If You Can't Live Without Me, Why Aren't You Dead Yet?

Do you know the difference between professional girls and amateur girls? According to Cynthia Heimel, "Professional girls are desperate for a boyfriend with a platinum Amex card. Amateur girls are desperate for a boyfriend who can deliver a good punchline". Unfortunately men love the professional girl with her perfect hair and eye shadow, while the hapless amateur girl struggles in the back of the room to dislodge the toilet paper stuck to her shoe. Then Men wonder why they are only valued for their wallet. This is only one of the many phenomena that Heimel skewers in this collection of essays. She also takes on the lack of good roles for women actors and modern dating, and talks about watching her son and his friends grow into men. Heimel is like a girlfriend you can always call at two in the morning who will make you laugh every time. She has several other collections, including When Your Phone Doesn't Ring, It'll Be Me.

Money: A Memoir

I read a really good review of this when it came out, but I think the reviewer must have either read a different book or lived a different life than I do. It is a memoir that deals somewhat with the author's personal experiences with money, including a divorce that leads to a drastic change in her financial situation. It also has some financial advice for women and explores some of the complexities of women's relationships with money. The problem is it tries to be three different books and ends up doing none of them very well at all. The advice part was pretty basic and the memoir and anecdotal sections I could not relate to at all. The other women she talks to all seem to be a random polling of her friends who grew up with mostly the same backgrounds and all with the attitude that a man would take care of them, an attitude that is pretty alien to me and the women I know. And the women "struggling" financially all seemed to be making $200,000 a year and living in million dollar homes. Sorry if it didn't really resonate when I read it on my secondhand couch in my rented apartment in between my two jobs. But maybe it's just me.

The Road from Coorain

This is one of the books that touched off the memoir craze. Jill Ker Conway grew up on a isolated sheep station in the Australian outback during the 1950's, eventually growing up become the president of Smith college and later MIT. Her family life was less than ideal, in part because as a brilliant and intellectual girl, her family and particularly her mother, had no idea of how handle her. Conway is deeply isolated both on the Coorain, and later in Sydney where she eventually attends school. Beautifully written and a nice corrective to too much 1950's nostalgia. There are two sequels, True North, and A Woman's Education.

The Feminine Mystique

When I was a junior in high school I bought this book at a garage sale. The premise of the book is some women would find jobs outside the home fulfilling and even be good at them, an idea that was revolutionary at that particular moment in American history. Reading this book in the 1990s showed me how far we had come and how much stereotyped gender roles are still everywhere. The book talks about how women were being programed through their education, through society and so on, to get married, have children and devote every cell of their being to cleaning, cooking and child care for the rest of their lives. Betty Friedan discusses how household cleaners and other products are marketed to women as being items that give women a sense of accomplishment and how women's magazines trended away from stories about women having any adventures but romance (no more learning to fly a plane for example). Bright high school girls were discouraged from going to college or sent there solely to find a husband asthe average age at marrriage for women was dropping. This book has been accused of focusing solely on the plight of white privileged women, which is true, but this is still an important book. Friedan never belittles being a mother or a homemaker, but merely points out women are capable of other accomplishments, in addition to or instead of a "traditional" woman's role, and shouldn't be barred because of their gender. Thanks Betty.