Review by Library Journal Review
What and why women want persist as questions that intrigue or nag, depending on who's asking. Here, three memoirists write about what they want and how they figured out how to get it. Beset by tearful miseries and strong yearnings at age 44, journalist and critic -Dederer (Poser) set out to determine what was happening to her-and why. In search of the reason for her erotic jump-start, she digs out her youthful diaries and revisits the Seattle of her sexy, "pirate girl" teenage years as well as the Oberlin of her angst-ridden college years and several other (literal and figurative) hot spots from her past. In unvarnished prose, she unravels the threads holding together the domesticated wife-mother-writer-persona she had assembled and examines the woman, formerly wild child, underneath. Her elegantly structured, expansive, and unapologetic account captures the sense of one woman's self about as honestly as it is possible to do on a page. Grey, a pseudonymous British columnist for the Guardian, documents her experiment in online dating after her unexpected, unpleasant, and unwanted midlife divorce. Determined to achieve coupledom again via the matchmaking powers of online dating, she endures years of inaccurate profiles, deceptive photography, misleading emails, disappointing first dates, awkward sex, and requests of an extremely personal nature involving Skype. Grey's report of her odyssey through the world of men thought to be appropriate for her is hilarious and detailed. She kisses her way through a whole house full of frogs in search of a prince and, luckily for her readers, keeps notes on the process. Woven throughout the chronology, however, are strands of dating fatigue and skepticism about the process as a whole. After all, she reasons, would a dating website have suggested her polar-opposite type parents to each other? Nevins, a veteran documentary producer and president of HBO Documentary Films, presents a series of essays, poems, and brief sketches intended to capture her more than 50 years working in the media industry. The 77-year-old author is coy about whether or not she is the featured character in the pieces yet promises that all of the stories she tells are true, even if she is hiding behind other names. She discusses topics as disparate as how a "Cosmo girl" style evolved into something less dependent upon the trading of sexual favors in the workplace, to the guilt heaped upon working mothers by others (including other women, and in one comic case, a hamster). Her tone is conversational and her powers of observation sharp, whether discussing the terrors of waiting for a mammogram or skewering a philandering male. VERDICT Grey's and Nevins's titles will appeal to anyone in similar circumstances, but Dederer's memoir speaks eloquently to questions all women have.-Thérèse Purcell Nielsen, Huntington P.L., NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A miscellany of musings about aging, love, work, and wisdom.Nevins (b. 1939), an acclaimed producer of TV documentaries who has won numerous Emmy, Peabody, and other awards, makes her literary debut with a collection of essays, poetry, and stories, often entertaining and, as she admits, "sometimes silly." Frequently, her theme is the assault of aging, beginning with her decision to get a face- and eye-lift, at the age of 56. At the surgeon's office, examining her face in a magnifying mirror, she was horrified: "I saw a wrinkled, witchlike, scrunched up, squashed face," she recalls. Working in media, she believed she had to hide her age. "Nobody wanted advice from an old broad," she writes. Her surgery, though, intensified her obsession with her looks. "I heard a metronome ticking in my head" that made her focus on every wrinkle, rushing to her dermatologist for every "new fix." Nevins also spent huge amounts of money on her teeth. She wishes she could face aging gracefully, but being surrounded by pretty, bright, and slender young women makes her angry. Besides aging, dieting, Viagra, and menopause, the author records a conversation overheard on a train between two women, one of whom, it turns out, was having an affair with the other's husband. "I wished John Updike was around to hear them," Nevins remarks. Other pieces focus on family: her demanding, impatient mother, who had a form of Reynaud's disease so severe that her forearm needed to be amputated; and her son, who slowly developed Tourette's syndrome when he was 3. "Tourette's," Nevins writes, "would crush and stomp on all dreams of normalcy." Nevins reflects candidly about her encounter with the anti-Semitic mother of a college boyfriend. "This mother deemed me unworthy," she writes, but that woman became her "mentor" as she earned accolades and awards. "Every yes to me was a slap in her face." As in many collections, some of the pieces are disposable, but the best ones are honest, opinionated, and spirited. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
