Girl Rearing [Hardcover]

Marcia Aldrich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1998

This is a memoir about growing up female in America. The last of four daughters, the author grows up in the wake of tragedy when her sister drowns, and is brought up under the authority of her mother's ideas of proper cleanliness, posture and feminine destiny. Never fulfilling expectations, she makes a doomed marriage and suffers a breakdown, but gradually her own voice emerges, one that has negotiated her mother's ideas of the feminine with her own rebellion. She must raise her own daughter and once again face the mysteries of her mother's feminine arts.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Successfully recounting a life without true suffering requires a certain degree of cool objectivity, critical self-awareness and humane wisdom. Unfortunately, Aldrich's first book of roughly chronological essays (some of which originally appeared in the Northwest Review) lacks such depth. Aldrich grew up as the comfortably middle-class child of an estate lawyer and a homemaker. The grievances of her childhood seem to be that her room was too pink; she didn't like her given name; she had to eat tomatoes; and her mother was overwhelmingly tidy. It can be hard to see beyond the kvetching to the writing, but even that can seem strained, as in these two passages about the loathed fruit: "So I ate the tomato, but not without consequences for her who made me eat it" and, later, in a deeply improbable dialogue, "I hate the way sliced tomatoes lay inert on cold white plates. Lizzie Borden hated tomatoes." What the reader immediately sees, but Aldrich doesn't seem to, is that her mother, the child of an early divorce whose first husband (not Aldrich's father) and eldest daughter both died tragically, desperately needed to impose order and control in the domestic sphere that she lacked in the larger world. And though she might have been a neatnik, she did rebel against the tyranny that dinnertime held over a woman's life in the '50s and '60s when Aldrich was growing up. For her part, Aldrich, like many other comfortable baby boomers, lacked specific grievances but luxuriated in the romance of rebellion. By comparison to memoirs of dire poverty, abuse, persecution, this comes across as profoundly self-indulgent.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Aldrich begins this overwhelmingly sad memoir by detailing her birth in an alley. Devastated by her foiled plans for the birth, Aldrich's mother continues to block the experience and, indirectly, her new daughter out of her mind. Isolation and guilt haunt Aldrich for the rest of her life and keep her with "one foot in life and one foot in death, precarious there, balancing." In the tradition of Wally Lamb's fictional She's Come Undone (LJ 5/1/92) Aldrich's story moves through an adolescence where, among other horrors, she helplessly stands ashore as one of her sisters drowns in a storm, and an adult life filled with failed romantic and platonic relationships. All of this leads to a nervous breakdown that forces her to analyze her past and question some of her deepest feelingsAincluding her very real fear of repeating the pattern with her own daughter. Though Aldrich succeeds in drawing the reader into her tragedies, her unwavering sadness will defeat many others.AEmily Jones, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 223 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; First edition. edition (September 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393027481
• ISBN-13: 978-0393027488
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,679,451 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Something New, September 9, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Girl Rearing (Hardcover)

Though it's subtitled "Memoir of a Girlhood Gone Astray," this is not a memoir in any usual sense. Aldrich tells you in subtle and not so subtle ways that she doesn't give a hoot about the rituals of sincerity that define the popular memoir in its contemporary form. This book proceeds on its own terms, in a series of stories, essays, parables, dialogues, and rants that give an account of "M," the heroine, who's knocking on the door of American Girlhood like somebody in a story by Kafka. Her antagonist - the doorkeeper so to speak - is her mother, a character who looms "like giants in wartime, beyond kissing." The parts of this comic drama are alternately hilarious, bitter, and heartbreaking, and the whole is as difficult to pigeonhole as Thoreau's "Walden" - another book you could call a memoir if you wanted to.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Education of M, March 21, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Girl Rearing (Hardcover)

In her experimental memoir, GIRL REARING, Marcia Aldrich prefers a literary and expansive notion of truth-telling to the literal and constrained "just the facts, ma'am"-style often associated with autobiography. As such, her GIRL REARING belongs in the tradition of Henry Adams' THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS, Gertrude Stein's AUTOBIOGRAPY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS, Mary McCarthy's MEMORIES OF A CATHOLIC GIRLHOOD, Maxine Hong Kingston's WOMAN WARRIOR, and Sandra Cisneros' HOUSE IN MANGO STREET. Like these other important works, GIRL REARING casts light on the relationship between the documentary imperative imposed on memoir and the invention necessary to tell a particular story in the way the author chooses. Aldrich offers readers the opportunity to revel in what memoir has always promised: a picaresque adventure in the voice of a distinctive "I." How readers view this "I," or Rousseau's or Augustine's for that matter, may have more to do with how fully we embrace the truths fiction can tell rather than the ones we insist facts provide. This "memoir of a girlhood gone astray" presents girl rearing as a relentless education in becoming small (through strict control of bodily appearance), unnoticed (through relegation to the powder room rather than the boardroom), and skilled only at things that do not give pleasure. At the heart of this training in psychic hygiene is a mother who is both overwhelmingly interested in the details of her daughter's upbringing and largely absent. The one source of emotional connection in M's girlhood results from a barely sanctioned foray into dirt: M, like so many girls before and after her, falls big for horses. It is a particular horse, Alert Indian, and an unconventional teacher, who give M her first access into physical control for the sake of pleasure rather than self-punishment, and she briefly thrives. Through Aldrich's moving and brilliantly written memoir, we come to see the artifice of girl rearing, of course, and its silent, psychic damage, but also more comprehensively that femininity itself is a fiction. Aldrich's tactical redirection of girl rearing's logic towards her own fictional self-fashioning in the mode of memoir is a compelling intervention in the representation - and living out - of femininity.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful book that defies the rules., October 28, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Girl Rearing (Hardcover)

Though it's subtitled "Memoir of a Girlhood Gone Astray," this is not a memoir in any usual sense of the term. Aldrich tells you in subtle and not so subtle ways that she doesn't give a fig for the facts or a hoot about the rituals of sincerity that define the genre in its contemporary form. This book proceeds on its own terms, in a series of stories, essays, parables, dialogues, and rants that give an account of "M," the heroine, who's knocking on the door of American Girlhood like somebody in a story by Kafka. Her antagonist--the doorkeeper so to speak--is her mother, a character who looms "like giants in wartime, beyond kissing," yet in one scene lays an old potato peeler on the counter for M to inspect, in wistful remembrance of the early days of marriage. The parts of this comic drama are alternately hilarious, bitter, and heartbreaking, and the whole is as difficult to pigeonhole as Thoreau's "Walden"--another book you could call a memoir if you wanted to.