A story about "The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage" — 4 years ago
I consumed the Audible.com version of this book featuring the writers reading their own work, including an introduction by editor Cathi Hanauer.
While the essays were interesting, I found the introduction to be too long and too negative. I almost didn’t listen to the rest of the book. Hanauer admits she has a lot of anger about the combined stresses of work and motherhood and spends a lot of time venting in the intro. She seems to consider the concept of ‘married career woman struggling to have it all’ to be a novel idea to explore, but I found myself thinking, ‘Isn’t this the millionth book about this exact subject? What are you contributing that’s news to anyone?’
The essays themselves are more balanced, but I found some of them so incredibly self-absorbed it was grating. A few are able to actually look outside their experience and observe the choices they’ve made in some sort of societal context and those are the best, I think.
Also, almost all writers are privileged, educated women with a rather narrow world-view, though. It would have been more interesting to hear also about the experiences of young women entering adulthood without college degrees, for example, or married women who are somehow miraculously able to cope without a nanny.
Hanauer says in the intro she sought out “smart, educated women” implying, of course, that those are the opinions matter most.
Individual esssays raise some interesting points, but I wouldn’t take this to be representative of working women or married women with children in general.
