Notes from an Incomplete Revolution: Real Life Since Feminism

Maran (What's It Like to Live Now), a feminist and social activist, presents a candid but overwritten memoir of her life since the 1970s. As a result of the women's movement, she maintains, she transformed herself from a heterosexual who placed love affairs with men above friendships with women into a bisexual now living with her lover, Ann, and trying to raise her two sons to be free of sexism and racism. Maran vividly describes the sadness she felt after her son Jesse got into a racially charged fistfight. She also exposes the contradiction between her commitment to feminism and her anger at Ann's inability to take care of her as a man might. Maran details the trauma her family of origin experienced when she voiced her suspicion, with no proof, that her father had sexually abused her as a girl. Although she now believes that her accusations were untrue, she delivers an illogical diatribe against men who question recovered memories of childhood incest. (May)