Reviving ophelia by mary pipher7/2/2023 I engaged in a lot of behavior as a teenager that on paper sounds pretty pathological or at least disturbing, and I'm not saying that's ideal or that I want my kids doing all of it, but I did make it out the other end, you know? As did a lot of other girls I know who had much more extreme problems. I mean, obviously girls shouldn't be cutting themselves or trying to commite suicide, but adolescents feeling bad a lot of the time seems normal to me. At the same time, I do have some basic belief that adolescence is supposed to be kind of miserable: that's called "growing up," and it hurts. Raising girls - raising anyone! - not to be all screwed-up around here - around anywhere! - is hard work, and parents deserve all the help they can get. Honestly, though, I'm sure this is a gross mischaracterization of everything in this book, which I honestly don't remember one bit. I felt at the time that it was making too much of girls' helplessness and sort of encouraging us to feel sorry for ourselves and to wallow in a sense of victimization, blaming our parents and "the media" for everything. I read this in the mid-nineties when it came out, and I remember feeling, as a teenage girl, annoyed and offended. It's definitely more of a statement about me than it is about the book, which I don't really remember anyway. This is a biased and thoughtless review, based on vague memories of a cranky adolescent's insensitive snap judgment, so you shouldn't pay any attention to it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |