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The Power Notebooks
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25/99
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18/99
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89/99
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About This Book
Katie Roiphe, culture writer and author of The Morning After, shares a timely blend of memoir, feminist investigation, and exploration of famous female writers' lives, in a bold, essential discussion of how strong women experience their power. Told in a series of notebook entries, Roiphe weaves her often fraught personal experiences with divorce, single motherhood, and relationships with insights into the lives and loves of famous writers such as Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir. She dissects the way she and other ordinary, powerful women have subjugated their own power time and time again, and she probes brilliantly at the tricky, uncomfortable question of why. In these informal musings and notes, Roiphe delves into treacherous, largely untalked about, contradictions of contemporary womanhood, going where few writers dare. The Power Notebooks is Roiphe's most vital, thought provoking, and emotionally intimate work yet.
Reviews
"At first, the fragmented notebook entries seem overly scattered, but they soon evolve into a cohesive analysis of the complex power dynamics facing women on a daily basis ..."
"In this arrestingly intimate and cathartic work, drawn from notebooks she kept during a recent 'time of upheaval,' she reveals her struggles with doubt, confusion, pain, and anxiety, forging an audaciously articulate, prodigiously candid, and thought-provoking blend of memoir, literary biography, confession, and dissection ..."
"[a] bright and dynamic collection of shorts ..."
"Her newfound openness only goes so far."
"The book is organized into fragmentary but readable short chapters...All are crisply written and often amusing though some chapters seem to be conventional reviews and interviews, repurposed into looser Power Notebook mode."
"Roiphe, who typically writes and picks fights with an unapologetic swagger."
"The result is a beautifully written and thoughtful book."
"Roiphe opens up, revealing the gentler person behind the polemical writer — and the accomplished literary scholar behind both ..."
"In the notebooks, Roiphe finds herself 'experimenting, following possibly disturbing tangents, pursuing diverging lines of thought.' Much of what her experimentation produces lies within the realm of commonplace pop-feminism ..."
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