Notes from an Incomplete Revolution: Real Life Since Feminism - Hardcover

Maran, Meredith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553099523 ISBN 13: 9780553099522

Publisher: Bantam, 1997

Synopsis

"What we had in mind, when my friends and I threw away our bras, was power.  We wanted the world to widen to women.  We wanted more respect, higher wages, better marriages than our mothers', bigger lives than any generation of women had ever known."

"We had big plans for men, too.  The more optimistic among us envisioned a new breed of men who would cook and cry, go to therapy and diaper babies, assist us in achieving the multiple orgasms we so deserved, and then pop out of bed to clean the bathroom."

Meredith Maran's first book, What It's Like to Live Now, was an amazingly candid and often hilarious memoir of her journey from a sixties idealist to a nineties new woman, complete with two teenage sons, a female lover, and a hefty mortgage.  Now, with the same reckless honesty, she returns to explore life--hers and ours, female and male--in the wake of the women's movement.

Today we earn more money than our mothers did, at jobs they never dreamed of doing.  We are less likely to stay in unhappy marriages, to bear unwanted
children.  But have we achieved what we set out to accomplish?  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?

"I'd marched for reproductive rights, but I still mourned the baby I aborted when I was twenty.  I'd been in a lesbian relationship for eleven years, but when my car broke down I still longed for a husband.  I'd picketed beauty pageants, but I'd been secretly dieting for fifteen years."

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.

This is writing we need--alive with humor and emotion and totally engaged with the life of our times.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

e had in mind, when my friends and I threw away our bras, was power.  We wanted the world to widen to women.  We wanted more respect, higher wages, better marriages than our mothers', bigger lives than any generation of women had ever known."<br><br>"We had big plans for men, too.  The more optimistic among us envisioned a new breed of men who would cook and cry, go to therapy and diaper babies, assist us in achieving the multiple orgasms we so deserved, and then pop out of bed to clean the bathroom."<br><br>Meredith Maran's first book, <i>What It's Like to Live Now</i>, was an amazingly candid and often hilarious memoir of her journey from a sixties idealist to a nineties new woman, complete with two teenage sons, a female lover, and a hefty mortgage.  Now, with the same reckless honesty, she returns to explore life--hers and ours, female and male--in the wake of the women's movement.<br><br>Today we earn more money than o

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. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"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.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I remember exactly when I stopped eating breakfast.  It was the summer of 1982, when I decided to change my life.  I was thirty-one.  I hadn't had a baby for two years, but I still weighed 135, twenty pounds more than my pre-pregnancy weight.  Every time I looked in the mirror, I saw myself as I'd been when I was nine months pregnant with Peter: one hundred and eighty-five pounds.  I saw my eyes, chin, cheekbones sunken into the bloated balloon of my face.  The dimpled, loose flesh hanging from my thighs and upper arms.  The rolling mountain range of my post-partum stomach.  The unforgiving face of the scale, which reported dispassionately upon my return from the hospital that even after delivering a seven-pound baby and consuming nothing more caloric than ice chips, Jell-O, and bouillon all that postsurgical week, I still had fifty-three pounds to lose.  Fifty-three pounds!

"Eating for two" (or in my case, for twenty-two) had given me the excuse I needed to relax my vigilance, indulge my long-suppressed hunger, surrender at last to my demon lover: food.  And what a price I'd paid.  My mother's warning had finally come true.  "Your father was skinny, like you, when he was a kid," my mother used to tell me.  "Then when he was twenty, he got fat, practically overnight.  And you have your father's body."  Now that haunting image--my once-trim self trapped forever in my father's fat body--was staring back at me. See what happens when you let yourself have what you want?

It wasn't just the twenty pounds (and gaining) that made me decide to change my life.  I hated living in San Jose, hated my Silicon Valley job, my marriage, my size-fourteen jeans, my inertia.  Every morning I tried to come up with one thing I could look forward to that day; food was almost always it.  A corporate lunch with co-workers at that all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.  The butter cream-frosted birthday cake we'd ordered for a secretary's birthday.  The coffee ice cream in the freezer; the jar of hot fudge sauce in the fridge.

After four years of marriage counseling, our therapist prescribed a weekend apart.  I spent it at my friend Leslie's apartment in San Francisco.  Leslie gave me the secret recipe for her newly svelte body: three or four cups of fresh-ground decaf for "breakfast."  A cup of low-fat cottage cheese with unsweetened applesauce to make it through to dinner.  And dinner--I was tired of cooking those meat/starch/iceberg lettuce meals that Rich loved, the meals his mother (and mine) had served every night of our childhoods at precisely six o'clock.  This, at least, I could do something about.  I stopped buying roasts and chops, started buying fish and pasta.  Stopped slathering butter on everything; stopped dragging Rich out for overpriced, overcooked restaurant meals every Saturday night; stopped settling down with Rich when the kids were finally asleep with a half-gallon of ice cream and two spoons.

Stopped settling down with Rich altogether.  It was as if by setting my own food on the table, I had set my own discontent, newly determined self there, too.  Without the consuming daily distraction of food to soften my jagged edges, without the smooth gloss of fat to coat my tongue, I could no longer deny that what I wanted more of was neither steak nor hot fudge.  In November 1982 I quit my job and started writing for magazines.  In March 1983 Rich and I separated.  I fell in love with Ann, moved to Oakland; made a life I loved in Oakland--a life with plenty to look forward to besides food.  Reached all those goals, and this one too: I was down to a hundred fifteen pounds.  And one meal a day.  People said I looked great, asked what my secret was.  A few friends--all of them women, obviously just jealous--asked worriedly if I was eating enough.  "Are you sure you're not getting too thin?"  Too thin! "You're so skinny, your ribs are showing."  Skinny!  I ate it up.

And now, after ten years of watching my baseline weight creep up to 118, then 122, then 125--fighting every pound, depriving myself of more and more, longing to recapture "the old me" I continue to think of as "the real me," the 115-pound me--something is eating me up.

"I needed to lose a lot of weight after I had my kids," I tell Dr.  Wylie.  "I guess I got into some bad habits I haven't quite broken."

He nods.  "This diet you've been on could certainly explain your symptoms," he says.  Diet?  I don't go on diets--I'm a feminist!  I know better!  I just eat...lightly.

"Having little or no food in your system for most of the day, then eating one big meal," he continues, "can really foul up the digestive process.  I think if you start eating three healthy meals a day"--he peers at me intently--"three full meals a day--you'll feel better."

Three meals a day?  I can barely stay at 125 on one meal a day!

For the past ten years, I have unthinkingly, unhesitatingly chosen being thin over being healthy.  Now this doctor and my own body are telling me I need to make the opposite choice.  To end this punishing relationship with food, this denial of my own hearty appetites.  To actually live what my feminist principles and common sense dictate: to eat when I'm hungry, stop when I'm full, indulge the occasional craving, give my body and mind the fuel and the faith they need to do what they were designed to do.  I contemplate this possibility now with longing, and terror.  Three meals a day.  Not walking around hungry.  Watching the numbers on the scale go up, and up, and up...

"Are you worried about gaining weight?"  Dr. Wylie asks.  Busted!  This is my double shame: not only am I in daily violation of feminism, obsessed with my weight, hatefully critical of my body, in slavish submission to the beauty myth--but I'm not even overweight enough to justify it.  If I weighed 185 now, as I did fifteen years ago, Dr. Wylie would understand my fixation.  He'd sympathize, suggest a weight loss program.  He'd help me.  But Dr. Wylie looks at me and sees an average woman, a fit woman, maybe even a thin woman.  How can Dr. Wylie, how can anyone look at my five-foot-six, 125-pound body and understand the sinking of my heart, the roar of recrimination that fills my head on those dark mornings when the scale reads 126?  Only I know how much better I'd look, how much better I'd feel, how much better I'd be if I just weighed ten pounds less.  How can I explain that my need to keep my hard-won title--Size Eight--is every bit as powerful as my craving was to earn it?

"Meredith?"  he prods me.  Then, gently, "I'm sure you know how dangerous it is to starve yourself.  And how prevalent eating disorders are among women in this country..."  

"Of course I do!" I snap.


Of course I do.

I am a student of eating disorders, an eager reader of every magazine article on the subject, every news story, research study, and novel.  I watch all those made-for-TV movies, every documentary and talk show, even the occasional after-school teenage special--publicly writhing with feminist outrage; privately hoping to pick up a useful weight-loss pointer or two.

I have two friends who tell me horror stories about their battles with bulimia as teenagers.  Liza, who's thirty-five now, eats as heartily as any woman I know; if she's still worrying about her weight, she keeps it to herself. Stephanie, who's my age, still panics every time she gains half a pound.

But it's the stories my niece Josie tells me that chill me to the bone.  Josie describes what goes on every day in the lunchroom of her expensive, exclusive girls' prep school: the girls who never eat, the girls who drink half a diet Coke for lunch every day, then run to the bathroom to vomit.  Josie says that she and her friends, "the ones who don't have eating disorders," as they distinguish themselves, keep looking for ways to help their classmates "without ratting on them."

"Sometimes we try showing them we care," Josie says.  "We ask them if that's all they're having and offer them some of our food.  Some days we try ignoring them, 'cause you never know--they might just be doing it to get attention.  But nothing helps.  They won't eat no matter what we do." Josie's friends, the girls who eat, constitute a minority group at their school.  Last year more than half of her classmates were diagnosed with eating disorders.  Nine out of thirty of them were hospitalized.

I've worried, too, about whether Josie truly has been spared--if she really is a "girl who eats," if she really is as different from her anorexic and bulimic classmates as those of us who love her might hope.  Rail-thin, an exotic beauty, Josie worked as a model when she was twelve: posing in bikinis and jeans for Macy's newspaper ads; smiling and biting into chocolate bars on Hershey's commercials.  Josie's dream of becoming an actress seemed to be coming true: she went out on local casting calls, performed on an educational cable TV show.  Then Josie hit fifteen and the phone stop...

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0553099523
• ISBN 13: 9780553099522
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272