary, each review offers an overall sense of the book’s quality and tone, and points out issues that could potentially arouse fear or anxiety in young readers. On a lighter note, each book is ranked on a “laugh meter” ranging from “not a comedy” to “giggles” to “can’t stop laughing.”

The site is especially remarkable because it refuses to trade in the all-too-prevalent gender stereotypes that dominate children’s book publishing today.  When designing the site, Ms. Young and Ms. Gaynor chose a palette of light blue, chocolate brown, and burnt orange—and selected “gender-neutral” icons and images that would appeal to readers of both sexes. “We definitely wanted to avoid being perceived as a ‘girly site’ or a site that only boys or only girls would want to visit,” explains Ms. Young.  Occasionally, a review might mention a book’s potential appeal to “reluctant boy readers,” but in its basic structure, the site does not presume that readers for particular books will divide neatly along male-female lines.  (Ms. Young’s own kids, perhaps, have encouraged her to disregard conventional marketing wisdom.  In her household, 8-year-old Hannah has devoured all the books in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, while 4-year-old Sam can’t get enough of Fancy Nancy.)

In conversations with fellow parents and teachers, they discovered that many elementary-school kids seldom discriminate between “boy books” and “girl books,” and are “equally happy to read from both ends of the spectrum.”  As Ms. Gaynor elaborated, “We try to recommend books that don’t follow typical stereotypes often found in children’s literature:  for example, books that have strong, positive relationships between boys and girls (Melonhead); non-traditional roles for boys and girls (Falling for Rapunzel, Keeping Score); and books with a main character that will appeal to both sexes (Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing).”

Of course, one website alone can’t change the gendered face of children’s publishing, but for now I’m pleased to report on a cultural space in which sex distinctions aren’t being mined, magnified, and marketed to sell things to kids.  On my own parenting “smile meter,” that scores a big grin indeed.

Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards’ ManifestA turns 10, and an anniversary edition has just been released from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.  For a great retrospective, see Courtney Martin’s piece this week at The American Prospect, “A Manifesta Revisited.” And Happy 10th, Amy and Jen!

My thoughts have very much been with Girl w/Penner Alison Piepmeier these past few weeks, in part because of what she is going through as she wrote about here, and in part because I’ve so enjoyed reading her latest book, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism.  Published by NYU Press this past fall, it is a significant contribution, wonderfully well written.  Comprehensive in tracing the history of girls’ involvement with zines, Piepmeier shows the significance of how zines function as an activist, feminist space.  Through her analysis, Piepmeier offers that “considered collectively, zines are sites for the articulation of a vernacular third wave feminist theory.  Grrrl zines offer idiosyncratic, surprising, yet savvy and complex responses to the late twentieth-century incarnations of sexism, racism, and homophobia.”

Her meticulous research is organized into five chapters – each exploring an aspect of zines’ history and use. Piepmeier gives an overview of the legacy of “grrrl zines” and their use by third wavers, then moves into the special joys the materiality of zines offers, particularly in contrast to the virtual world.  She analyzes how zines explore gender expectations, sexuality, motherhood, and intersectional identities through writing and drawing about topics such as body image, naming and calling out injustice, struggles with relationships and sexuality, in addition to creating visions for the future.  Finally, she offers a reading of zines as a “public pedagogy of hope” considering how zines are spaces of activism and agents of change.

Piepmeier is adept at revealing the incredible uniqueness of the zine as an active space for women and girls — a locus to work out identity, talk back to the presumptions of the mainstream media, contest heteronormative representations, and unleash anger, frustration, and an urge for change.  Her reading of zines as material artifacts of a generation’s grappling with cultural and political ideology becomes fascinating as these handmade artifact accrue meaning collectively.

What becomes progressively more mesmerizing is the revelation of how many levels at which the zine can function.  A handmade object, its value is held, in part, from the intimacy of containing the literal impressions of the hand that made it, then sent through the mail (almost old-fashioned now) with personalized attention, to be read individually.  Piepmeier points out the zine’s foremother in the scrapbook, then second wave’s move to the mimeograph machine, as part of a legacy of spaces where women collect images, preserve thoughts, and by taking the reins of independent printing also unleash words that might not otherwise be said, often around sexual abuse or identity, or dialogues that deviate from an omnipresenent cultural script.  Particularly interesting is watching the progression of Bitch magazine from its original zine roots in 1996 to its present-day incarnation with a major distributor as it straddled “zine and magazine status.”

This open space — standing outside “traditional” publishing practices of the magazine aimed at the teen girl, releases in zinesters an empowering sense of being able to say whatever they want, and unmasks worlds of emotion, rhetorics of protest, and concern with the micropolitical that uniquely combine in this format.  As Piepmeier details, the intersection of text and image, and a consequent sense of invention allows zinesters to query a multiplicity of issues through use of “flux, contradiction, and fragmentation” as she writes, using the zine as a space to both experiment and to creatively play.

Also conveyed is the sense of deep satisfaction zine-makers feel with their creations; by constructing their zines so they construct their subjectivities. Piepmeier writes, “I suggest that the physical act of creating a zine locates zine creators in their bodies… and the act of reading does the same thing for the reader, and thus they are brought into an embodied community.”  Her reading of these zines makes visible the palimpsest zinesters are writing over a cultural preset of female identity as zinesters articulate their outlooks, wounds, and joys.  This deeply affecting work collectively yields a deep effect – just like Piepmeier’s important book.

When people solidly in middle age write memoirs most often they have had unusual lives.  Or — better yet — they’re about to flee from ordinariness into a major life change, or they’re writing about the aftershocks from a sudden jolt.  Melanie Gideon, in her memoir The Slippery Year, fits none of these categories. Half Armenian, half-Indian, she is the middle-class daughter of a pediatrician and a psychiatric nurse raised comfortably with three sisters in Rhode Island.  Now married with a 9-year-old child and settled in the Oakland Hills, she’s a mother in the carpool lane, a wife who resents her husband’s snoring, a reluctant member of a women-only dinner group who buckles under the pressure of what gourmet dish to bring.  And she’s floating in the middle of an existential “Is this all there is and how do you know?” fog that she can’t wipe out of her eyes.

Yet when she squints at the bleary outlines intense humor, sardonic wit, and an almost sentimental angst seeps out.  “I did not have cancer.  My parents had not abused me.  I was in a good marriage to a kind man,” writes Gideon in her introduction as an apologia for the sense of quotidian disappointment and dysphoric angst she constantly feels.  The “slip” that serves as a touchstone throughout the book is a sense of meaningfulness sliding out from under her guise as a modern-day mother entrapped with privilege and accomplishment.

This would be sobering, a kind of pre-“Richard Cory” glance to see what’s lurking inside the minivan if Gideon wasn’t so damn funny.  Blessed and cursed by the fact that she’s deeply aware, she first chronicled the burr of her husband’s impulse purchase of a camper in the New York Times’ Modern Love column and in this book she expands.  Quite literally.  She blows up details of her Bay area life to comic effect, and after letting the air out settles into an almost poetic realization of what her life really is.

In a hilarious passage she describes the tortoise-like pace of shoppers having a “lifestyle experience” at her local Trader Joe’s and how this irks her.  While walking fast in San Francisco she is stopped by someone proselytizing the “Slowmandments” as part of a goal to make San Francisco “an official Slow City.”  Gideon’s response is that the thought of San Francisco being any slower than it already was – “was terrifying.” She replies that he has clearly mistaken her for a native Californian but then feels guilty she’s rebuffed his message. At Chez Panisse in Berkeley she looks for secret messages in her menu since she is so bereft she’s not having an orgasmic food experience like everyone else.

“At forty-four, I feel the current of that river pulling at me,” Gideon writes, “I am one of six and a half billion people currently taking their turn at being alive on this planet” and then she riffs on soccer-parent politics. It’s too flip to call Gideon a postmodern Erma Bombeck – the world is too changed from that era, the jar between generations too rife. But her humor, sense of modern-day ennui, and intense wit settle into a Rothko-like layering where she stares into the lack and creates an atmosphere dark with depth and poignancy. Gideon wades around in the muck of her well-appointed life but messy psyche to create a likeable character grappling sharply with issues of purpose, how to both nurture and let go of her son, know if she’s in love enough, deal with their beloved dog’s remains, weigh risk over safety and feel guilty because she takes this measure.

One critique is that I wish Gideon could show more courage.  Also the author of two children’s books she’s obviously a talented writer who makes no mention of her ambitions.  She is willing to discount her strengths in a way that translates as honest and humble, but also unfairly self-deprecating. Striking is her willingness to indict her own misgivings and chronic worry which makes the moments of happiness, when they float by, the more startling. Her son, Ben, emerges as the book’s mini-Zen philosopher.  In response to hearing his mother explain, “The sky is falling,” he reframes this as “the sky is calling.”  Gideon’s devotion toward her son, and her sense of unbearable grief that he will one day grow up and leave (foreshadowed in a hysterical recollection of his week away at soccer camp) catch up all of the book’s themes in a Gordian Knot of incurable feeling.

“My friends and I search for our lost selves everywhere” she writes, “Where is that plucky girl, that lustful teenager, that optimistic young woman, that tenderhearted young mother?”  “Occasionally, if we are lucky,” she writes, “we catch a glimpse of the woman we are becoming… the one who has been aging gracefully inside of us. She is more than her body.  She is more than her face.” By making the book’s subtitle “a meditation on happily ever after” she outlays its thematic reach – to set thinking against fairy tale, set reality against wistfulness, and the flip of finding her younger self’s aspirations set against the woman she now is.

Following on Alison’s post from yesterday, I know I speak for the entire GWP community in wishing her a speedy recovery. We can’t wait to have her back. And in the meantime, Alison, we’ll be with you on this journey, to support you however we can. We are all sending you love, healing, and good vibes.

In the spirit of passing around the vibes, I wanted to share this news: Yesterday, Kathy LeMay’s book, The Generosity Plan, hit the shelves. The book is a smart, practical guide to a new kind of philanthropy, one that everyone, no matter the size their bank account, can participate in. Endorsed by Arun Gandhi, Jennifer Buffett, Eve Ensler and Sheryl WuDunn along with other activists and philanthropists, it’s a must read for anyone who wants to contribute to making a difference for our world–something our own Alison already very much does.

Visit www.thegenerosityplan.com for more.  And deep congratulations, Kathy.

“We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.” – Anne Frank

There are plenty of researchers publishing trendy new findings and studies on the subject of happiness: what it means to be happy today, how happy or unhappy we all are, what we can do to make ourselves more happy.  I quote Anne Frank because a lot of these articles and books, like the objective of happiness itself, are all different and yet the same.  While being marketed in separate and distinctive ways, many offer the same reductive stance on life — the modern adult is frazzled, in need of rest and recooperation from the stresses of our hectic world, and here in this text lies the cure-all/best course of action/the latest product or service to find and keep real, lasting happiness.  But what if we weren’t really looking for an easy answer in the form of a good or service?  What if the issue of happiness required an understanding of gender, race, class, and individual privilege?  Ariel Gore’s new book Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness examines happiness from a feminist standpoint, insisting that “There is no ‘happily ever after.’  There is only meditation, action, change, friendship, idea, inspiration, creation.” 

The book follows Gore and a panel of 100 women she interviewed over the course of a a year.  Their ideas challenge gendered studies and notions of happiness, particularly the axiom that women who follow traditional patriarchal value systems are “more content” — Gore instead insists that empowerment through resistance, taking charge of anxiety, and self-care are essential to an authentic experience of happiness.  Her intersectional understanding of happiness critiques writings on happiness which ignore the many identity-based divisions of women’s lives, particularly class, as Bluebird questions the popular notion that selflessness is inherent to happiness; if women are socialized into selflessness by family and culture, is this cultivating happiness?   “If service is the secret of joy,” writes Gore, “one has to wonder why waitresses, maids, and mothers aren’t the happiest people on earth.  The answer is clear: that service has to be voluntary rather than coerced.” 

I appreciated her frankness in discussing her ambivalence toward capitalism, particularly her relationship to money as a working-class artist and a queer mother of two.   As a reader, I fully embraced her journey toward self-actualization in finding inspiration, inner peace, and hope for the future, all of which she sees as the necessary means to happiness for herself and her family.  The book bravely tackles a critical and important understanding of the specific identity politics which inhabit happiness studies and why it shouldn’t be a pursuit solely made possible by connections, wealth, or class status; if we cultivate ourselves and our communities, she argues, we can always find happiness on our own terms.  It’s an accessible, deeply thoughtful take on a complex topic and a great read for anyone in search of an intersectional and feminist approach to women’s happiness.

Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is available on January 19 in bookstores and through online booksellers, including Powells and Amazon.