Book Review: Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress
Author: Susan Jane Gilman
Date: 2005
Publisher: Warner Books
ISBN: 0-446-67949-6
Length: 352 pages
Quote: “I love hearing about other people’s romantic and sexual ineptitude as much as the next person. Yet ultimately, there’s so much more to women’s lives that’s worthy of attention and ridicule.”
Possibly this quote will arouse false expectations. There are, although publishers don’t seem to want to believe it, people in this world who would like to read the memoirs of someone who was able to omit any mention of his or her sex life. That is: instead of a chapter about losing her virginity, Gilman could have left us to wonder whether she might have managed to keep it. Instead of a warm and witty story about wondering when to stop passing for a lesbian, Gilman could have left it to our imaginations whether she was one, or had ever met one, or not. She doesn’t give us quite enough sex-free adventures to convince us that she could, at that point in her life, have written 352 pages of hilarious autobiography without mentioning a single sexual act, part, or passion, but we suspect that she might have achieved that if she’d tried.
As things are...if I were meeting this woman in real life, I would still prefer not to know that she’d given her virginity to someone other than her husband (someone, according to page 152, chosen partly for his commitment-phobia). If I had to share an office with her, I’d also just as soon have heard a few more stories about the political activism and not so much about the teenaged drinking parties. It’s not that I can’t forgive Gilman or the other fifty or a hundred writers whose coming-of-age stories involve sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. It’s that all those stories sound so much alike.
Fortunately, Gilman keeps her promise to tell us more than her idiot-girl moments. She remembers girly-girl moments from childhood: without giving any thought to the actual job descriptions of an airline stewardess versus a marine biologist, she thought she wanted to be a stewardess just because it had that princessly feminine ending...why hadn’t the English language offered her the dream of being a biologess? She warned herself that meeting a celebrity she admired would probably be disappointing, embarrassing...and it wasn’t. She declared herself a Communist while working at a proletarian food-service job, then morphed into something like a conservative after seeing what taxes did to a minimum-wage paycheque. She got long-term jobs through connections...and, with delightful modesty and good humor, leaves readers to raise the question of whether the charm, wit, and candor of her writing might have been considered, after all.
After spending her formative years in the North, Gilman transplanted easily to Washington...and continued to be so provincial it hurt. The wild road trip story, an obligatory part of coming of age in her day, derives most of its excitement from Gilman’s paralyzing fear of the stereotypes of country people, and of “The South,” that she never really questions. Gilman, herself, eventually does a little better with her provincial attitudes when she gets an opportunity to go to Switzerland, but most of her friends seemed to have their stereotypes of Switzerland mixed up with their stereotypes of Sweden.
So who’s the hypocrite in the pouffy white dress? The title of this book is explained toward the end. Gilman does not come across as a hypocrite. She’s not ashamed to admit that she discovered tthe magic of anti-fashion clothing only as a bride. That does take fortitude...I made that discovery in junior high school, but being south of the Mason-Dixon Line helps.
Who should read this book? Women who were (or weren’t) feminists in 1970, who may want to know what growing up with high feminist consciousness was like. Women who were born in the 1950s, 1960s, or even 1970s, who may want to compare notes. Mick Jagger fans, and people who’ve never liked Mick Jagger much but are willing to be persuaded that he’s had moments of niceness. Men who want to read about the sex lives of idiot girls. And anybody who enjoys witty memoirs. I could do without the inflated praise blurb writers have heaped on this book (“If you don’t absolutely love this book, you are simply dead inside,” Laurie Notaro gushed); nobody likes reviews that “sound like advertisements”...but Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress is, in the most modest, restrained, temperamentally conservative terms, a delightful read.
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