cover image Looking for a Fight

Looking for a Fight

Lynn Snowden, Lynn Snowden Picket. Dial Press, $23.95 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-385-31584-5

Hurt by the dissolution of her marriage and enraged by the pitying looks that followed the divorce, Snowden Picket released her frustration by entering the underworld of boxing. It wasn't the first time the author had tried on a new life. For her first book, Nine Lives, the ""participatory journalist"" worked as a stripper, a cop, a housewife and a rape-crisis counselor. Not that Snowden Picket was completely unprepared to enter the ring--she was already a serious athlete who had run the New York Marathon--but the sport she describes in this gritty memoir is a world away from the boxing training offered at most white-collar gyms. For one thing, the author trains at Gleason's, the Brooklyn gym famous for its stars and its ""grimy, no-frills, blood-and-guts"" atmosphere. For another, she takes blows to the face. Though Snowden Picket's memoir culminates in a brutal ring fight, the book's real story is about her drive to overcome a dogged feeling of helplessness, which crystallizes in her frequent panic attacks. When her trainer tells her she hits like a man, Picket takes it as the highest compliment: ""So there it was. I wanted to be a man. As a woman I was vulnerable and vulnerability led to pain."" Soon her aggression begins boiling up in unexpected ways. She punches a teenager when he tries to frighten her and beats up her boyfriend's brother when he sucker punches her at a party. Although not as eloquently written as Kate Sekules's The Boxer's Heart (Forecasts, Aug. 28), this memoir features a lighter tone and emphasis on personal transformation that may make it more popular. (Nov.)