Maybe It's Me essays: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman

by Eileen Pollack

Eileen is nine and too smart for the third grade, but when the clownish school psychologist tries to gain her trust with an offer of Oreos, she refuses. After all, she doesn’t accept gifts from strangers! This is the start of a love-hate relationship with the rules as they were laid out for a girl in 1960s upstate New York—and as they persist in some form today. As she ascends from her rural public high school, where she wasn't allowed to take the advanced courses in science and math because she was female, through a physics degree at Yale, to a post-graduate summer that leaves her “peed on, shot at, and kidnapped,” to a marriage where both careers theoretically are respected but, as the wife, she is expected to do all the housework and child-rearing, pay the taxes, and make sure the Roto-Rooter guy arrives on time, Pollack shares with poignant humor and candid language the trials of being smart and female in a world that is just learning to imagine equality between the sexes. Maybe It’s Me  is a question all smart women have asked themselves. Pollack’s autobiographical essays take us on a roller-coaster ride from gratifyingly humorous street-level stories of innocent curiosity to the calculated meanness of tweeny girls to the defensive strategies of threatened men to the 20,000-foot overview of how we all got here. In the end, Pollack’s message is one of human connection and tenacity because even in her sixth decade, still searching for love, acceptance, and equality, she is still very much in the game.

288 pages, Paperback

Published January 24, 2023

About the author

Eileen Pollack grew up in Liberty, New York. She has received fellowships from the Michener Foundation and the MacDowell Colony, and her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, the Literary Review, the AGNI Review, Playgirl, and the New Generation. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, and teaches at Tufts University. She won the Pushcart Prize for her story “Past, Future, Elsewhere.”

Reviews

[Dewitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, no timelier, or more honest self, moral, and geopolitical appraisal of the dilemmas posed by the Gaza/Israel war than Eileen Pollack’s essay, “All of Us, We Are All Arameans,” once a Ploughshares solo, now collected in her probing memoir-in-essays MAYBE IT’S ME (Delphinium, 2023). “Someday there had to be peace,” she reasons. “ How could there not be? And maybe, once the peace was achieved, the fact that the two communities were intertwined would make it all the stronger. If two former enemies shared the same highways, rivers, and lakes, didn’t they need to cooperate to preserve their resources?… Israel was going to need to commit itself to the same sort of civil rights movement America had struggled through in the past—and is still struggling through today.”