©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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Her subtitle emphasizes "real," and that's what Roiphe has tried to be. Reflecting autobiographically on the conflict between the ideology of feminism and the reality of motherhood, Roiphe wryly evaluates her own experience, which often as not is ours, too: "Whenever ideology and reality clashed, reality won." A good way to begin and end a book about a life spent championing feminism while coping with two husbands, one career, three daughters, and two stepdaughters.
Roiphe walks us back through marriage and pregnancy in the fifties "when feminism was a mummy wrapped in old wishes waiting for Betty Friedan to burst open the wall of its sealed cave." Nine months pregnant, she carries her first husband's typewriter home from the repair shop on a snowy night while he laps up scotch at local bars. Disillusioned but determined to be the perfect mother, she discovers what mothers everywhere still learn: "Taking care of a child is boring in many ways."
Then came the revolutionary sixties. "What wonderful fresh air this feminist wind brought to the choking lady in the apron holding her cookies on a hot baking tray." In six succeeding sections Roiphe's meditations reflect on motherhood and feminism, on guilt, on "the fathering issue," on radical change and the nuclear family, on the high price sometimes paid for freedom, on realistic solutions. Each section proceeds somewhat chronologically but with loops and backings. Roiphe circles her theme with fragments torn out of time, offering conclusions on the nurturing of men, the necessity of safe, universal day care.
Loaded with potent verbs, hammering points home with strong anecdotes, Roiphe's prose tumbles at us from her pages with the power of cataracts, the surge of tides. Or it softens to an apparently structureless whorl of images from which emerge forceful summations. Roiphe commands private images, public events, references to literature to recapitulate succeeding decades of awakenings, heady liberation, aroused feminist anger, excesses, backlashes from the fifties to the nineties.
Toward the end of her book, Roiphe prefaces the terrible story of her eldest daughter's drug addiction with humble calm: "It is true that having children is a sanding of the ego, a rubbing down of pride, a kind of placing in proportion one's ambitions, defusing the grandiose, cutting back the unreal." This same daughter contracts HIV. With steadfast commitment to the real, Roiphe reports her reactions as a real, modern mother: "When I imagined how she must feel, trying to cheerlead with the shortened baton of her life, I felt stunned, stilled, numbed. What else I feel I do not yet know." But she has been willing to share.
Joanne Lewis Sears is a writer who divides her time between Montecito, California, and France.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.