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The Power Notebooks
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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
"Roiphe's personal revelations in The Power Notebooks are part self-defense, part risky exposure to further attacks."
"[a] bright and dynamic collection of shorts ..."
"For all her commitment to honesty, Roiphe has blind spots, including an inability to reckon with her own professional clout ..."
"Roiphe runs with a fairly posh crowd), but there are also quite a few frank admissions of loneliness, neediness and fragility ..."
"But Roiphe doesn't seem quite ready to let the old ways go."
"Non-fans may find the whole project a bit self-important, though most could probably agree that this is a nicely produced, well-written, short memoir for the bedside table to be dipped into before sleep."
"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 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 ..."
"Roiphe delves into the lives of women writers...praising Simone de Beauvoir as a 'brilliant elucidator,' which Roiphe is, too, to deeply clarifying and affirming effect."
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