Four Stars

**Apparently this isn’t released until Tuesday, but my local Barnes and Noble had it out yesterday, so I guess I’m reviewing this from the future? Awesome!**

You might be familiar with Ms. Gibbons. She’s the woman who went on TV in her bathing suit (in Times Square, no less), wearing a size 18ish. She had sex with her husband every night of the year in hopes of improving her own body confidence. She runs the website ‘Brittany, Herself’ and is the leader of the ‘curvy girls army.’

I found this book while trying to kick-start by Cannonball Read yesterday. I bought four books that I could see myself forgoing TV for (although not the new Game of Thrones tonight, because I’m not an animal). This one really jumped out at me, and I pretty much inhaled it. I read it before bed last night, only stopping because my eyes refused to cooperate. I read it on a 30 minute walk to get lunch, and on the walk home. I was even a little sad that today was a run day, not an elliptical day, so I couldn’t read it while working out.

I related to a lot of what Ms. Gibbons shares in this collection of essays, even though I’ve never had children (her discussion of being a mother permeates much of the second half of the book, but is certainly not the overall focus). No one would describe me as thin. Fat? Eh, probably not usually. But I’ll freely admit to having more than one totally fine morning destroyed because I stepped on the scale.

And that’s bullshit. Ms. Gibbons articulates the ways in which it is bullshit much better than I can, so I’ll just leave it at that. There are some really laugh-out-loud moments, and some really thoughtful ones that gave me pause. I was reading this too quickly to even bother to underline passages I especially liked (the book would have been mostly underlined anyway), but this one stuck out:

“The reality was that my life wasn’t miserable because I was curvy; I was miserable because I thought I’d be happier if I were thinner, and when I sat to think about it, it didn’t really make sense.”

Word.

Four Stars

I’m not sure what drew me to this book. I’m not adopted, and I’m not aware of anyone close to me who was either adopted or surrendered a child for adoption. But it was probably the subtitle that pulled me in: ‘The hidden history of women who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade.’

The ‘solution’ to unplanned pregnancies for many anti-choice people is for the woman to carry the pregnancy to term and then surrender the child for adoption. That of course doesn’t solve the issue for women who don’t want to be pregnant (regardless of whether they want to raise their child). But it also really doesn’t take into account the impact surrendering a child for adoption has on many of the women who give birth.

This book is, to borrow a totally clichéd phrase, heart-wrenching. The focus is primarily on the middle-class white women who, between the mid-1940s and mid-1960s found themselves pregnant and (sometimes, although not always) alone. Ms. Fessler points out that during that time white women in the U.S. were surrendering children at a rate many times that of black women, which in part explains why the vast majority of the women she spoke to come from this demographic. The overwhelming common thread in these stories is not care for the young women, or even care for the children they gave birth to; instead, it seemed most families were mostly just concerned about being embarrassed by their daughters, and these young women were punished for that.

And it’s always the daughters. It appears that, for the most part, the young men and boys involved in the pregnancy were not affected – they certainly weren’t kicked out of high school like their pregnant girlfriends (which was the law in some places), and they weren’t sent away to maternity homes to finish out the nine months, deliver the child, and have the child taken away. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it? Young teen and single moms are often derided still today, but I don’t see anyone going after the men who were just as present at the time of conception.

There’s so much wrong with what so many of these women went through. From not being informed of their rights, to being treated like crap by parents who clearly didn’t know how to care enough about their children (only about how the rest of the town might talk about them), these young women tell their stories throughout Ms. Fessler’s book. Each chapter is filled with quotes from women the author interviewed, and then followed by two chapters that are each one woman’s story told to illustrate the points being made. The biggest take-away for me is that these women should have been given the support they needed to keep their children if they wanted them; they instead were essentially treated like breeders for more ‘worthy’ couples. These women did not owe their children to these couples who wanted to adopt, but the social workers, nuns, priests and maternity home staff seemed to do all they could to convince these women that it was not fair to their children to keep them.

Four Stars

I’ve heard many people reference this collection of essays, to the point where I sought out the author’s twitter feed so I could get a feel myself about what her writing was about. After having enjoyed her (often random) tweets for a while now, I finally picked up her book. Well, I downloaded it. And now I’m mostly just mad that it took me this long. I really should have just read it the second I heard about it.

Ms. Gay writes about many different cultural topics throughout this book, each fitting loosely into the categories of gender and sexuality; race and entertainment; politics, gender, and race; and ‘me’ (the author). I appreciate the fact that I don’t agree with everything she says in every essay – that’s kind of the point. Not that the author expects us to disagree with her, but that she owns the fact that she is a complex and complicated person, with many different opinions that don’t always neatly line up. She listens to problematic music, she reads Vogue unironically, and she (gasp!) shaves her legs. She’s a bad feminist.

But she’s not. She’s a fantastic feminist, because she approaches things with a critical eye. It is, in fact, possible to like things that are not good. Her essay on the song “Blurred Lines” is a great example of this: the lyrics are horrifying and basically an ode to justifying rape, bat damn if the song isn’t catchy. She is also able to provide a different perspective than so much of what we see in mainstream feminism. Ms. Gay brings the perspective of not a white, straight woman but of a Haitian American queer woman. That doesn’t mean she speaks for all black women, or all bisexual women, but it does mean that her commentary comes from a place that doesn’t get nearly enough coverage in most of the media out there.

For some reason I had some trouble with a few of the earlier essays. Part of that may have just been the mood I was in. But for me the last 200 pages of the 300+ page book flew by, and I was sad it was over. However, thanks to the interwebs, I can still read her writing, as she is the editor of The Butter, a subsection of The Toast.

Five Stars

“Good for her! Not for me.”

The above phrase first appears about a fifth of the way through Ms. Poehler’s excellent book. If you’re familiar with her “Smart Girls at the Party” project, it should come as no surprise that she offers up some pretty sweet life advice. I’m almost 35, and I don’t think I’ve seen that sentiment summed up so perfectly. I’m considering having it tattooed on my ass.

Not literally. Well, not actively, anyway. Maybe someday. But for now it is tattoed across my mind.

This book is not exactly what I expected. I was assuming it would be closer to what Tina Fey gave us with Bossypants. I know that comparing one pretty white rich comedian to another pretty white rich comedian isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but these days when I see Ms. Fey I think about Ms. Poehler and vice versa. I picture Amy/Hillary and Tina/Sarah standing at the podium during the Saturday Night Live cold open. I’ve always felt that I know a bit more about Ms. Fey (not that we really know anything about strangers, even after they’ve written a memoir) than Ms. Poehler, although I recall reading in Bossypants the story about Amy very bluntly telling Jimmy Fallon that she didn’t care if he liked something she did or not. That’s awesome.

After reading this book, I feel like I understand Ms. Poehler a bit more. She’s an interesting woman, and a complex one who can be very sarcastic, very blunt, and very sincere in the same paragraph. The sincerity threw me a bit, but I really appreciated it in this book. Unlike Neil Patrick Harris’s book (which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago), this one feels like an exploration. I’m not fooling myself into thinking it’s not a carefully curated version of herself that she’s choosing to share, but she is at least a talented enough writer to make the reader BELIEVE that she’s sharing something real with us.

And what she shares is a mixture of pride, shame, humor, and insight. She tells a story that does not paint her in a flattering light, and while I could take the cynical route and imagine that she did it to absolve herself, I don’t actually think she did. I think she wanted to point out how she screws up, and how sometimes she doesn’t make things right, or spends way too long before she tries to make things right. She talks about hard work, about her marriage ending, and about her childhood. The book jumps around, and at times it isn’t totally cohesive, but it felt real. I imagine that Amy Poehler is someone who would use the phrase “my truth” without irony or judgment. I don’t think I would have believed that before reading this book. I think folks are expecting a laugh-riot peek behind the life of a comedic genius, and while we get that peek into her life, it isn’t all (or even mostly) laughs. It’s funny, for sure, but it’s more than that. I haven’t enjoyed this type of book this much in a while. I plan to read it again, because I think there’s more for me to get out of it.