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The Power Notebooks
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18/99
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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
"All seem to have houses in the city and houses in the country."
"Roiphe runs with a fairly posh crowd), but there are also quite a few frank admissions of loneliness, neediness and fragility ..."
"Despite her reputation for controversy, Roiphe has never been that formidable a polemicist; her perspective is too blinkered, her blind spots too obvious."
"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."
"It doesn't seem to occur to her that a display of compassion might just as effectively mollify one's image ..."
"An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships."
"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's astute memoir reverberates with rich prose, crisp pacing, and self-compassion."
"This is a book to divide opinion."
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