I know “white feminism” is usually used as a pejorative (and appropriately so) but in this case it is also a really good descriptor for what the book is about. It’s about feminism and white ladies who are feminist and their white lady feminist lives. I have a white lady feminist life. I think maybe I just miss the books I read last year about worlds so far removed from my own. This was a book I really understood well. Our primary protagonist, Greer, is […]
“You know, I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.”
Meg Wolitzer’s The Female Persuasion is one of those books that is full of big ideas but never really lands any of them. Greer Kadetsky is the Type A daughter of two hippie-esq parents who botched her financial aid paperwork to Yale so she was forced to go to her safety school, Ryland. Her boyfriend, Cory, is the son of Portuguese immigrants who goes off to Princeton while Greer miserably attends Ryland. During Greer’s first weekend at school she is sexually assaulted by a frat boy who goes […]
Living in her white bread world
2.5 stars. Like I said in my last review, I read The Female Persuasion at the same time as Girls Burn Brighter and I think I liked The Female Persuasion less than I would have otherwise. It was like sitting by a pretty lamp while the sun is shining gloriously outside. Pleasant, but not exactly life changing. Or even week changing. Greer Kadetsky, a lower middle class white girl born to underachiever parents, finds herself at her safety school Freshman year. Not because she couldn’t […]
Calling All Sellouts
In high school, I did my best to morph from shy wallflower into mysterious guitar-slinging writer. Not as a pose, but because I felt the most ME when I was jamming with friends or banging out a story. I thought I found myself and my group. I wanted, more than anything, to ring true. I wanted to surround myself with people who wanted the same thing. That was my ideal life. Fast forward fifteen years. I’m an attorney walking downtown, lost in thought about some […]