It's Not That I'm Bitter

Who wants a free book? When I said yes to that question, Harriet sent me Gina Barreca's It's Not That I'm Bitter. I'm going to tell you what I thought about it and then pass it on to one person who leaves a comment indicating interest in reading it.

Since I'm an inveterate re-reader, I don't often jettison a book, but this one isn't the kind of book I usually pick up (making it my next entry in the Critical Monkey contest), and parts of it really ticked me off.

Don't assume I'm going to get all excoriating about it immediately, however. I liked reading parts of this book. I like the part where she points out that Anne Bancroft was only 6 years older than Dustin Hoffman when she played the part of the older woman in The Graduate. I like the part where she explains why the few lines spoken by Padme in Star Wars make her long for Princess Leia's snappier dialogue.

I really like the part where she says that women shouldn't try to live according to popular sayings, singling out the one that advises us to "work like you don't need the money, dance like nobody is watching, and love like you've never been hurt" and revising it to "love like you don't need the money, work like nobody is watching, and dance like you've never been hurt." (It's that last one that really gets me, of course--I wish I could!)

I would have liked the part where she says "we need to stop obsessing over hymens, husbands, and hangnails and once again direct our attention outward to the larger issues of financial equity, economic justice, and the creation of genuinely significant opportunities for women in all workplaces" except that this sentence comes near the end of a 218-page collection of essays in which she has already confessed that "I'm twenty pounds overweight and I worry about the shape of my eyebrows" (40), "I feel guilty about having another woman clean my house" (102) and that "we didn't think that telling girls they shouldn't feel any shame about their bodies or sexual urges would mean that our daughters (or our granddaughters or kid sisters) would be eagerly participating in blow-job parties at age twelve" (163-164).

The parts about weight issues, eyebrow shape, clothing choices, problems remembering to floss, and baby-boomer nostalgia are either irritating or soporific for me. Making fun of hymenoplasty is easy, Gina; it's taking responsibility for the "free love" philosophy you admit that you helped to popularize that's hard.

I also reacted negatively (as I often do) to the hand-wringing over employing a cleaning woman; if she's not paying the woman enough, why doesn't she either pay her more or fit cleaning her own house into her busy schedule? (Update: this is a burning issue in The Chronicle of Higher Education.) (I had a silent moment of schadenfreude recently when a friend who has a cleaning woman revealed that her adult daughter has never learned how to clean a toilet).

The cover of the book actually says it all--the title appears across the torso and ample hips of a woman's body in an old-fashioned full slip, and the subtitle runs in a banner across the crotch: "How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World."

Is there anyone else out there who already saves her worrying for issues more pressing than underwear (so to speak)?