Customer Reviews

Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories

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Katha Pollitt has long been revered for her sharp feminist writings, but in "Learning to Drive" she shows her more vulnerable side. Her skills as a poet carry these lovely musings about her parents, her daughter, her own fragile aging self, and the various boyfriends and husbands who have puzzled and amazed her through the years. I especially love the way she ends the collection, with thoughts about the most universal of subjects - beauty, aging, death. Fighting off the embarrassing urge to have plastic surgery, she realizes that her face carries in its contours the details of her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. "I like to think about the echoes of them, and of me, in my daughter's face, and the unexplained folds and angles that remind us that we are all made up of recombined bits of ancient ancestors, even if we don't know who they are." Pollitt is a wise, witty, complicated woman, and I loved spending time with her through this book.

Gentle Reader, ignore the natterings of the insipid NY Times reviewer and run, do not walk, to read Katha Pollitt's latest. It is pure pleasure. Witty, erudite, wise, poignant, insightful, and sometimes hilarious. I started to browse in it and came up for air two hours later to find I'd missed my favorite NPR Saturday shows.

John Freeman in the Newark Star-Ledger:

One cannot open a publication these days without stumbling upon a personal essay. Unfortunately, the awkward confessions outnumber the moving ones - and the finely written are rare indeed.

In this jungle of self-revelation, however, there is a bird which manages to embody all three qualities. And in the past couple of years, many have sprung from the aerie of Katha Pollitt's imagination.

"Learning to Drive," Pollitt's hilarious, elegant new book of personal essays, collects these pieces into one volume. If a book could contain awkward silences, this one could fill a cathedral with them.

Herein Pollitt admits to Web-stalking her ex-boyfriend, of continuously failing her driver's test, of attending a Marxist study group only to spend most of her time procrastinating for the weekly reading.

Pollitt, an award-winning poet and columnist for the Nation, knows she can't simply dump this information onto the page and expect a reader's natural sympathy to do the rest. Each story is a fine, crafted piece of comic writing, with expert turns of phrase.

"Information was what I wanted from her boyfriend's ex-lovers," she writes in a piece about befriending one of his ex-lovers: "the underside of the carpet I thought I had been standing on." A piece on feminism has this description of Iris Murdoch: "she looks a bit like an intelligent potato."

This kind of wit is hard to come by, harder still in a writer so thoughtful. One almost wishes Pollitt didn't have to go through such travails to deliver it to us - but, selfishly, most readers should take this book and run.

Katha Pollitt's "Learning to Drive" is fabulous -- smart, fuuny, and full of insight into men and women. The opening essays on her philandering boyfriend caused a sensation when they first appeared in The New Yorker--especially "Cyberstalker," about stalking the ex-boyfriend on the internet. The nine new essays are terrific. My personal favorite is the one about her Marxist study group: it seemed kind of useless at the time, but nevertheless she now misses "something wonderful and noble" in the wild utopian hope for a world of equality.

Katha Pollitt has long been known for her sharp wit and her rare ability to take an issue that confounds most social and political commentators and get right to the heart of it. I have always felt a little awestruck at her talents as an essayist, but this book impressed me, and moved me, in a totally new way. I was reminded of a quote from bell hooks: "It is easier to stand before a public world and demand justice (equal pay for equal work, reproductive freedom and more) than it is to stand in the space of our private longings for love and connection and call for a change in how we make love, how we create partnerships." In "Learning to Drive" Pollitt turns the lens onto herself, her relationships and her vulnerabilities with candor and remarkable courage, but her work of memoir is distinguished from others by her skill at making the connections between her private longings and the society that shapes them.

Katha Pollitt is that rare writer whose piercing intellect and emotional honesty are matched by wit and literary grace. All Pollitt's gifts are on display in this sparkling little volume. In eleven deeply personal essays, she chronicles with insight and eloquence, the landscape of her life and proves that feminism does not mean never saying you're vulnerable.

Katha Pollitt delivers political insight in her columns for the Nation. She crafts beautiful poems for the New Yorker and the Paris Review. And now she has turned her hand to memoir in this elegant collection of essays about life as daughter, mother, and live-in lover. The title piece, "Learning to Drive," will attract readers who have experienced a bitter romantic break-up and can't seem to stop thinking about revenge. Others will enjoy witty reflections about political study groups and parenting.

I went into Learning to Drive as a fan of KP's essays in The Nation and remain so. The author's keen wit in there front and center. Some of the reviews tried to put across that she was some kind of a loon for cyberstalking the ex-boyfriend. But it wasn't just that he walked out--he seems to have been living a bizarre double life, which included intimacy with women they both knew. I think KP's post-breakup "research" was just her way of trying to process a deeply weird scenario. Yes, we'd all like to think we'd be above it but miles & mocassins, &c. Anyway, the bad breakup is only a small part of this book, and it's always a delight to read KP holding forth on politics, culture, and the infinite number of ways Americans can be hypocritical on the subject of women's roles from daughters to wives to mothers.

As a general rule I have found that books that consist of previously published columns and suchlike material bundled together to make a book usually aren't all that good; that they tend to be a "greatest hits" compendium of the author's (supposedly) best work in the opinion of some publishing house book editor. Pollitt's book Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories is the rare exception to my rule.

Learning to Drive is a coherent and tenderly personal progress report of Pollitt's private life and growth as culled from assorted columns published in the Nation and the New Yorker magazines. As someone or other once famously said: "The personal is the political." And Pollitt goes on to show exactly how true that observation really is.
The "personal is political" meme therefore says that our personal lives are in considerable part politically delimited and determined so that improving our personal lives means we must collectively address our lives and relationships in political terms.

The choices we make personally have political implications. Obviously the choice to be an activist or not or to support this or that political project has political implications even though it is personally undertaken. But as Pollitt shows, so do our most personal relationships. All the choices we make, even the ones that seem totally apolitical and personal, have political implications. The choice to wear make-up or not, to watch TV or not, to eat this or that or not, to wear this or that item of clothing, to use a bank or not, or as in Pollitt's case, whether to put up with an obviously unfaithful boyfriend, is a personal choice, but it is also a political one.

Pollitt's mini-memoir is also replete with refreshing and honest insights about the limits of ideological purity when one's chosen ideology founders in real life practice. One of the best ongoing themes in this work is the story of her parents and especially Pollitt's father, who although a dedicated card-carrying member of the Communist Party, gives up the famous line from Stalin about having to `break eggs to make an omelet', that (paraphrasing from memory here), "I saw a lot of broken eggs, but never any omelets." Pollitt observes that her father never gave up his Marxist ideology, but he could honestly admit to its failures and shortcomings. That observation is quite Orwellian and in the most positive and affirming of ways, too. As in the way that Orwell, as a man of the Left, had no compunctions about saying what he really thought or saw, regardless of his chosen ideological leanings.

Katha Pollitt's book succeeds in much the same way; she never renounces her political views, but she isn't blindly trying to superimpose ideology in place of reality by trying to call a circle a square, either.

I've always loved Katha Pollitt, and this book was no exception. I was blown away - I didn't expect it to be so laugh out loud funny and I certainly didn't expect to relate. My favorite stories were the ones about herself, which seems to go against the general consensus.

Reading reviews of the book after the fact, Pollitt has gotten a lot of flack for this one. The reason that so many people expressed discomfort and dislike was a major part of why I loved it. Feminists aren't supposed to display vulnerability, and they're certainly not supposed to air the feelings and experiences in regard to men that she does. A feminist isn't supposed to be "reduced" to all of the emotional things we negatively associate with women.

I felt privileged to witness her grapple with this vulnerable, embarrassing, human side in her stories. There was definitely a time when I would have been sad to read this book, wondering what would have possessed her to think it was okay to show this side. Now, I find myself trying to negotiate these boundaries all the time - the ones that don't necessarily "mesh" with the front that a world hostile to feminism requires one to espouse. Highly recommended.