Critical and cultural lightning rod Katie Roiphe shares a timely blend of memoir, feminist investigation, and exploration of famous female writers’ lives in this bold, essential work.
In a series of notebook entries, Roiphe weaves her personal experiences of divorce, single motherhood, and relationships with insights into the lives and loves of famous writers such as Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir. In each entry, Roiphe takes up a problem of power, asking questions like, “Why does a writer as flagrantly self-assured as Mary McCarthy have to ask her husband for a nickel to make a telephone call?” “Why can’t Sylvia Plath get past the idea that her entire being hangs on one man, as her American psychiatrist put it?”
Using her own life as a case study, Roiphe dives into everyday quandaries, including why we stay in destructive relationships, the quest for likability, the difficulty of asking for raises, and the dangers of being perceived as a strong woman. She dissects the way we she and other ordinary, strong women have subjugated their own power in their private lives, and she probes brilliantly the tricky, uncomfortable question of why.
In these informal musings and notes, Roiphe delves into treacherous, largely untalked-about contradictions of contemporary womanhood. Transcending her penchant for controversy, The Power Notebooks is Roiphe’s most vital, thought-provoking, and emotionally intimate work yet.
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Early praise for The Power Notebooks
“Katie Roiphe’s gaze is always fierce, merciless, funny, tender, and frank, but never more so than when she turns it on the paradoxes between the public and private lives of strong women, beginning with her own. A moving and brilliant book about the still insoluble equation of women and power.” —Nicole Krauss
“This brave, richly imagined, unlikely book appears fragmentary at first glance, but it achieves an astonishing coherence that encompasses Roiphe’s own experience and the experience of women she admires and considers. Her prose is sharp, her insights sudden and gratifying, her way of telling stories deeply engaging. Her investigation of the internal and external lives of women who grapple with power is itself an act of great power.” —Andrew Solomon