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Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories
Celebrated for her award-winning political columns, criticism, and poetry, Katha Pollitt now shows us another side of her talent. Learning to Drive is a surprising, revealing, and entertaining collection of stories drawn from the author’s own life.
With deep feeling and sharp insight, Pollitt writes about the death of her father; the sad but noble final days of a leftist st...more
With deep feeling and sharp insight, Pollitt writes about the death of her father; the sad but noble final days of a leftist st...more
ebook, 224 pages
Published
September 9th 2008
by Random House Trade Paperbacks
(first published September 4th 2007)
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You'd think (if you know me at all) this book would be right up my alley. YES, the writing is brilliant. And yes, I do love the world of old-school feminists and Marxists and shabby New York intellectuals (intelligentsia) etc etc etc. But I heaved a lot of sighs over her going on and on and ON about her ex-boyfriend and his mistresses. Possibly ageist of me, and I hate to admit it; I was distressed over her websurfing, stalking old lovers and imagining their new lives with their new wives. It se...more
I've always loved Katha Pollitt, and this book was no exception. I was blown away - I didn't expect it to be so laugh out loud funny and I certainly didn't expect to relate. My favorite stories were the ones about herself, which seems to go against the general consensus.
Reading people's reviews of the book after the fact, Pollitt has gotten a lot of flack for this one. The reason that so many people expressed discomfort and dislike was a major part of why I loved it. Feminists aren't supposed to...more
Reading people's reviews of the book after the fact, Pollitt has gotten a lot of flack for this one. The reason that so many people expressed discomfort and dislike was a major part of why I loved it. Feminists aren't supposed to...more
A surprisingly disappointing Katha Pollitt book. The essays about her communist, FBI-pursued parents were by far the most interesting. If I had to read one more word about her philandering ex-boyfriend, and all the women he slept with while they were together, I would have burned the book -- even though it's a library copy. She should stick to cultural and political criticism and stay away from memoirs as long as she lives.
I'm not a great fan of personal memoirs, in general. But the personal is the political, after all, and Pollitt is one of our finest political writers. Pollitt is a representative of the generation of feminists who made the case that the personal was political. She's making the best case for it, by describing her own life with little reference to the ostensibly political, through a politically informed sensibility. I don't agree with some of her core beliefs -- particularly her essentialist view...more
2.5 stars. Some essays were better than others. I thought Pollitt was at her best when she was writing about other people (her pieces about her parents were my favorites) and not herself, because I didn't find her to be a terribly interesting person, despite being a moderately amusing writer. I think there was a bit of a generational gap in her writing (for example, her depiction of current feminism didn't really resemble current feminism as I understand it), and a socio-economic gap as well (th...more
I loved this book. I didn't find it bitter at all, but an honest exploration of the very real issues of being left, growing older, and the at-times all-consuming fears that even the most ardent feminists must have. We are all products of our environment, and although the United States is progressive in many ways, the sad fact of the matter is that the message most women grow up with is that our identity is all wound up in our desirability which is validated in relationships. I found Pollit's ess...more
I liked this book, but can't say I loved it. It actually felt like two different books in one. The first half of the book is spent discovering gems while in the midst of hearing about her philandering boyfriend. Somewhere around the middle of the book, that subject gets dropped and her essays are really focused on more universal experiences including motherhood, the environment, beauty, aging, family relationships. I definitely found it refreshing to read from a more mature (and intellectual)voi...more
Feb 24, 2008
Emma
rated it
4 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
people who like personal essays, people wrestling with feminism's legacy (and future)
This was one of those swallow-it-whole, binge-read sort of books. It clocks in at just 200 pages and I finished over the course of two nights of reading.
For the most part, I loved it. Her prose just sort of rocks. She's hilarious. And insightful. And so brutally honest.
I guess she got a lot of criticism for being so brutally honest, but that's the real strength of this book. There are so many tell-alls these days, but usually they lack any sort of analysis to give it any sort of coherence. Or t...more
For the most part, I loved it. Her prose just sort of rocks. She's hilarious. And insightful. And so brutally honest.
I guess she got a lot of criticism for being so brutally honest, but that's the real strength of this book. There are so many tell-alls these days, but usually they lack any sort of analysis to give it any sort of coherence. Or t...more
Enjoyed this book more than I expected despite the fact that
I've admired her articles in the Nation for what has now become years and years.
She has a refreshing sense of humor and a perspective with which I feel a strong affinity.
She too is deeply disatisfied with where the new century's popular culture, et al has landed after so much progressive momentum in the 90's that we may have taken for granted.
Her writing is so lucid that even though she walks the personal memoir line, she's touchingly...more
This was a really lovely collection. Pollitt manages to strike a perfect balance of honesty, bitterness and hope. I wish I could bracket all the knowledge garnered in the book for a later date. Someday I expect her words will resonate with me even more. Her reflections on motherhood, her upbringing, failed careers and relationships are told with an astute maturity that I don't yet I have. But we can all hope to age as gracefully (and humorously) as Pollitt. A great feminist writer!
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Not her strongest work. Sadly, the first few personal essays really undermine the book as a whole. I totally understand Pollitt's bitterness over the end of a long-term relationship, but the subject gets beaten into the ground in a way that reflects poorly upon the author. Picking and choosing, or spacing these out a bit, would have helped enormously. If this had been the first book of hers I'd read, I'm not sure I'd be back. I usually love her insightful essays, but this book is a little light...more
Well written non fiction pieces from a woman who writes for The Nation. She reflects on her life with a full spectrum of historical feminist & political wisdom. Names have been changed. Early pieces cover men she had relationships with, socialist meetings she attended; later pieces in the book explore her relationship with time's passage, with her mother, and with growing older. She provides a woman's perspective throughout the book. She talks about one man's comment that the other women he...more
at times I wanted to tell her to buck up and stop complaining, that she was manhating across the board in a way that was too easy and predictable and bitter, but by the end I wanted to write her a letter telling her she is awesome and funny and really very right. she became a book-friend in a way that I ultimately didn't find embarrassing (clearly).
Pollitt's dry wit is a fun break from the drama of life.
“I would have been a good girlfriend for a political prisoner, writing long letters and living in a fever of anticipation__just think, darling, only fifteen more years!¬¬__and having the intoxication of romantic love without the loss of self it seemed to entail." from Sisterhood.
"
“I would have been a good girlfriend for a political prisoner, writing long letters and living in a fever of anticipation__just think, darling, only fifteen more years!¬¬__and having the intoxication of romantic love without the loss of self it seemed to entail." from Sisterhood.
"
So she's sort of like a leftist, intellectual Erma Bombeck? Or something? Maybe that sounds unfair and belittling, but I don't mean it that way; I used to think Erma Bombeck was hilarious. This swings into slapstick more often than I was expecting, is all. I was expecting more like Susan Sontag. For the most part I really liked it, though.
Oct 01, 2011
Bonnie
rated it
3 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Recommended to Bonnie by:
Book Lover's Calendar
At first I started reading this author's life's lessons/observations and thought they were quite funny, and much of it fascintating, although it did not go into depth at all about her parents being Communists in the 50s which I would have loved to have read tons more about; however, soon the author started to sound like a middle-aged whiner and somewhat bitter single woman who had been left by her husband in one part of the book (actually the more humorous part to me, not that it was funny that...more
Yet another recommendation from my mother, who must statistically be my #1 recommender of books. Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation. She's a New York intellectual who was born and raised in New York, which alone makes her fascinating. I read the second essay in this collection of personal essays, "Webstalker," when it appeared in the New Yorker a couple of years ago. It's about obsessively stalking her ex-live-in-boyfriend online, and while that's hardly newsworthily novel behavior to p...more
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Katha Pollitt writes brilliant columns for the Nation. But this memoir -- set of stories -- was disappointing. The most delightful of the stories was "learning to drive." The worst ones involved her telling and re-telling of her ex-husband's affairs and her obsession to learn about them.
Pollitt is funny. Sometimes I forget that b/c I read her a lot in _The Nation_ when she's writing polemics, but she's funny. And her life is funny. And she makes feminism funny while still believing it. Horray for Katha Pollitt and her well-turned sentences!
I picked up this book at the library just to peruse. I was struck right away with how Pollitt's attention to her own life stimulates a desire for me to pay more attention to my own. For this reason alone, I recommend this book.
Katha Pollitt is honest and funny and this book is a collection of stories from her life. It is her personal narrative and her reflections on love and aging that I found most poignant. Brava Katha! You inspire me.
Pollitt writes engaging essays on personal topics, then expands to consider the political and cultural implications, which I appreciate. She tackles some big issues with a deft, light touch.
Oct 20, 2009
camilla
rated it
3 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
read-2009,
rad-ladies
Some of the essays in this book made me laugh out loud and all of them made me think. Very well written and intelligent, what else could you expect from a Nation columnist? I'll be giving this to my mom and my sister and all the rad ladies in my life.
I never conceptualized my not driving as in opposition to my personal feminist beliefs, but now I kinda think I should learn to drive. And the chapter on parenting hits home at the moment.
I have only ever read Katha Pollitt in the Nation magazine, but I liked her enough to dive into this book based on a half-hearted recommendation from an acquaintance. Her musings on aging, parenting, love, and loss were appreciated. Learning to Drive is a quick read, as much as those dense feminist columnists are able, and entertaining enough to read out loud to a loved one as a bedtime story. For those of us looking to the aging of the second-wave as a to-do or not-to-do list for our own middle...more
Jan 04, 2012
Vera
rated it
4 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
gender-studies,
memoir-and-biography
This is my favorite kind of memoir – funny, witty, provocative and filled with social critique. The book consists of essays which deal with various issues and time periods in the author’s life, and I enjoyed “Memoir of a shy pornographer” and “Beautiful screamer” the most. “Learning to drive” is very readable since Katha Pollitt, unlike some other writers I’ve read recently, tells her stories without getting stuck in descriptions of mundane details.
When people hear "feminist author" I wish it was Katha Pollitt's wry, revealing writing that came to mind first. She is a first-rate essayist.
I loved this. I can't believe how orthoganal all the withering reviews were to the actual book. I have a crush on Katha Pollitt now.
I picked up this book because, like Ms. Pollitt, I, too, learned to drive later in life (and could also relate to her essay about the perils of addictive Googling). This book got a lot of flak for how self-revelatory the author was about some sorry moments in her personal life -- particularly as a prominent feminist -- but I appreciated her candor and the insights she drew from some messy personal experiences.
The only jarring note for me was all the talk of Marxism ... but as it has obviously b...more
The only jarring note for me was all the talk of Marxism ... but as it has obviously b...more
Excellent book of essays. Incredibly well-written with food for thought and stuff of laughter.
| topics | posts | views | last activity | |
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| Interesting to read but bitter | 1 | 11 | Jul 24, 2008 12:55pm |
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“In the months to come, I would look back on this time in my life almost as a kind of out-of-body travel, from which I had returned with nothing but a sense memory of having been somewhere inexpressibly exciting and far away. It wasn't like a dream, exactly, although it had a dream's strange internal logic. It was like looking through the window of an airplane at night, the way the city below appears so near, yet untouchable beyond the glass--a network of lights, flames, stars.”
—
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