W hat do women want?
Oh, honey. How long have you got?
If you’re serious, come sit by me. Not for nothing, but you can’t go wrong with a passel of extremely talented women who take a moment out of their lives to pull us out of ours with glittering writing, biting commentary and just plain raunchy good fun.
“Roar Softly and Carry a Great Lipstick” is a collection of essays edited by Autumn Stephens, who is the author of the popular “Wild Women” series of biographies and humor. It takes a wild woman to know one, and it looks like Stephens has assembled her most creative friends – and women she might wish to have as friends – and let them loose.
Given the caliber of the contributors, it’s hard to know which to read first, the lyrical Anne Lamott on alcoholism or the soulful Edwidge Danticat on mothers. If there’s a theme here, it is implied in the goofy title. There is no solution like the homegrown solution for problems from sexism to divorce.
In “Without Me, I’m Nothing,” Bonnie Wach, a California columnist and author, explores her post-partum depression in the most searing way. Here, she describes her aversion to taking her newborn son to the neighborhood park:
“I know I should be taking the baby to the playground, but I just … I just don’t want to. I hate it. All those zombie mommies with their snack packs and sun cream. It’s a sand-infested jail cell.”
Couldn’t you just stand up and shout “Amen!”
And what woman of a certain age hasn’t thought, as Jane Ganahl writes in “The Lioness Sleeps Tonight”:
“Sometimes, when I catch a man’s eye at a gas station, or a coffee bar, then look back at him, I’m startled if he’s still staring … I skip the sections in department stores aimed at young wenches, knowing my body is not up to the disguise … and when I have Pearl Jam or Audioslave turned up loud on my car stereo, I close the windows so no one will think I’m an old bag trying to stay young. Nowadays, it seems, when I roar, I do it in private. If at all.”
Ganahl, too, is a California columnist.
But give me Mary Roach, author of the quirky and wonderful “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” which sneaked up the best-seller list last year.
In her contribution to “Roar,” called “The Marvels of Middle Age,” Roach manages to once again cheerfully poke fun at human decay. Don’t like the changes in your middle-aged body? Do what Roach does, and marvel at how white are the parts of your teeth once your gums recede, or remember that artist Georgia O’Keeffe had unsightly chin hairs, too, but no one cared. They remember her, instead, writes Roach, for her “large, vaginal nature paintings. Let this be an inspiration.”
This book is not without its weaknesses. An essay on finding new friends is a little flat, as was one contributor’s description of her writing group’s publication of their work.
But what separates this collection from others where women riff – 2002’s “The Bitch In the House” comes to mind – is the diversity of the women who are writing. These are not all wealthy women worried about their nannies. These are women worried about themselves, their mortality, their lovers, their world.
Buy this for your girlfriend. Better yet, buy it for a man who’s deserving. Let him see how the other half thinks.
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