My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem
The last Gloria Steinem book i read was Revolution From Within, at the age of 27, when I thought a was having a crisis of existentialism and aging. Hahahahahhaha!!! [sigh]
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that our society doesn’t stop to learn enough from our own elders. I wonder why that is? Gloria, who has spent her entire life traveling the road, talking to people, and learning from them, shares vignettes of her life and experience with us in this book. It’s an interesting approach, and the result is a mix of tidbits ranging from things I have little interest in to things I wish she’d write an entire book about on it’s own. What it does do is take us traveling with her through her tales of life on the road.
We had a wonderful book club discussion about this book, even though at the time of our meeting not one of us had managed to finish it. Our club is an interesting mix of vibrant and intelligent women. One is becoming a wine connoisseur, one is an engineer, one holds multiple degrees including one in theology and one is a senior sales executive. Or, to look at it a different way, one is a young millennial and 3 are in or about their fifties. And yet another: one has children and three do not (soon to be two and two).
There have been many ways in which our lives and experiences have separated us (and joined us), all of which have lead to more enriching book club discussions, but one that never before occurred to me was my experience of growing up privileged versus their childhoods. In my case, I had the good fortune of parents who stayed married at least until I left home for university, a single home for my entire childhood, enough (although not an excess of) money to do and have more or less anything we wanted. In their case, they had to struggle through broken families rebuilt with step-parents and siblings, financial difficulties, frequent moving from place to place, immigrating to a new country and struggling to find a home. The struggles faced in their respective childhoods have lead to survivalism and determination to accomplish what perhaps felt out of reach at one time. In my case, with a seemingly solid family base remained intact until after I left home, I was very fortunate to have a pretty easy life. Our discussion was a good reminder to me of that.
I wasn’t without difficulties of my own difficulties, but they were a bit different. When I started high school, my childhood best friend suddenly “unfriended” me and became the ringleader of a group of students who picked on me for the next 5 years. I navigated through the bullying, made new friends and was pretty happy, and then my high school best friend got a ride home from grade 12 prom with my date and got all make-out-y with him in the car. Now, this is a kind of high school right-of-passage thing that’s probably happened to everyone, but to my mind I had two best friends in my life to that point and I was betrayed by both of them. Today, I realize, I have acquired a fair number of behaviours that are all tactics designed to protect myself from that kind of betrayal again. It’s survivalism, in a way, but it’s protectionism, not determination, and I admire that determination in my book club friends. They are such strong women and they should be proud of who they have become.
No matter what you might think of Gloria Steinem and her politics and activism, it can’t be denied that she has a great power to listen to people and cause them to reflect on their own lives and choices. I love that.
Rating: Buy it. You’ll want to read bits of this again.