Maybe It’s Me: On Being The Wrong Kind Of Woman

 

 

maybeitsmeAn “insightful gaggle” of darkly comic essays about the trials of growing up smart and female in a world in which women are rarely appreciated for both their bodies and their minds…

Eileen is too smart for the third grade, but when she gets a chance to be skipped ahead, she fails the test. The clownish school psychologist tries to gain her trust with an offer of Oreos, but she refuses. After all, he is a stranger and might try to poison her! This is the start of the author’s love-hate relationship with the rules as they were laid out for a girl in the 1960s and as they persist in some form today. As she ascends through a physics degree at Yale that dashes her hopes for love and romance, to a post-graduate summer that leaves her “peed on, shot at, and kidnapped,” to a marriage of supposed equals in which she is expected to do all the housework, child-rearing, and bill paying and make sure the Roto-Rooter guy arrives on time, Pollack shares with poignant humor the trials of being smart and female in a world in which women are rarely appreciated for both their bodies and their minds. Maybe It’s Me is a question all women have asked themselves. But Pollack’s message will resonate with readers of all genders as a story of the very human search for connection, love, acceptance, and self-respect. The author of the groundbreaking memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club, Pollack proves that even in her sixties, wiser and more bruised but no less hilarious, she is still very much in the game.

 

 

 

Praise for Maybe It’s Me

 

“An insightful gaggle of essays [that] underscore Pollack’s knack for wringing humor from the mundane, successfully striking at the paradoxical ways in which ‘sex and birth (and love) can be beautiful as well as ugly, wondrous as well as painful, enticing and mysterious….’ This is a hoot.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)

 

“A master of the long-form personal essay… The author’s candor, curiosity, humor, and gift for phrasemaking are engaging regardless of the topic…. Yet more compelling work from a unique mind.” –Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

 

“Eileen Pollack’s essay collection Maybe It’s Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman asks the kind of probing questions all autobiographical writing ought to pose but only the most fearless dares to answer. With a clear eye and a sharp wit, Pollack traces the path by which an outwardly ordinary girlhood gave rise to an extraordinary woman.” –Kristen Roupenian, author of You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories 

 

“Detective, stand-up comedian, veteran storyteller, Eileen Pollack investigates mysteries that trouble the idea of home. She seeks answers in memories of her Catskill childhood but also heads out to places that discomfort and disquiet: a Jewish cemetery hidden within a Detroit auto plant, a Catholic hospital in Krakow, the ruined walls of Jericho. Whether writing about the absurdities of the mid-life dating scene in New York or her conflicted love of Judaism, her candor and wit disarm and delight.” –Donovan Hohn, author of Moby-Duck and The Inner Coast 

 

“Eileen Pollack’s essays are striking for their tender, smart explorations of love and longing, fear and injustice, memory and history, and the everyday project of claiming one’s place in the world. An illuminating portrait of womanhood and all its sorrows, challenges, and triumphs, Maybe It’s Me is a marvelous collection with a bold, powerful sensibility.” –Natalie Bakopoulus, author of The Green Shore and Scorpionfish

 

MORE REVIEWS + PODCAST:

https://newbooksnetwork.com/maybe-its-me

https://forward.com/culture/480827/boors-clowns-crazies-weirdos-and-other-hazards-of-online-dating-for-a/

https://lilith.org/2022/01/eileen-pollack-on-sexism-from-physics-departments-to-dating/

https://www.jewishboston.com/read/eileen-pollack-explains-why-shes-the-wrong-kind-of-woman/

 

 

Excerpt from Maybe It’s Me

You think just because a woman is in her sixties, she loses her interest in sex and romance? You think desire is like a battery? It runs down? A good-looking man walks by and you don’t feel that flutter in your vagina? When you are young and no one has ever done a really good job of making you feel so beautiful that even your tiniest toe is worthy of being sucked on, then sure, you are dying for a man to take you in his arms and kiss you. If you have only ever seen people eating chocolate on TV, you wonder what chocolate tastes like. But after forty years enjoying everything from Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to the finest, darkest Scharffen Berger truffles, are you going to say: Nah, I don’t care if I ever taste chocolate again?

Not so much as an M&M?

Here is what it is like to be in your sixties. You lie in bed wondering if anyone will ever see your breasts again. Touch them. Kiss them. Appreciate how smooth they still are, how soft. It’s like buying a bag of oranges, and you aren’t sure you can eat them fast enough before they wither and attract the fruit flies.

 

 

 

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