To Hell with All That

Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife, by Caitlin Flanagan

I saw an ad in the New Yorker for this book and put in on hold at the library. (Turns out she is a staff writer for the New Yorker. I'm sure I've read some of her stuff, just didn't remember any of it.) I was number 20 on the wait list. I decided I'd better read it before I had to take it back since there is still a considerable wait list, and thus, I am not able to renew.

My general impression: 1. There was no coherent conection between chapters. No major theme, argument to connect it as a whole. Reading reviews, I see that these were originally published as magazine articles. still, it leaves me with an unsettled and choppy feeling.

2. At the end of the day, I'm not sure what she thinks. Her position isn't cohesive. For example, I started out thinking that she was against working mothers, but at the end, wasn't sure. This happened a lot so that I never quite got her bottome line. She seems to laud homekeeping, but then shares her supposed inability and her willingness to lower her standards and hire outside help. Here's how the NYTimes Book Review put it:

More distressing are Flanagan's contradictions, which make it easy to dismiss her. Like many contrarians, she spends too much time arguing against everyone else and not enough time considering her own opinions. She rails against doctrinaire feminists, yuppie parents, stay-at-home moms, political correctites and wives who won't put out. But she's often as guilty as her targets. She mocks boomers who pal around with their kids, then takes vacations at family-friendly resorts where she splashes about with her children. She laments her generation's failures at household maintenance, then admits she's "far too educated and uppity to have knuckled down and learned anything about stain removal" herself. Self-deprecating, yes. But also hypocritical.

3. She is a describing a world familiar to only a very few people. she has a personal organizer for goodness sake. And a nanny too. I can almost forgive her that one since she had twins (and her description of their first couple of years of life makes me regret ever thinking fondly about two babies for the price of one and I hope it never happens to me). Is elitish.