Divided into sections titled "Reading," "Being," "Seeing," "Feeling," and "Remembering," Changing My Mind is a book of "occasional essays," which Smith describes as "written for particular occasions, particular editors." Because of this structure, the collection doesn't feel particularly unified, but that isn't necessarily a weakness. Different readers will likely find different essays to love, but even those that don't grab the heart tend to engage the brain. Not having read any George Eliot, I found "Middlemarch and Everybody" hard going at first, and all the essays in "Reading" are pretty unapologetic about the specialized knowledge they require for full enjoyment. On the other hand, Smith's writing usually had the effect of making me really want to read the book she was talking about, especially Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Smith writes,

This is a beautiful novel about soulfulness. That it should be so is a tribute to Hurston's skill. She makes "culture" — that slow and particular and artificial accretion of habit and circumstance — seem as natural and organic and beautiful as the sunrise. She allows me to indulge in what Philip Roth once called "the romance of oneself," a literary value I dislike and yet, confronted with this beguiling book, cannot resist. She makes "black woman-ness" appear a real, tangible quality, an essence I can almost believe I share, however improbably, with millions of complex individuals across centuries and continents and languages and religions...

Almost — but not quite. That is to say, when I'm reading this book, I believe it, with my whole soul. It allows me to say things I wouldn't normally. Things like "She is my sister and I love her."

A more evocative description of literary identification I've never read, and Smith's examination of the ways her blackness does and doesn't influence the way she reads Hurston will resonate with anyone who's ever found a "sister" on the page, of any race. It also provides a corrective to the opposite but equally restrictive notions that we can only enjoy books whose writers we identify with culturally, and that cultural identification has no place in the literary experience.

There was a strain of nastiness in Smith's novel On Beauty — characters who lacked physical self-confidence sometimes seemed like the novel's whipping boys (or girls) — and that nastiness occasionally resurges in Changing My Mind. In "Two Directions for the Novel," it's pretty clear that Smith thinks writer Joseph O'Neill has chosen the wrong direction. Of a passage from his novel Netherland, she writes, "an interesting thought is trying to reach us here, but the ghost of the literary burns it away, leaving only its remainder: a nicely constructed sentence, rich in sound and syntax, signifying (almost) nothing." "Two Directions" makes an interesting argument for Tom McCarthy's novel Remainder as a model for fiction that gains new flexibility by breaking through the restrictions not just of attractive language but of human psychology. But can't fiction writers learn to praise one kind of writing without denigrating another? Is literature really a zero-sum game?

In a way, though, Smith's meanness just added to the growing conviction I had as I read Changing My Mind: that I was being granted a peek into the idiosyncratic brain of a very, very interesting person. This conviction reached its apex with Smith's film reviews. Smith claims in the very moving "Dead Man Laughing" that at her audition for a comedy troupe at Cambridge, "I wasn't funny. Not even slightly." She appears to have rectified this. Here she is on Get Rich or Die Tryin', addressing Fiddy directly:

I love that there are more naked men in this movie than in Brokeback. I love that you keep getting your fellow gangsters to admit that they love you. Really loudly. In the middle of robberies. I love the Beckettian dialogue: "I'm in it for the money." "For what?" "Sneakers." "Anything else?" "A gun." "What you need that for?" "I don't know." I love that you watched GoodFellas and Scarface, like, a million times and decided to ditch all that narrative arc crap and get straight to the point with a minimalist voiceover: "Crack meant money. Money meant power. Power meant war." I love how your acting style makes Bogart look animated. I love that the boss of your gang is dressed like Brando and is doing the voice from The Godfather. And then there is this: "So that was the crew. Four niggas dedicated to one thing and one thing only: getting paid and getting laid."

And sometimes Smith is just bizarre. In her review of The Weather Man, she writes,

I think I found the film palatable because I read it perversely. As I see it, the film's central concept is the aversion most right thinking people have to the actor Nicolas Cage. And he accepts this mantle so honorably and humbly in the film that I think maybe now I quite like him. It's an honest and comic performance and seems filled with all the genuine humiliations that one imagine Cage himself has suffered in the past 10 years. I don't want to tell you any more about it — it's best stumbled upon without expectations but with my reading kept in mind.

This is basically an anti-review, and Smith's general approach to film reviewing is so funny and ad hoc and fucking weird — yet so frequently spot on — that it made mean wish she hadn't quit doing it in 2006. More than that, it made me wish I still wrote film reviews. Changing My Mind may be most inspiring to other writers — I don't know of anyone else who actually likes essays on writing, even ones as smart as Smith's "That Crafty Feeling." But anybody who appreciates frank and well-informed and slightly off-center thinking will likely find what I did — that Smith makes one want to read more, think more, and generally be smarter, which is about the best thing a writer can do.

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays [Amazon]

We read this book with interest. Especially instructive were what to say when deflowered by famous crooner.

Famous crooner visits town on one night stand, and through a series of lucky breaks, you get autograph. After deflowerment, he leaves town and when you tell story to girl friends, they do not believe you. You refuse to be laughing stock. On crooner's return engagement at local theatre, you storm his dressing room with mob of skeptical girl friends. You show autograph to crooner to refresh his memory. He says, "That's not my handwriting." You say: "Then may I come back for your real autograph later?"

(Miss Hyacinthe Phypps, the book's author, editorializes: "Obviously, someone in this situation is completely confused.")

Illustrations are also suitably intriguing. Particularly well-rendered were "the fraternity boy" and the "blind date" (dressed, as they always are, in double-breasted plaid mac and leghorn hat.)

If we had one quibble with the estimable book, it is that we wish the author had been able to address conundra of the modern age. To wit:"Deflowerment by Webcam," "Deflowerment by Sparkly Vampire," "Deflowerment by Gay Friend While Both Drunk," "Deflowerment at Locavore Restaurant When You Don't Know Partner's Provenance" and "Deflowerment by Giggling Animated Belgian Penis."

In sum, however, this is a useful and instructive manual, a necessity to any well-stocked library, and possibly the most inappropriate graduation gift since the Sex and the City box set.

The Recently Deflowered Girl: The Right Thing to Say on Every Dubious Occasion [Amazon]

Yes, Palin has shaken off the McCain entourage and that pesky government gig. Levi Johnston has broken with the family values narrative and is visiting with Sodom and Gomorrah. But the major memes are unchanged: her breezy embrace of ignorance is still only slightly tempered by a new round of handlers; she still unblinkingly co-opts feminist language; she still mesmerizes and infuriates.

Palin, write Nation editors Richard Kim and Betsy Reed in the introduction, "personalized, popularized, and polarized the debate." They're referring to her single post on her Facebook page that launched a thousand death panel screeds. But it pretty much applies to all things Palin.

Going Rogue is made up mostly material compiled from the election season, some of it after the McCain-Palin defeat, plus a handy greatest-hits collection of her fumblings and fabrications. Though there are some essays on her environmental policy and her religious associations, nearly all of them deal with her implications for women – her policies on sexual assault in a state with the highest rate of rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence, what her selection means for women's progress. To the editors' credit, younger women writers like Rebecca Traister, Dana Goldstein, Jessica Valenti, Amanda Fortini, and Amy Alexander are well-represented alongside the likes of Frank Rich, Gloria Steinem, and Naomi Klein.

Before the election, cable-news analysis tried out the theory, the McCain campaign hoped against hope, and liberals had nightmares that Palin would be some sort of gamechanger for the Republicans in the 2008 campaign. But plenty of feminist and progressive writers saw through the entirely cynical ruse from the start. The lessons from the book — especially in a week where Palin's antics are tying feminists in knots, when some of her detractors are indeed sexist, but she herself advocates policies that limit women's rights — is to observe, as these writers have, how disingenuous a project this has been and still is.

Several of the essayists point out that Palin has gotten this far by co-opting cherished liberal ideals. That includes affirmative action and feminism. "Lower standards for potential leaders of the world's most powerful country in the name of diversity: That's what Republicans stand for now," writes Katha Pollitt in one essay. She adds, "The good news is, this twisted homage to feminism means conservatives must recognize it as a force in American politics-why spend so much time framing Palin as a feminist if we're all just a bunch of hairy man-haters?

Tom Perrotta also recognizes that Palin is a red herring, understanding her in the context of what he calls the Sexy Puritan archetype, which is a result of the right realizing that "to be seen as anti-sex — and especially to be seen as unsexy — is a losing proposition in contemporary America, even among evangelical Christians most troubled by the fallout of the sexual revolution."

Going Rouge can make you nostalgic for the moral clarity of the election season, when all the knotty dynamics came down to a simple yes or no on a Tuesday. Maybe that's another reason we can't let go of Palin — it's more fun to dwell in the suspenseful soap opera of last year than it is to deal with the bleak ambiguity of actually solving our problems in the Obama era.

Do people who oppose Palin's politics and her dragging down of the discourse make her matter more by obsessing over her? True, the future could still bring Palinism out of the teabag margins and into the mainstream. But if there's any silver lining to this act of the media farce, it's to remind us, as this book does in the most reasonable and un-Palin-like terms, why a majority of the electorate also didn't fall for it in the first place.

Going Rouge [OR Books] (Book only available for purchase through publisher).

I've had the unenviable task of reading both Prejean's Still Standing and Palin's Going Rogue in the last couple of days, and I gleaned the following striking similarities:

Both were self-described "jocks" turned beauty queens.

Palin: "I thought it was a horrendous idea, at first. I was a jock and quite square, not a pageant-type girl at all. I didn't wear makeup in high school and cut my hair short because I didn't like wasting time primping. I couldn't relate to the way I assumed most cheerleader types thought and lived, and figured it was those girls who were equipped for the pageant thing.
On the other hand, there was the scholarship money."

Prejean: "When I told my parents and my sister about it, they looked at me like I was crazy. They knew me as the girl who scraped her knees sliding into second base, who got a fat lip jumping up for a rebound in the midst of flying elbows at a basketball game. But a beauty contest?"

Both were accused of skipping public appearances, but say they had good reasons.

Palin: "My opponents and the press had a field day with that one: "Palin a No-Show at Chamber Of Commerce Luncheon Debate." [...] I couldn't make the media understand why I had chosen to skip another rubber-chicken campaign stop and instead attend this significant military exercise. I tried to explain: the Chamber of Commerce be here next week; our troops would not."

Prejean: "The reason I was not at the press conference is that I had not been invited to be at the press conference. The first I heard of it was when a reporter asked me to comment on it a few days in advance. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. [...] This was the second time in about a week that he and Shanna had "scheduled" an appearance for me (the other was the pro-gay marriage public service ad) when in fact they had never invited me at all and knew I would be out of town — and then portrayed me as running out on them!"

Both say they have the same views on gay marriage as Barack Obama.

Palin: "I explained to Schmidt that I oppose homosexual marriage, but that didn't seem too controversial in the campaign since the Democrat candidate for president held the same position."

Prejean: "When I later googled "Obama," "marriage," and "man and a woman," I found that Barack Obama's answer was almost identical to my own, although he managed to work in opposition to Proposition 8."

Both say they resisted pressure to give "safe" answers.

Palin: "The bottom line was that these were political answers — and I couldn't force myself to play it safe and sound like a politician. On top of that, there were probably ten cards for a single topic with a different set on nonanswers on every one. So in the end I'm thinking, Okay, which nonanswer do you want me to give?

Prejean: "Roger wanted me to reinforce the first part of my answer, and buck the whole question back to the right of states to regulate marriage. He wanted me to punt."

Both feel persecuted by the liberal media.

Palin: "Reporters from across the nation camped out at the end of our driveway in Wasilla and on the ice in front of our home. [...] Every once in a while a friend or family member would think they could trust a reporter, and so they'd talk to them. And almost 100 percent of the time Todd and I would get a call later from a panicked loved one saying, "Geez! We can't win! That reporter took what I said all out of context." Or even worse, "I never said that!" We assured them we knew, it was okay, it was just the unproductive game some chose to play."

Prejean: "Somehow the liberal media can get away with these degrading, disgusting jokes about a conservative woman, while still touting themselves as open-minded and tolerant. What is Sean Hannity or some other conservative media figure (male or female) had said something like this? Especially if he said it about a liberal woman? But for some reason it was perfectly acceptable for these men to belittle me on live television. Laura Ingraham pointed out the one-sidedness of "tolerance" in her television debate with Gloria Feldt (a liberal feminist who said I — another woman! — needed a "heart transplant" instead of breast implants). Laura commented — quite rightly — that she would be taken off the air if she spoke of liberals the way these media figures were speaking about me."

This last illustrates the most fundamental similarity between the two women: they believe that they are special, and have been singled out for special scrutiny. As we mentioned before, the conservative media is every bit as prone to attack journalism as the much-maligned liberal media, and Hannity, Ann Coulters, and others have said plenty of nasty things about liberal women. Palin and Prejean have both experienced sexism — Perez Hilton's post-pageant comments about Prejean
were a particularly noxious example. But instead of making them more sensitive to the problems of other marginalized groups, like gays and non-conservative women, their difficulties have only served to heighten their exceptionalism.

Still Standing is actually a more enraging book than Going Rogue, in that it deals more closely with its author's upsetting views on social issues. Prejean writes,

If it isn't right for the public schools to teach a single faith perspective, how can it be right for them to teach an anti-faith perspective, to teach that homosexuality is a normal lifestyle, when to faithful Catholics and Evangelicals and others who support traditional morality, it isn't? This sort of double standard in our public life is dangerous, but it's what political correctness is doing to us: it is putting just not just our freedom of speech, but our freedom of conscience at risk.

She also says,

I think my whole ordeal reveals just how the culture of political correctness uses shaming, blackmail, and other forms of emotional abuse to force people and organizations to either stick to our beliefs and suffer the consequences, or throw away our beliefs just to be left alone.

What she doesn't acknowledge is that people with beliefs the exact opposite of hers have been facing this choice for decades. Neither Palin nor Prejean seem to understand that while they ask America to sympathize with their victimization, they're also asking us to support policies that victimize others. Prejean's views on gay marriage and Palin's beliefs about reproductive rights (and welfare, and healthcare reform) aim to restrict people's freedom to live the way they want. To espouse these views while complaining about handlers who try to rein them in and reporters who criticize them reveals a staggering egocentrism. This is just one more thing Palin and Prejean have in common, and perhaps the reason both of them are still appearing on television long after each has arguably lost her relevance: both of them are tireless promoters of themselves.

Still Standing: The Untold Story Of My Fight Against Gossip, Hate, And Political Attacks [Amazon]
Going Rogue: An American Life [Amazon]

PW reviews director Louisa Ermelino wrote that the publication "ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz" when composing its list, and that "it disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male." But Cate Marvin, founder of Women in Letters and Literary Arts (and also a pretty great poet) says,

The absence made me nearly speechless. [...] It continues to surprise me that literary editors are so comfortable with their bias toward male writing, despite the great and obvious contributions that women authors make to our contemporary literary culture.

Salon's Laura Miller sees both sides of the issue. She points out that "what's at issue isn't sales or even access to readers," and it's worth remembering that women buy more books than men these days, and that many of the most commercially successful writers in English are women. But "prestige and critical recognition" still matter, and Miller acknowledges that Publishers' Weekly may be unknowingly buying into prejudices about what deserves to be prestigious. Ermelino seemed to brush off the concerns of Marvin and others by saying the PW list wasn't "the most politically correct," but Miller writes,

[R]eal, long-standing cultural biases [...] live in the heart of every critic to one degree or another, and we'd be shirking our duty if we didn't try to account for them. Writing off such qualms as mere "political correctness" is, in its own way, just as dishonest as exaggerating your admiration for a book simply because its author is female, or dark-skinned, or from a far-off nation. I don't doubt that P.W.'s editors are entirely sincere when they say their list reflects their unvarnished preferences. Still, the fact that those preferences can't encompass one woman author among 10 books (fiction or nonfiction) picked from the 50,000-plus titles they claim to have sifted through suggests that their horizons might need a bit of deliberate widening.

This is a smart point. When a list like this one draws criticism — and they have in the past — the compilers usually defend it with the argument that "this is just what we like." But what we like is subject to deeply held and unconscious biases, and when we think we're being objective, we are often praising what we're most comfortable with, or what we think is most deserving of praise based on whatever stereotypes we grew up with. Miller gets this, but she also understands how difficult it is to make a list that's both wide-ranging and true to a critic's particular tastes:

If you insist on a list that's ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That's a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.

I'm not completely comfortable with the idea that jettisoning your preconceived notions lead to "tepid" criticism, just as I don't like the argument that approaching literature from a multicultural perspective leads to the canonization of bad literature. I think that the "deliberate widening of horizons" that Miller talks about might actually lead critics to love books they might not even have picked up otherwise, and to examine the ways in which their privilege influences their taste. But I also think that compiling, by committee, a list of the ten best books in any year is a great way to piss people off, and not a particularly great way to inform them.

I've been reviewing books for a long time, and I'm a big fan of the book review as a literary form in itself and a way of introducing readers to new and exciting work. I know that, when I review a book, I bring my own prejudices to it — I can and should try to fight against them, but I'll never completely eliminate them all. The thing is, my reviews run under my byline, and are clearly my opinion and mine alone. I'm also just making judgments about an individual book, not about what constitutes the cream of the crop of an entire year's literature. Getting a bunch of people together to pick a "best-of" list, no matter how open-minded those people are, screws up the process of criticism because it obscures it from view. We don't know who fought for what, who insisted on what inclusion or exclusion, and what those people's reasons and biases were. All we see is a collective entity that calls itself an authority and delivers a verdict not just on one book, but on all the books of an entire year (or, sometimes, decade or century). Even if we got the names of everybody on the PW panel (the entire staff? a select group?), it would be pretty hard to tease out all the different influences that lead to an all-male winner's circle.

So while I think the WILLA Wiki of great 2009 books by women is a good response to PW's dude-fest, I also know that every list excludes somebody. And I'd rather go on judging every book on its own merits than compare it to a whole bunch of other books. But of course, that's just the opinion of Anna North, a young-ish white woman from Los Angeles who's tired because it's Friday and skeptical because it's November and a little embarrassed because she hasn't read any of the books on the PW list — and who, like all critics, could easily be wrong.

No. 1 Omission From Top 10 Book List: Women [NYT ArtsBeat Blog]
A 10-Best Books List Without Women? [Salon]
Best Books Of 2009 [Publishers Weekly]
The WILLA List Wiki [Official Site]

In an "explanatory note" on the text, Levitt and Dubner admit (in somewhat disingenuous "we're-so-bad" fashion) that their previous book, Freakonomics, lacked "a unifying theme." Superfreakonomics sort of has one — the authors write in the introduction that "it seems to be part of the human condition to believe in our own predictive abilities — and, just as well, to quickly forget how bad our predictions turned out to be." Their aim is to provide a lighthearted and eclectic corrective to this stodgy short-sightedness — a challenge to the status quo, complete with jokes.

Some of their revelations are quite interesting. Particularly timely in light of the recent horror in Richmond is their takedown of the standard view of the Kitty Genovese story. Genovese's death has become a symbol of the apathy of Americans — and New Yorkers in particular — in the face of suffering. A New York Times account of the event famously began, "for more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. [...] Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead." In fact, the number of witnesses was more like six, and one of them may have called the police in time to save Genovese — but they were slow to respond because they thought it was a domestic violence call. As Levitt and Dubner frame it, the Genovese story is less about uncaring bystanders and more about incompetent police and sensationalizing reporters. They roll this information together with a critique of modern altruism research to form a convincing argument that people at large are neither as evil nor as good as they're sometimes made out to be.

Levitt and Dubner are less enlightening on the subject of women in the workplace. We've already critiqued their discussion of prostitutes, but a drop in hookers' relative wages isn't the only social development they try to pin on "the feminist revolution." The other is the decline in the quality of schools, which they blame on women's entry into high-paying professions that had previously been closed to them, like medicine and law. Levitt and Dubner write,

As a consequence, the schoolteacher corps began to experience a brain drain. In 1960, about 40 percent of female teachers scored in the top quintile of IQ and other aptitude tests, with only 8 percent in the bottom. Twenty years later, fewer than half as many were in the top quintile, more than twice as many in the bottom. It hardly helped that teachers' wages were falling significantly in relation to those of other jobs. "The quality of teachers has been declining for decades," the chancellor of New York City's public schools declared in 2000, "and no one wants to talk about it."

The authors don't suggest that we turn back the clock on feminism in order to benefit schoolchildren, but they do question whether women have really profited from their increased opportunities. They mention the wage gap, then contend that because women take fewer finance classes and more "career interruptions" than men, they are actually choosing their lower wages. Levitt and Dubner write, "while gender discrimination may be a minor contributor to the male-female wage differential, it is desire — or lack thereof — that accounts for most of the wage gap." It's hardly a new argument, and their question, "could it be that men have a weakness for money just as women have a weakness for children?" isn't particularly groundbreaking. They don't explain why women should bear the full responsibility for educating schoolchildren, or how districts might make teaching more competitive with other professions. By bookending their discussion of women's work with talk about working girls, Levitt and Dubner try to make their arguments sound hip and different — but really, blaming women not only for their own lower wages but also for the problems of society is pretty darn conventional.

Then there's Levitt and Dubner's discussion of global warming. This part of the book has gotten a lot of media play — Levitt talked about it on The Daily Show — and it's likely to be the most controversial. To be clear, the authors don't argue that global warming doesn't exist — they just don't think we need to cut back on fossil fuels in order to stop it. Rather, they champion a series of cool-sounding inventions like a hose that would squirt sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, blotting out just enough light to cool the earth. These plans sound interesting, and it's not clear whether the scientific and environmental communities are considering them seriously. Part of this lack of clarity may have to do with the fact that Levitt and Dubner portray Al Gore and everyone else who believes in carbon reduction as at best a bunch of stick-in-the-muds and at worst a cult. They write,

[T]he movement to stop global warming has taken on the feel of a religion. The core belief is that humankind inherited a pristine Eden, has sinned greatly by polluting it, and now must suffer lest we all perish in a fiery apocalypse.

In response to ideas like the sulfur dioxide hose, Levitt and Dubner quote Al Gore as saying, "I think it's nuts." It's unclear if that's all he had to say, or if he perhaps had an inkling that he was about to be portrayed as the "patron saint" of a misguided religion and decided to clam up. Whatever the case, it's hard to evaluate the "geoengineering" ideas the authors present because the larger scientific community doesn't get to have a say. The authors have a stake in appearing contrarian and cool, and they don't give much space to the lame-os who might disagree with them.

Levitt and Dubner write in their introduction that "we're trying to start a conversation, not have the last word." If their book really does spark a discussion about creative ways to reverse global warming — or to improve schools, for that matter — that will be all to the good. Unfortunately, right now Superfreakonomics looks like that very dangerous thing, a little bit of knowledge. Casual readers may pick it up, find out that women don't want higher wages and that a special hose will save the world, and assume that neither social nor environmental change is necessary. Because as much as Levitt and Dubner portray themselves as upstarts, many of their ideas just give people permission to behave as they always have. And as much as they claim to want to open a dialogue, they don't really give the other side its say.

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance [Amazon]

But Wood Nymph Seeks Centaur is by Francesca Lia Block — an author whose 24 spellbinding magical-realistic novels have fascinated many thousands of girls and boys since we read her award-winning Weetzie Bat young adult series as teenagers — and this book marks her first foray into the prescriptive realm. I was curious about what kind of dating advice we'd get from the creator of the stories that taught me so much about the hot, subversive, dazzling potential of love and sex when I was in my teens – so curious that I decided to put aside my prejudices about books with the word "dating" on the cover and find out what kind of mythological beasties my friends and I are.

Divorced with two young children, Block reentered the single world later in life via online dating. This experience seems to have been exciting and traumatic in equal measure, and she has drawn heavily on her own experiences in order to devise the book's categories. The chapter that describes the male types in detail is full of girlfriendishly confidential and funny stories, and the descriptions of these types who feature in these stories ring true, though they sound a bit ridiculous taken out of context: "My Garden Elf friend was helping me shop for a vintage Chanel suit," for example, or "I liked the Urban Elf very much. But I was still rebounding from my Satyr and was soon distracted by yet another Satyr; my relationship with the Elf fell away."

But after I got past the inherent oddness of thinking of men as Giants and Werewolves, I was shocked to find how accurately Block was describing many of my exes. I experienced the same feeling of "instant relief" she describes herself as having felt after devising the system: "I recalled all my failed relationships, and when I looked at them through the lens of mythology… I felt a sense of order. Of course the Satyr left me. Of course I couldn't stay with a Faun. I was a Wood Nymph! It was like trying to date the wrong astrological sign."

Skeptics might wince at this comparison – after all, not everyone believes that the position of the stars at the time of our birth determines our essential natures. But even the most rational-minded among us has to admit that people do have essential natures. It might not matter so much whether we call someone a "Pixie," or a "classic Aries" or a "Myers-Briggs ENTJ." Also, trying to figure out what type you and your friends and your significant others are is fun. Tomboyish and energetic, with an underlying seriousness? You may be a Brownie. Passionate, ambitious, and likely to channel your anger into art? You're a Banshee. Do you love beauty, and often insult people without meaning to? It's likely you're a Mermaid. Does your crush have an intense gaze, a lean, athletic body, a comfortable bed and a great stereo? Watch out – you may have a compulsively seductive, never-faithful Satyr on your hands.

The system isn't without its weak spots. A gay friend (who I think is probably a Centuar-Faun) happened to be sitting in my kitchen when this book arrived; he's a longstanding Block fan, but he honed in immediately on how much less useful the system is for predicting the outcomes of same-sex matches. (Block provides a chapter, but acknowledges that a whole other book would be necessary to encompass all the possibilities). And the chapter about female types lacks the specificity of the chapter on males, probably because Block dates men, and only has firsthand experience of what women are like as friends. I had to combine two types to arrive at a description that seemed like it fit me, which Block says is common, but which made reading the chapter about pairings a bit less satisfying (sort of like when Susan Miller told me I had to read the monthly Astrologyzone predictions for both Libra and Aries, but I digress.)

Nevertheless, I found myself recommending the book to friends and bringing up its advice as we chatted about our relationships – and to my mind, anything that brings a fresh perspective to those conversations is worth the cover price. I also chatted briefly with Block via email about how she devised the system, her favorite breakup music, and what the future might hold for a Mermaid-Banshee/Centaur pairing (I was just curious).

How do you think people come by their mythological types? Are we born Mermaids or Werewolves, or does a combination of nature and nurture make us what we are?

I think it is definitely a combination, with, perhaps, a little more emphasis on nurture in respect to my system because in my book I'm primarily talking about how types relate in the venue of dating and often our dating persona is something we create, either consciously or unconsciously. As we get to know someone deeply we discover their true nature, which is, literally, as much about nature as nurture.

What are some red flags — detectable from an online profile or a first glance alone, let's say — that the creature you've got your eye on might be a Satyr?

Satyrs often have beautiful, soulful looking eyes, sexy voices and physical style and grace and they can throw you off. Don't just get carried away by what you see at first. Everything comes down to behavior and actions, not what someone says or how they appear but what they do.

Does he call you back? Is he attentive? Does he keep his wandering eye in check? Is he kind? Does he introduce you to his friends and family at the appropriate time? Is he sexually and emotionally respectful?

I loved the celebrity examples of different types of creatures, or different type-pairings, but I wondered, as I imagine many readers of your fiction must've wondered, what type you'd say some of your characters were. (Of course, some of them are literally Fairies or Vamps!) What's Weetzie, or Cherokee, or Violet, or Claire or Emily in Pretty Dead? (Um you don't have to answer all of these. But I'm curious about all of them!)

Weetzie is Pixie/Fairy. Witch Baby is a Wood Nymph/Banshee. Cherokee is a Pixie/Mermaid. Violet is a Wood Nymph/Vamp. Claire is a Dryad/Fairy.

Charlotte from Pretty Dead is a Mermaid. Emily is a Brownie. Thanks for this question!

I know you've written a book of poetry about an ex-lover, and obviously all fiction writers draw on their personal lives for inspiration. But even so, was it hard to be this personal about your love life? Was the experience of writing this book different from writing others? In a way, in spite of its prescriptive format, I felt like it contained peeks at what a more straightforward memoir might look like. Have you ever considered writing one?

I feel comfortable revealing my truths through my writing because I have the protection of lyrical language and literary structure. In other words, if I reveal something personal in a way that has some beauty and order I gain perspective on it and distance from it. I also consider the fact that my truth may help someone else. I have written a memoir about my first year as a mom called Guarding The Moon and I'd consider doing another.

You clearly know your way around heartbreak — How do you deal with breakups? Any recommended methods of coping, favorite music, etc?

Lately it has been about continuing to go out and meet new people, doing a lot of yoga, relying on my friends and writing about it. I can't listen to music when my heart hurts, unless it hurts with the joy of first love and then I can listen to sad music and cry easily. I like "Breathe Me' by Sia for a good cry. Also "Morning Yearning" by Ben Harper.,"Mad World" by Gary Jules., Michael Franti's "Hey World."'I like Frightened Rabbit's "Floating in the Forth," "Ava" by the National, "Nothing Compares 2U-Sinead O'Connor, "Thank You,," Alanis Morissette and "Love Should" by Moby.

What's your take on a Mer-Shee/ Centaur pairing? Just um randomly curious.

Just randomly, huh? He'll think she is sexy and admire her power but he might be intimidated by her unless he's found his own success through his art. She should try to tone down her ego and work on expressing love. support and compassion to the females in her life, as much as the males because it will be a way for her to find love and compassion for herself and be more ready for a healthy relationship with this attractive but sometimes difficult type. Good luck.

Wood Nymph Seeks Centaur: A Mythological Dating Guide [Amazon]

Earlier: Weetzie Bat: The Book For Girls Who Ended Up Taking A Gay Dude To Prom
F Is For Francesca, And I Wish I Were Her

Ehrenreich made her name taking on the humiliations and inadequacies of American low-wage jobs in Nickel and Dimed, and in Bright-Sided she identifies a similarly large-scale enemy — a sort of positivity-industrial complex composed of big corporations (who want optimistic, obedient workers), motivational speakers and coaches (who want to sell materials on how to be more positive), and even medical researchers (who feel pressure to support the "sexy" idea of mind over matter). These forces combine, she argues, to enforce a "deliberate self-deception" that not only masks real unhappiness but has led our country into danger.

Bright-Sided is especially strong in its critique of Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, which Ehrenreich identifies as a rehash of earlier self-help books, and even of some principles of magic. She points out that the ideas promulgated in The Secret — say, that you can "attract" a life partner by making room in your closet for his clothes, or a car by putting a picture of it on a "vision board" — require a universe in which other people are slaves to your whims. She describes an interview in which Larry King found himself in "an odd situation for a famous talk show host — having to insist that he, Larry King, was not just an image on someone else's vision board but an independent being with a will of his own." A world where no one else has free will, Ehrenreich points out, is "a god-awful lonely place."

Ehrenreich also writes persuasively that the popularity of positive thinking in corporate America — she cites the rise of "self-described management gurus" like Tony Robbins and the book Who Moved My Cheese? as examples — has served to blind workers to their ever-decreasing job security. "Outplacement" firms teach the newly unemployed to think of layoffs as a good thing, and Who Moved My Cheese? tells readers that the most successful people (or rather, mice) are those who don't "overanalyze or overcomplicate things" — with the result that workers are less likely to complain about their employers' increasingly capricious control over their lives. Ehrenreich writes,

By and large, America's white-collar corporate workforce drank the Kool-Aid, as the expression goes, and accepted positive thinking as a substitute for their former affluence and security. They did not take to the streets, shift their political allegiance in large numbers, or show up at work with automatic weapons in hand. As one laid-off executive told me with quiet pride, "I've gotten over my negative feelings, which were so dysfunctional." Positive thinking promised them a sense of control in a world where the "cheese" was always moving. They may have had less and less power to chart their own futures, but they had been given a worldview — a belief system, almost a religion — that claimed they were in fact infinitely powerful, if they could only master their own minds.

The book can be unforgiving at times. Ehrenreich writes provocatively of her own battle with breast cancer, and of the criticism she faced from other sufferers for admitting she was angry. She also notes that the (highly questionable) claims that "positive" people are healthier can degenerate into a kind of victim-blaming — one patient said, "I know that if I get sad, or scared or upset, I am making my tumor grow faster and I will have shortened my life." And she cites one study showing that women who see benefits to cancer may even "face a poorer quality of life" than those who don't. At the same time, Ehrenreich doesn't make much distinction between negative events we can resist in some way and those we simply have to accept. She mentions that breast cancer therapies haven't improved all that much since the 1930s, but this isn't for lack of effort or research, and some women thinking of cancer as a "gift" hasn't stopped the search for a cure. Ehrenreich's critique of the whitewashing of her own and other women's feelings is apt, but at the same time, a cancer diagnosis represents for many people a powerful loss of control. It's little wonder that many try to find a silver lining, and a little inhumane to discourage them from doing so.

Other forms of positive thinking, especially that imposed by employers, are far more damaging to society. Ehrenreich mentions the role of optimistic yes-men in the financial crisis and the Iraq war, but she could have condemned even more strongly the movement that seeks to convince people that losing their jobs is awesome. While looking on the bright side of a layoff may make sense on a personal level, it also discourages any sort of collective action. Ehrenreich writes in her postscript that "positive thinking has been a tool of repression worldwide" and that "the threats we face are real and can be vanquished only by shaking off self-absorption and taking action in the world." The latter seems like the real key point of Bright-Sided — that convincing ourselves that things are already good can keep us from making them better, both for ourselves and for others — and I wish Ehrenreich had made it more forcefully throughout her book, not just in the postscript. It's a message that deserves to be heard.

Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion Of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America [Amazon]

Those who saw Vilar's appearance on ABC know she comes from a Puerto Rican family both lauded for its political activism and dogged by mental illness and addiction, and that she had fifteen abortions in fifteen years, twelve of them during her marriage to a much-older professor she met as an undergraduate. The beginnings of her "abortion addiction," as she repeatedly calls it, lie in this tumultuous relationship. Thirty-four years her senior, her husband told her early on that he liked young women, women "without too many wounds." He would get one but not the other.

Vilar's husband also told her that "family kills desire," and that women who had children became "gender casualties" who only reproduced because they couldn't handle "the challenge of freedom." He himself insisted on said "freedom," by which he meant living on a sailboat for much of the year, and breaking up with women when they began to want children. Vilar, both determined to stay with him and seduced to some extent by his ideas, aborted every time she got pregnant. So why did she get pregnant so many times?

It's a question that Vilar doesn't answer until the very end of the book. Throughout her account of her marriage, which finally ended after eight fraught years, she tells us about her husband's narcissistic and controlling behavior, his encouragement of her writing followed by resentment of her success, the death by overdose of one of her brothers and the addiction of the other, her financial woes, and her father's frustrating detachment. But except for a few passing mentions of "remembering" or "forgetting" to take her birth-control pills, we don't get any explanation of what went through her head when she exposed herself to accidental pregnancy fifteen times. And we don't find out if her child-averse husband, who knew about most of the abortions, ever tried putting on a condom.

Then, in the final chapter, Vilar suddenly lets us into her psyche. She writes,

I would take my pills and skip a day, a few, and often give up on the whole month, promising myself I would do better the next time. Not knowing how a pill or a handful of them would affect my fertility, my days took on a balancing act, and a high of sorts accompanied the days before my period was due. [...] At times the high took place before pregnancy, waiting for a missed period, my body basking in the promise of being in control. At other times it was the pregnancy itself, the control I embodied if only for a couple of months, and still other times it was leaving the abortion clinic, feeling that once again I had succeeded in a narrow escape. The time of my drama was my time, no one could interrupt it, and what was more important, I could not interrupt it to meet other's needs.

She traces her addiction to her mother's suicide after an unnecessary hysterectomy, writing,

I had no control over my mother's decision to abandon me. But I had control over my body. I could impregnate myself and abort; no one else could control my fate when I showed such strange ownership. Repeat abortions "remembered" an element of the experience of death and abandonment. If my mother chose death over me, I chose to tell the story fifteen terrifying times.

It's a relief to finally get Vilar's explanation for her actions, but I wished this explanation had been woven in throughout. If it had — if we got a fuller representation of Vilar's thought processes during her painful marriage — perhaps her book would bear out the claims of universality she makes in the prologue. Vilar writes, "my testimony is not unique. Beyond the antiseptic, practical language of Planned Parenthood and the legalistic or moralistic discourse of Roe V. Wade and its pro-choice and pro-life counterparts, there are few words to articulate individual, intimate accounts." She also mentions that 10% of women who terminated pregnancies in 2004 had had three or more abortions.

But though Vilar promises to "address questions that might elucidate how pro-life and pro-choice advocates are [...] both right and wrong," she never really does so. And though she does touch on the painful memories, cultural influences (women's reproductive rights in Puerto Rico were compromised by many factors, including experimental birth control pills that sterilized many women), and emotional abuse that led to her "addiction," she never again mentions other women with repeat abortions, or gives us much of a clue about how her book might tell us about them. Are there really many women who use abortion pathologically as a way to gain a sense of control over their bodies and their lives? And would the lives of these women really force us to rethink our beliefs about abortion? It's difficult to tell, because Impossible Motherhood only gives us one of their stories.

Impossible Motherhood: Testimony Of An Abortion Addict [Amazon]

The novel follows four moms: Rebecca, who's self-absorbed and nasty; Melora, who's self-absorbed and a Hollywood actress; Lizzie, who's lost and sad; and Karen, who's straight-up crazy. Doree Shafrir wrote that the book heralded a "new narrative of the New York woman," and Sohn herself commented, "There's so much anxiety around finding a mate that no one really thinks about the actual marriage when they're trying to find someone." But if her book is about "the actual marriage," I'm joining a nunnery.

Few of the couples in the book seem to have married because they actually liked each other. Rebecca married Theo because "she had slept with every smart artistic cutie south of Fourteenth St and was beginning to wonder how she was going to meet anyone new," while Karen wed Matty so she could move to Park Slope. Lizzie does seem to feel love and lust for her husband Jay, but she took up with him only after finding out her long-term girlfriend didn't want children. Marriage in Prospect Park West seems largely a vehicle for procreation — but procreation isn't all that much fun either. Rebecca's jealous of her kid, Lizzie doesn't know what to do with hers, Melora's son is raised by nannies, and Karen just wants more.

It's no accident that having children in Prospect Park West, like buying real estate, often seems more about status than about love. Sohn is clearly aiming to create a biting comedy of manners, a beach-read version of Edith Wharton. And the novel does succeed in sending up a competitive culture of upper-middle-class mothering. The characters' ambivalence about their kids and their stay-at-home lives feels authentic, as does the atmosphere of anxiety and overprotection that pervades Park Slope. I didn't believe any mom would make her kid play in kneepads, like Karen does — until I saw it in Prospect Park.

But "new narrative?" Is it really new to say that middle-class parents overprotect their children? That parents in general don't have enough sex? That yuppies are self-absorbed and obsessed with real estate? Sohn seems confident that her characters reflect the real Park Slope — she told Shafrir "It's a very undersexed neighborhood" — but this observation too feels like a stereotype. To give us a new narrative of Park Slope you'd have to show us parents fucking wildly while their toddlers drink real Coke and watch television. Which might actually be more satisfying than Prospect Park West.

The novel is an absorbing read, thanks mainly to the totally batshit Karen, who basically blackmails Melora into being her famous friend. And it's true that Sohn seems to be tapping into a vein of ennui and insecurity that may darken the lives of even the most privileged moms. But I still got the feeling that Prospect Park West was a book written to make its readers feel superior to its characters. Their marriages are so bad, their values so screwed up, their gestures at liberalism so laughable in light of their venality, that I felt like I'd been invited to a party just to make fun of the guests.

Early in the novel, Rebecca and Lizzie are sitting in Park Slope's Tea Lounge making fun of the other mothers:

"God, they're old," said Rebecca, pointing to the mothers arranged in a circle around a coffee table [...]
"They spent their lives making an effort," Lizzie said, "and now they have the kid so they don't have to."
"It's not like this in Tribeca," Rebecca said. "I once took Abbie to the Washington Market playground, and I saw a hot woman pushing her kid on the swings. She turned out to be Christy Turlington. I felt so bad for the normal mothers in Tribeca. They must have such low self-esteem."
"In Park slope we're Christy Turlington," Lizzie said.

Prospect Park West feels like one long "we're Christy Turlington," a fun but empty fuck-you to a bunch of people we don't really know.

Women's Lit: Chick Lit Gets An Update [Publisher's Weekly]
Prospect Park West [Amazon]

Subtitled A History of Women and the Mind Doctors, Appignanesi's book aims to trace the relationship between women's "madness, badness, and sadness" and their treatment by (usually male) professionals from the late 18th century to the present day. The book does a good job of describing the connection early physicians saw between physical and mental ailments — the "moving womb" theory of hysteria, the fits of numbness and paralysis supposedly brought on by a frightening sight or memory. The "mind doctors" of the 18th and 19th centuries were of course wrong about the specifics of these connections (breast milk, for instance, does not travel into the brain and cause insanity), but it's interesting to note that they understood what we sometimes forget — that the mind and body can influence each other, for good and ill.

Unfortunately, this awareness often led to sexism. Appignanesi notes that doctors in the second half of the 19th century believed that problems with the female reproductive system caused "nervous afflictions," and that,

Throughout this period, doctors and scientists seemed determined to raise the existing division of labor in the middle class to a universal given, and to transform women's place in the domestic sphere into a biological inevitability from which deviation of any kind would bring breakdown, not only of the mind but of the species. Women were understood as being fashioned by evolution for the home and maternity, nervously fragile, intellectually inferior. Moving away from that lesser birthright, allowing energies to be drained by intellectual or imaginative exertion would lead to nervous collapse or to that capacious list of symptoms which most often went under the catch-all diagnosis of neurasthenia or its near-neighbour hysteria.

Prejudicial theory was often matched by brutal practice. Pelvic surgery and force-feeding were common treatments, and Appignanesi tells the story of one woman fed so violently in an asylum that all her teeth were broken. Especially gruesome was early 20th-century hospital superintendent Henry Cotton, who believed psychosis was caused by "chronic pus infections" and who "treated" sufferers not only with tooth removal but with surgery on the stomach, tonsils, uterus, and colon.

There's an interesting book to be written about how fads in mental treatment have harmed and helped women's bodies and minds over the past two centuries. Mad, Bad & Sad is not that book. Appignanesi offers overlong and sometimes jumbled case histories in lieu of any real tracking of trends. Instead of a full picture of how culture has shaped women's diagnosis and treatment, we get scattershot portraits of such ailments as hysteria, neurasthenia, eating disorders, and borderline personality disorder without a coherent explanation of what brought each of these conditions to the fore. It's clear that aspects of mental illness are culturally determined — there's a reason why the diagnosis and even the symptoms of hysteria were prevalent in one century, BPD in another, but Appignanesi doesn't really examine what that reason is.

She does say that "therapies [...] can create their own best patients," and she seemed nearly as skeptical of modern SSRIs and cognitive-behavioral therapy as she does of tooth removal and pelvic surgery. Despite her graphic descriptions of blood-vomiting hysterics, she sometimes seems to think that mental illness is largely illusory, something imposed by doctors on women going through normal life phases like adolescence and childbirth. The only therapies she seems to support are journaling, psychoanalysis (with some reservations), and just growing out of your problems.

Appignanesi makes good points at the beginning of her book about the inherent sexism of early psychiatric theories. She might have used these insights to examine how modern-day therapists might transcend gender stereotypes and treatment fads to give their patients the best possible care. Instead, she seems to consider almost all mental health treatments to be forms of insidious social programming. Of course, psychotherapy does tend to reinforce social norms even as it helps patients deal with their very real pain. Whether the two necessarily go hand in hand is an interesting question. It's too bad Appignanesi doesn't make a serious effort to answer it.

Mad, Bad, And Sad: A History Of Women And The Mind Doctors [Amazon]

It came out back in 1997, but many of our commenters mentioned The Gift of Fear after Sodini's shooting spree because it describes how to identify violent people and protect yourself from them. Sadly, these strategies are still very necessary today. Gavin de Becker is the founder of a consulting firm that helps a variety of public figures avoid stalking, harassment, and assassination — as a child, he was also a victim of domestic violence. His book offers tips for minimizing many different threats to personal and public safety, including attacks by disgruntled employees, parricide, and serial killing, but perhaps most relevant to the Sodini case is the chapter on date stalking. This isn't because Sodini necessarily stalked his dates — the women he killed seem to have been strangers to him — but because de Becker's points about men, women, and stalking may shed light on Sodini's psychology.

In a Broadsheet post on "Nice Guy Syndrome," Kate Harding asks, "How is it that so many guys like Sodini — the kind who routinely refer to women as "hoes" (sic) and "bitches," and act disgusted by the thought of women having sex with any other men — have heard, "You're really nice, but..." again and again in the course of being rejected?" The answer:

Telling a guy the real reasons you're not interested — you don't find him attractive, he's way too old for you, you get a distinctly creepy vibe off him, whatever — or offering no explanation at all, because you just met this guy and owe him nothing, would be "rude."

de Becker identified a very similar problem in 1997. He writes,

True to what they are taught, rejecting women often say less than they mean. True to what they are taught, men often hear less than what it said. Nowhere is this problem more alarmingly expressed than by the hundreds of thousands of fathers (and mothers), older brothers (and sisters), movies and television shows that teach most men that when she says no, that's not what she means.

He advocates for "a high school class that would teach young men how to hear 'no,' and teach young women that it's all right to explicitly reject." By "explicitly reject," he means avoiding phrases like "it's just that I don't want to be in a relationship right now," or "you're a great guy and you have a lot to offer, but I'm not the one for you." Statements like these, de Becker says, may cause men with poor boundaries to think, "she really likes me; it's just that she's confused. I've got to prove to her that she is the one for me." They may then escalate their pursuit, even resorting to violence.

de Becker doesn't mention it, but a culture of complimenting men while rejecting them fuels Nice Guy Syndrome and various professional enablers as well. Would Sodini still have turned violent if the women in his life had followed this advice? Maybe. But a whole cottage industry of lesser misogynists, built on the theory that women actually like being mistreated and "negged," might have a lot less business.

de Becker has advice for women about dealing with strangers as well as dates. He tells the story of a woman who was raped by a man who insisted on helping her with her groceries, and says women should respond with clear refusal to any unwanted offers of help from strangers. He writes,

I encourage women to explicitly rebuff unwanted approaches, but I know it is difficult to do. Just as rapport building has a good reputation, explicitness applied by women in the culture has a terrible reputation. A woman who is clear and precise is viewed as cold, or a bitch, or both. A woman is expected, first and foremost, to respond to every communication from a man. And the response is expected to be one of willingness and attentiveness. [...] Women are expected to be warm and open, and in the context of approaches from male strangers, warmth lengthens the encounter, raises expectations, increases investment, and, at best, wastes time. At worst, it serves the man who has sinister intent by providing much of the information he will need to evaluate and then control his prospective victim.

The most disturbing lesson of The Gift of Fear is that women are constantly receiving cultural messages that not only threaten their autonomy, but actually put them in physical danger. Our culture, our families, and the general soup of social influences that enforce our gender norms teach us to be polite and solicitous even we don't want to talk to someone — in so doing, we may unwittingly welcome our rapists. de Becker offers several antidotes to this socially-constructed politeness — he teaches not only firm refusal, but also a series of techniques for improving our intuitive sense of danger. He makes a persuasive case that everyone has such an intuitive sense, and that learning to listen to it rather than to our social conditioning may save our lives.

Of course, all these techniques put the onus for preventing crime on its potential victims. de Becker writes,

Whether it is learned the easy way or the hard way, the truth remains that your safety is yours. It is not the responsibility of the police, the government, industry, the apartment building manager, or the security company. Too often, we take the lazy route and invest our confidence without ever evaluating if it is earned.

de Becker offers plenty of criticisms for the police and security companies later in the book, but his advice for private citizens basically takes as its premise that no one else will protect us from harm — we have to do it ourselves. This is, of course, true — police can't follow us around all the time, and even a perfectly equitable society would probably have some crime. However, "the police, the government, and the security company" should be trying a little harder to earn our confidence.

Several times in the book, de Becker criticizes those who are in a position to prevent violence but, after a crime, throw up their hands and say, "who could have known?" He lists many warning signs that someone will become violent — sadness and depression, purchasing weapons, paranoia, "blaming others for the results of his own actions." George Sodini exhibited many of these signs in public — on his blog, and possibly even on a bus before the attack. Still, Pittsburgh police said "nobody could have stopped him." After the incident, several commenters mentioned giving The Gift of Fear to female friends or relatives. Maybe someone should send a copy to the Pittsburgh police department as well.

The Gift Of Fear [Amazon]
Gym Reopens After Deadly Shootings [AP, via NYT]
No More Mr. Nice Guy [Broadsheet]

Earlier: Gunman Murders Gym-Going Women; Misogynists Approve

Of course, Everything Sucks (subtitle: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool) is actually a memoir, written about Friedman's days as a scholarship student at New York prep school Danforth Academy. Friedman's only 22, so what her book promises is a look at prep school kids as they really are, or at least as they were just five years ago.

The mean girls in Everything Sucks could go toe-to-toe with Blair Waldorf any day. Called the Great Eight (did anyone else's high school actually have popular crowds with names?), they orchestrate complicated social humiliations via IM, count to ten whenever one of their members leaves the room before mercilessly dissing her, and compete over who can lose the most weight and wear the most expensive clothes. The ringleader is Cashmere, a trust-fund Regina George with a snobby, racist mom and a closet full of Gucci. Her blowout with her mother starts with a birthday gift of designer jeans in size six (horrors!) and ends with Mom tossing the keys to Cashmere's new BMW out the window — a creepily fascinating set piece on bad parenting and teenage entitlement.

Friedman made a splash while still in high school when her essay, "When Friends Are Really Enemies," was published in Newsweek, and a certain amount of Everything Sucks is devoted to her process of breaking free from the Great Eight and the classist, sizeist values they represent. She recounts her final conversation with her frenemies thus:

"Where are you applying, Hannz?"
I take a bite of lettuce. "I'm not sure yet."
"Well, maybe you can go wherever [your boyfriend] Adam is. Where is he, anyway, like, Colorado or something?" Teagan smiles at me generously. "I hear you can really stretch a buck there."
"And with all the hiking and stuff, you would totally lose the weight!" Cashmere adds.
I clear my tray and walk down the steps of the dining hall. I don't come back. Ever.

Friedman eventually triumphs over bulimia and an overreliance (the word "addiction" isn't used, and Friedman isn't interesting in demonizing drug use) on cocaine and Adderall, and over an administration that wants to punish her for her essay. For teenage readers, her book would be an inspiring tale of a smart girl who has been down, but never out. As a grown-up, though, I couldn't help but read it as part of a larger genre of prep-school literature, TV, and film. Friedman acknowledges this, telling Salon's Judy Berman that an obsession with the very wealthy is, "pervasive in pop culture. It seems like every other person is Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton, and that we should aspire to have a closet full of $900 shoes." A reading of Everything Sucks sheds some light on why an audience of largely non-prep-schooled readers and viewers gobble up Gossip Girl, Prep, and the like.

Not everyone in the book comes off badly — Friedman's guy friends are largely supportive, fun, and witty, despite the drug problems from which some of them suffer. But the Great Eight are so superficial, self-absorbed, and nasty — and their parents and the Danforth top brass so materialistic and enabling — that they confirm every negative stereotype the public-school-educated have about prep schools. Especially if we came up through America's overburdened urban school systems, we may have endured indifferent teaching, rundown facilities, and rubbery nacho cheese, but the denizens of Danforth, we can tell ourselves, were far more corroded by their privilege — and isn't it fun to watch it happen?

This combined fascination with the gloss of prep school and feeling of superiority over its supposedly morally bankrupt students may explain the popularity of Prep and Gossip Girl. Everything Sucks deserves to share in this popularity for its clear-eyed account of a young woman who survives being a socioeconomic outsider at a cutthroat institution and learns a lot about herself in the process. At the same time, the Great Eight sometimes read like caricatures, and I started to wonder how much Friedman was relying on her memory and how much she was giving us exactly what we expect rich high school mean girls to be like. Friedman may not have seen any other side of these girls, and she may not have witnessed any family interaction beyond the acrimonious mother-daughter exchanges we get here. But it would have been nice if Everything Sucks offered not just the moving story of its heroine, but nuanced portraits of its villains as well. As a former public school kid, I already have lots of preconceived notions about Gucci-wearing teens named Cashmere, and these notions probably deserve to be challenged.

Prep School Casualty [Salon]
Everything Sucks: Losing My Mind and Finding Myself in a High School Quest for Cool [Amazon]

Heroine Wendy Murman is an editor at a leftist magazine, living with her husband in Brooklyn and struggling to conceive. Her best friend Daphne is a flighty, self-absorbed, semi-employed beauty who shocks Wendy when she ditches her unreliable married boyfriend for a hot, successful arch-conservative named Jonathan. Soon Daphne is married, pregnant, and installed in a beautiful house, and Wendy is beside herself with envy.

A little jealousy is certainly normal, but Rosenfeld paints the relationship between Wendy and Daphne — and indeed, between Wendy and all of her girlfriends — as so negative and competitive that you wonder why any of these people spend time together. Her e-mail exchanges with frenemy Paige are unrealistically bitchy, as when Paige writes,

Meanwhile — f.y.i. — I just read a very interesting article about infertility among women in our age group. It turns out that most of the issues (tube blockage, lack of cervical fluid, etc.) have their origin in STDs. Which is not to say you have one. Still, it might be worth checking.

Wendy begins the novel by wearily disregarding Daphne's threat of suicide, seems to find her conversation annoying, takes every interaction they have as a chance to compare herself to Daphne and find herself wanting, and remembers countless times throughout their friendship when Daphne has let her down. She recalls, for instance, the night her first boyfriend dumped her, when Daphne promised that they could "go to the movies 'and forget about all [their] guy problems." Instead,

An hour later, Daphne was putting on her coat and saying, "I totally forgot I said I'd meet Josh. Are you going to be okay if I go out for a few hours? I promise I'll be back soon." (Face squinched up.)

Face squinched up? Given this and basically every other scene between Wendy and Daphne, it's hard to see why Wendy doesn't just find better friends — or at least friends who make her feel better.

Unless Rosenfeld's point is that female friendship is inherently toxic. She says on her website, "every woman has a Daphne in her life — a so-called "best friend" whose seemingly effortless successes never fail to make her feel like a Huge Loser." Really? Everyone has a best friend so fake she deserves quotes? And for whom her jealousy outweighs her joy? Sadly, reviewers seem to concur. Publishers' Weekly calls I'm So Happy For You "a dark, hilarious and painfully accurate view of the less-than-pure reasons why women stay friends." And Zoe Heller calls it "a finely observed and witty account of the jealousies that lurk within even the kindest female hearts."

Rosenfeld's Double X advice column, Friend or Foe (tagline: "Boys are easy. Friendships are hard.") adds fuel to the girlfriends-totally-suck fire. Her most recent column implies that a friend's disappearance after the birth of a child must be the result of envy. She also writes about dangerous friend archetypes like the "Instant Best Friend" who dumps you at the slightest provocation (and who quite easily recognizes herself and lashes back in the comments!), or the "Time Energy Suck [...] who dins and sniffles in your ear for hours at a time about first dates who never called again and ex-lovers with whom she broke up eight years ago-'it's just still so hard.'" Friendships can be hard, but are they really so hard that we need names for different bad ones? Doesn't this just perpetuate a sad stereotype of women as catty bitches who undermine each other?

There is, however, a slightly more hopeful way to interpret all this. As Wendy descends further and further into insane jealousy of Daphne, her husband Adam offers this explanation of her behavior:

You're never satisfied. That's just who you are. You felt deprived as a child, and there's nothing anyone can do to make it up to you. You could marry Bill Gates and still think you were getting fucked over.

It's harsh, but also feels true — a lot of Wendy's problems seem to come from her constant sense of being worse off than others, and her inability to appreciate what she has. Only when she stops comparing herself to Daphne can she finally be happy. It is possible to read I'm So Happy For You as a cautionary tale against the kind of jealousy that makes every baby, every relationship, every apartment, every job into a mere data point in a constant status accounting. If it's Rosenfeld's point that this is no way to live your life, more power to her. But why does she have to make it sound like every woman lives this way?
I'm So Happy For You [Amazon]
I'm So Happy For You [Official Site]
Friend Or Foe [Double X]

Much of the book could certainly trigger a vulnerable reader. It tells the story of Lia, who spirals into anorexia and cutting after the death of her best friend Cassie, who was bulimic. Like many anorexics, Lia knows how many calories are in everything she eats, and her descriptions of her meals ("I eat ten raisins (16) and five almonds (35) and a green-bellied pear (121) (= 172)") could certainly serve as instruction and motivation for disordered eating. So could her reports of her steadily dropping weight and ever-lower goal, the pro-ana websites she visits (though, thankfully, Anderson doesn't include actual web addresses), and the tricks she uses to make her family think she's eating. Most disturbing, though, is the way Lia thinks about her illness and her recovery. Anderson writes,

[The doctors] are morons. This body has a different metabolism. This body hates dragging around the chains they wrapped around it. Proof? At 099.00 I think clearer, look better, feel stronger. When I reach the next goal, it will be all that, and more.

Goal number two is 095.00, the perfect point of balance. At 095.00, I will be pure. Light enough to walk with my head up, meaty enough to fool everyone. And 095.00, I will have the strength to stay in control.

At 090.00, I will soar. That's Goal Number Three.

To the non-sufferer, this thinking is distorted and scary, but to anyone with a tendency toward anorexia, it may sound all too reasonable. Lia's thoughts about herself may be far more triggering than her calorie-counting or meal-avoiding strategies — they may convince girls that their own disordered thoughts are normal or even correct.

Some have argued that the book's triggering qualities are mitigated by how terrifying its portrayal of anorexia and bulimia is. Jack Martin of the New York Public Library told the Times, "It's so horrific I don't think anybody would pick this book up and consider it a manual." It's true that the manner of Cassie's death — a ruptured esophagus caused by her bulimia — is incredibly disturbing, and that the deeper Lia descends into anorexia and cutting the more she feels self-loathing rather than strength. But a Times commenter says, "it doesn't matter if you describe the 'horrors.' i'll read right past it and go for what i want," and this may be true for many sufferers.

The real reason Wintergirls is a worthwhile book isn't that it will scare people away from eating disorders — it might do the opposite. It's that Anderson offers insight into a difficult subject, one that is much-discussed but frequently misunderstood. Especially strong is her treatment of Lia's family. While at first it's tempting to think that Lia's parents' divorce "caused" her eating disorder, the book ultimately resists such easy conclusions. Lia's mother, father, stepmother, and stepsister all come across as complex characters who influence Lia for both good and bad, and whose relationships with Lia will all be important as she begins her recovery. Anderson renders anorexia as a complicated disease with many interrelated causes, but she also emphasizes the importance of family in Lia's treatment — both these messages are worth sharing.

Cynthia M. Bulik, director of an eating disorder program, may have the best take on the book. She told the Times, "Books such as these should be read with careful parental supervision. In the best of all possible worlds, this could be a conversation starter between parents and teens rather than a dark world that teens enter alone reading the book in isolation." Read without discussion or supervision, Wintergirls could indeed be triggering. But read as part of a conversation — or, perhaps, read by parents and other family members — the book could help make some teens' worlds a little less dark.

Wintergirls [Amazon]
The Troubling Allure of Eating-Disorder Books [New York Times]
Skin and Bone [New York Times]

Earlier: Are Teen Girls Really That Fragile?

Really, though, it's less "f&%k you" and more "go you," you being all the mothers out there who, like Waldman, aren't 100% perfect. Waldman (who, in case you didn't know, is married to novelist Michael Chabon) says herself that she's known for over-sharing — she once blogged about her risk of suicide, freaked out her son by discussing the blog post within his earshot, and then wrote a column about that experience. But in Bad Mother, with the exception of several digs at Gawker, she's on good behavior. "My children have given me permission to write this book," she writes — a relief to read, but also a kind of hedge. The book may be called Bad Mother, but Waldman really doesn't come off as all that bad.

The most interesting parts of the book are also the most heart-wrenching — Waldman's discussions of her bipolar disorder and of her abortion. She writes sensitively of her decision to continue taking antidepressants during her pregnancy with her youngest child, and of the difficulties other moms in her situation face:

It's hard enough to be pregnant or depressed, let alone both, without having to make sense of conflicting medical research and objectively evaluate the quality and seriousness of your own despair. Add to this the cacophony of condemnation from the Bad Mother police, damning you if you expose your baby to medication and if you don't, and the decision seems nearly overwhelming.

These nuanced words are a far cry from, say, the alarmist piece on antidepressants and pregnancy in last month's Vogue — or from the generally unhelpful public dialogue on the subject. Of her abortion — due to a fetal abnormality that could have caused physical problems or mental retardation — she writes that her "shame and anger" alienated the other members of her online support group. Called A Heartbreaking Choice, the group sometimes used the acronym AHC to denote the procedure that had ended their pregnancies. Waldman writes:

I made them uncomfortable — especially the many pro-life women among them — by insisting that we accept the term "abortion" for what we had done. There is no denying, I wrote in my posts, that this is what we did. We cannot hide from the fact that when Congress or the courts restrict abortion, we are the women they are talking about. [...] If we allow the language of the debate to encompass only the experience of those women who abort for what others like to call "convenience," and they themselves know as necessity, then we risk losing this precious right altogether.

Waldman is a conflicted mother, sometimes an exasperated mother, and, yes, a mother who happens to have mental illness. But the "maternal crimes" she mentions in the book's subtitle are all pretty small — she momentarily forgot her baby in an ice cream parlor, she sometimes argues with (and yes, fucks) her husband within earshot of her kids. When she took Celexa during her pregnancy, she was assured by a Swedish study that it was fine. The fact that she thinks these things warrant a visit from the Bad Mother police shows just how vigilant these police actually are — see for example the recent furor over Madlyn Primoff.

But the relative tameness of Waldman's anecdotes also shows that we may not be really ready for a truly honest mothering memoir. For one thing, confessing your darkest thoughts and feelings about motherhood — which Waldman doesn't actually seem to do in Bad Mother — can be harmful to your children. For another, the idea that mothers even have truly, deeply, dark and ambivalent feelings — or that mothers who are otherwise decent people may commit really upsetting lapses — is more than a lot of people can accept. It's still not particularly popular to admit that maternal behavior, like all human behavior, is more of a spectrum than a simple good-bad binary. In fact, one of the only places where it's easy to see this spectrum is the internet, where moms can remain nameless. On Bad Mothers Anonymous, one poster confessed this cute infraction:

My kids think their grandma is a witch. They were playing with her broom and I told them to stop. My son asked why? So I told him that was grandmas witch broom , and she rides it at night when everyone else is asleep.....Needless to say they never dis-obey her! LOLOLOLOL Grandma didn;t appreciate it much cause the kids still believe it..lol

Another wrote:

Im just really mean to my kids cant stop yelling at them and i just dont know how to change i wanna be a good mom just dont know how to be I didnt have one.

When everything from innocent white lies to heart-wrenching family conflict makes you a Bad Mother, maybe it's time to retire the term — and to find a way to help moms and kids that doesn't involve so much value judgment.

Bad Mother [Amazon]
Living out loud — online [Salon]
Bad Mothers Anonymous [Official Site]
I'm Tempted To Take Up Mountain Climbinb. [Bad Mother]

Related: Ayelet Waldman: Bad Mother, Good Husband-Banger

Reviewers have been skeptical. Gina Bellafante in the Times pokes fun at "Brown's brand of sex-positive, everyone-in-a-miniskirt feminism" and slyly likens her to Sarah Palin. Judith Thurman in The New Yorker is slightly more charitable, writing, "what has changed since Brown wrote Sex and the Single Girl is that women have more roles to play, on a greater stage. She helped-but only modestly-to expand the repertoire."

From a feminist perspective, Brown has a lot of strikes against her. She turned Cosmopolitan into what it is today — the Cosmopolitan Institute of Man-Pleasing, and many of her opinions over the years have been pretty obnoxious. Brown believed women should lie to men in order to flatter them. She once said, "There's enough trouble having a man in your life without saying, 'Look, I didn't have an orgasm last night.'" She thought women should use every possible method to remain attractive, including cosmetic surgery and extreme dieting ("I think you may have to have a tiny touch of anorexia nervosa to maintain an ideal weight"). And, at least when she was younger, she repeatedly and cheerfully suggested that women finance their lifestyles by getting men to give them money.

On the other hand, Brown always championed two things that remain controversial for women: working and being single. Scanlon points out that while Betty Friedan promoted work as an antidote to domestic stagnation for middle-class housewives, Brown spoke to women who had to work — but still believed they could enjoy it. Though her claim that "you can have almost anything, anything you want out of life if you work like a wharf-rat at everything you take on" may seem naive, Brown thought of her own life as proof that a working-class girl without exceptional beauty or a magnetic personality (she repeatedly called herself a "mouseburger") could work her way up to great success — and that this process was the most important process of her life. Work, she said, "can build more self-esteem than any psychiatrist, self-help book or lecture." Work was "a blessing," even for single parents, even for those forced into jobs by dire circumstances. In Cosmo and in her books, Brown repeated that a job, not a man or children, should be the center of a woman's life, and that even the lowliest job could turn into a fulfilling career.

Of course, Brown did think men were important for straight women (although she attempted to include discussions of homosexuality in her books and in Cosmo, her publishers usually quashed these attempts). She just didn't think they needed to marry them. In Sex and the Single Girl, she wrote that the single woman "is engaging because she lives by her wits. She supports herself. She has to sharpen her personality and mental resources to a glitter in order to survive in a competitive world, and the sharpening looks good." Brown acknowledged that singlehood could produce anxiety — "many's the time I was sure I would die alone in my spinster's bed" — but she argued that it was worth it — "I could never bring myself to marry just to get married. I would have missed a great deal of misery along the way, no doubt, but also a great deal of fun." Most interestingly, Brown didn't think singlehood was exclusively for the young. "A girl of 35, 45 or older shouldn't worry about getting married," she wrote, and in her newspaper column she championed the decision of a sixty-two-year-old woman to "stay friends" with a man rather than marrying him.

Helen Gurley Brown could be intolerant (she told a reporter that married women were "dull and hypocritical") and tone-deaf (she thought that the unattainability of her cover models' beauty made women more comfortable with them), but in a world where women are still made to feel guilty for working and not getting married, some of her views are pretty refreshing. Reading Bad Girls Go Everywhere is a sobering reminder that things really haven't changed that much since Sex and the Single Girl was published in 1962. Women still have to apologize for "delaying marriage," for letting their "market value" decline, for having the gall to think they can marry when and if they want, rather than when other people think they should.

In her review of Bad Girls Go Everywhere in this weekend's Washington Post, Naomi Wolf writes, "Brown is a genuinely important figure who pioneered a feminism that championed women as cheerful, self-empowered individualists," but she also says that Brown's "sexier, sassier" version of feminism has triumphed over Friedan's. While one brand of feminism may have triumphed over another, feminism as a whole still has a lot of work to do. Maybe even more now than at the height of second-wave feminism, women need advocates to remind the world that they have value outside of marriage, that far from being depreciating assets they are independent people who get better and stronger the more they struggle. Helen Gurley Brown was far from a perfect advocate, but she spoke for women's independence persistently for a very long time, and she doesn't deserve to be dismissed.

Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown [Amazon]

Related: Miniskirt Lib [New York Times]
Who Won Feminism? [Washington Post]
Helenism [New Yorker]