Overview
Do women - whether they're twenty or forty or sixty - feel more in control of their lives? Has feminism made us more - or less - fulfilled in our relationships with men and with each other? With her keen eye for contradictions, Meredith Maran finds our new realities in surprising places: on a racquetball court facing an unyielding female opponent; before a classroom of high school students, openly discussing her bisexuality; in a courtroom during a sexual abuse trial. Through her singular experiences she illuminates the issues millions of women confront daily: her thorny relationship with her mother; the politics of flirting; the struggle to raise caring, responsible children in the face of racism and violence.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Maran What's It Like to Live Now, a feminist and social activist, presents a candid but overwritten memoir of her life since the 1970s. As a result of the women's movement, she maintains, she transformed herself from a heterosexual who placed love affairs with men above friendships with women into a bisexual now living with her lover, Ann, and trying to raise her two sons to be free of sexism and racism. Maran vividly describes the sadness she felt after her son Jesse got into a racially charged fistfight. She also exposes the contradiction between her commitment to feminism and her anger at Ann's inability to take care of her as a man might. Maran details the trauma her family of origin experienced when she voiced her suspicion, with no proof, that her father had sexually abused her as a girl. Although she now believes that her accusations were untrue, she delivers an illogical diatribe against men who question recovered memories of childhood incest. MayLibrary Journal
"If the personal is indeed political, what does my real life say about my politics?" asks Maran, a feminist activist for the past 25 years. By recounting in detail her own successes and failures, Maran considers what the women's movement has and hasn't accomplished. She brings into focus the contradictions between the ideals of feminism and the realities of most women's lives. Her confessional essays revisit the major challenges that arose with "women's liberation"a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, female competitiveness, her own abortion dilemma, the physical trauma of a friend's breast cancer, and her son's encounters with racial and teenage violence, among others. This "herstory" is a recycling of themes from Maran's earlier What It's Like To Live Now LJ 3/15/95 and magazine articles. Echoing her mentor, Robin Morgan, this 44-year-old "new woman" reiterates that sisterhood is powerful, as well as frightening, exhilarating, and inescapable. Recommended for libraries that lack similar works.Carol McAllister, Coll. of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Va.R. Pela
San Francisco Bay-area memoirist Meredith Maran's second book is more than just another treatise on the postfeminist movement by one of its constituents...Equal parts Fran Liebowitz and Helen Gurley Brown, Maran writes of the early days of the movement, her hopes for its future, and the lesbian equation. Maran's commitments to both her beliefs and the craft of writing is apparent here in this inspiring and entertaining account of being a woman today.— The Advocate
Kirkus Reviews
Essays from a still idealistic baby boomer on the legacies of feminism—and on battles yet to be won.Maran (What It's Like to Live Now, 1995), a bisexual freelance writer and business consultant, considers life since the emergence of second-wave feminism. In these engaging personal essays, Maran, who has been in a relationship with a woman, Ann, for ten years and is raising two sons, ponders motherhood—her relationship with her kids and with her own mother; the abortion she had when she was 20 and her current friendship with the man involved; and monogamy with her long-term lover. She mulls over the feminist implications of (sometimes) wanting a man, and of dieting. In one particularly thoughtful essay, attending the Gary Ramona trial—in which a Napa businessman sued his daughter's therapists for allegedly implanting false memories of sexual abuse in her mind—she considers the backlash against abuse memories in light of her complicated personal experiences; having once thought she was an incest survivor, she has now changed her mind but believes that Ann was sexually abused. That piece ends with a sinister, bizarre, yet wonderfully ambiguous encounter with Ramona himself. The essays are lucid and absorbing the way good magazine articles are, but sometimes one yearns for a little more depth. In an essay exploring the personal and political implications of not getting along with her feminist mother, she doesn't quite get at the trouble—what exactly is wrong with her mother, with their relationship? Do their common interests perhaps hurt rather than help? And sometimes her view of the world seems too simple, as when she wonders how a homemaker friend's lifestyle "advances the cause of women": Readers may well wonder—why should it?
Highly readable and relevant—though superficial at points.