The Power Notebooks

by Katie Roiphe

Overview

Katie Roiphe, culture writer and author of The Morning After, shares a timely blend of memoir, feminist investigation, and exploration of famous female writers’ lives, in a bold, essential discussion of how strong women experience their power.

Told in a series of notebook entries, Roiphe weaves her often fraught personal experiences with divorce, single motherhood, and relationships with insights into the lives and loves of famous writers such as Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir. She dissects the way she and other ordinary, powerful women have subjugated their own power time and time again, and she probes brilliantly at the tricky, uncomfortable question of why.

In these informal musings and notes, Roiphe delves into treacherous, largely untalked about, contradictions of contemporary womanhood, going where few writers dare. The Power Notebooks is Roiphe’s most vital, thought provoking, and emotionally intimate work yet.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982128012
Publisher:	Free Press
Publication date:	03/03/2020
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.50(h) x 2.10(d)

About the Author

Katie Roiphe is an author and journalist writing about feminist issues. She is best known for writing The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism, and In Praise of Messy Lives, as well as The Power Notebooks, and has contributed articles to prominent publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Paris Review, Vogue, and Slate. She has a PhD in literature from Princeton University and is the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children.

Editorial Reviews

01/27/2020

Roiphe (The Violet Hour) circles “a subject I keep coming back to: women strong in public, weak in private,” in this bright and dynamic collection of shorts that she wrote “during a time of upheaval” encompassing pregnancy, divorce, sexual entanglements, and single motherhood. Using personal experience as her template, Roiphe layers episodes of her own “confusion, self-contempt, conflict” with those of women writers Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Mary McCarthy, and Edith Wharton. In a pivotal scene, Roiphe is forced to walk home when her abusive husband, enraged by their crying infant, kicks mother and baby out of his car. Inside their apartment, his shouting is heard by neighbors and terrifies their child, yet she remains “quiet, still, vacating,” confessing “not a single friend... would recognize me.” Accounts of other dysfunctional relationships—the 35-year-old divorced rabbi who seduced her at 15—are clinically conveyed. Throughout, she addresses the disconnect between her public and private selves, admitting, “authority... the form power takes on the page, is a fiction... something I dreamed up because I would like to have it.” Roiphe’s astute memoir reverberates with rich prose, crisp pacing, and self-compassion. Agent: Suzanne Gluck. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

PRAISE FOR THE POWER NOTEBOOKS

“Roiphe’s larger goal here is to investigate the lived reality of her romantic dynamics, not to get on a soap box and opine. The result is a beautifully written and thoughtful book.” —Lauren Elkin, The New York Times Book Review

“Roiphe seems incapable of writing a bland sentence...[her] exploration of women's complicated relationship with power — including her own — is sharp, smart, and literate.” —NPR Book Reviews

“Quietly revelatory...Although Ms. Roiphe seems to be exposing her vulnerabilities here, she is actually, once again, demonstrating her unique brand of fearlessness.” —Emily Bobrow, The Wall Street Journal

"In her most confessional work yet, the feminist bete noire muses on her restless inner life, blending shrewd observations about motherhood and the pitfalls of dating with paeans to influences such as Joan Didion and Mary McCarthy." —O, The Oprah Magazine

“As she works her way through complex, conflicting ideas, Roiphe demonstrates the very human conundrum of searching for answers in a world without them.” —Elle

“Katie Roiphe is famous for being very sure of herself, for stating unpopular positions with great force and for not caring if people hate her...In her latest work, “The Power Notebooks,” she seems as surprised as we are to find herself taking a break from the role of steel-sided contrarian...An exercise in the redemptive power of admitting weakness and error.” —The Washington Post

"Roiphe’s astute memoir reverberates with rich prose, crisp pacing, and self-compassion."
—Publisher's Weekly

“Katie Roiphe’s gaze is always fierce, merciless, funny, tender, and frank, but never more so than when she turns it on the paradoxes between the public and private lives of strong women, beginning with her own. A moving and brilliant book about the still insoluble equation of women and power.”
—Nicole Krauss, New York Times bestselling author of History of Love

“This brave, richly imagined, unlikely book appears fragmentary at first glance, but it achieves an astonishing coherence that encompasses Roiphe’s own experience and the experience of women she admires and considers. Her prose is sharp, her insights sudden and gratifying, her way of telling stories deeply engaging. Her investigation of the internal and external lives of women who grapple with power is itself an act of great power.”
—Andrew Solomon, New York Times bestselling author of Far From the Tree

“An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“[An] arrestingly intimate and cathartic work...Seeking guidance and inspiration, Roiphe delves into the lives of women writers, from Edith Wharton to Mary McCarthy, praising Simone de Beauvoir as a “brilliant elucidator,” which Roiphe is, too, to deeply clarifying and affirming effect.”
—Booklist

PRAISE FOR KATIE ROIPHE

"Katie Roiphe does not so much explode pieties as slice them open and prod their strands apart apart with equal parts rigor and transfixed curiosity."
—Alison Bechdel, New York Times bestselling author of Fun Home

“Ms. Roiphe’s are how you want your essays to sound: lean and literate, not unlike Orwell’s, with a frightening ratio of velocity to torque.”
—The New York Times

“Roiphe has always seemed to me a writer to envy. No matter what the occasion, she can be counted on to marry ferocity and erudition in ways that nearly always make her interesting.”
—The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

2019-12-22
A collection of personal journal entries from the feminist writer that explores power dynamics and "a subject [she] kept coming back to: women strong in public, weak in private."

Cultural critic and essayist Roiphe (Cultural Reporting and Criticism/New York Univ.; The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, 2016, etc.), perhaps best known for the views she expressed on victimization in The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism (1994), is used to being at the center of controversy. In her latest work, the author uses her personal journals to examine the contradictions that often exist between the public and private lives of women, including her own. At first, the fragmented notebook entries seem overly scattered, but they soon evolve into a cohesive analysis of the complex power dynamics facing women on a daily basis. As Roiphe shares details from her own life, she weaves in quotes from the writings of other seemingly powerful female writers who had similar experiences, including Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, and Hillary Clinton. In one entry, Roiphe theorizes that her early published writings were an attempt to "control and tame the narrative," further explaining that she has "so long and so passionately resisted the victim role" because she does not view herself as "purely a victim" and not "purely powerless." However, she adds, that does not mean she "was not facing a man who was twisting or distorting his power; it does not mean that the wrongness, the overwhelmed feeling was not there." Throughout the book, the author probes the question of why women so often subjugate their power in their private lives, but she never quite finds a satisfying answer. The final entry, however, answers the question of why she chose to share these personal journal entries with the public: "To be so exposed feels dangerous, but having done it, I also feel free."

An intriguing examination of the complexity of female power in a variety of relationships.

Kirkus Reviews