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I was asked to review this book in 2019, shortly after its publication. One might think that the gap in time between then and now is attributable to the Covid-19 pandemic and the unprecedented seismic events, local and global, that ensued. That's partly true. The rest of the story is more flesh and bone. I had my children in these few years, and spent most of the intervening time contending with similarly cataclysmic shifts within me, amid the mind- and life-altering transformations of the pandemic.
I held off on opening this book. Though it is a mere 204 pages, its bold title and cadre of psychoanalytic luminaries on the topic of women and womanhood daunted me, particularly in the hazy, uncertain days of new motherhood. The last thing I wanted was to open up my conflicts regarding desire, ambition, and leadership, when what I needed was to feel sure about something in the new identity I'd begun to form. I'd look guiltily at the book sitting on my desk before I hurried off to chase that certainty.
When eventually I approached the book, in the “new normal,” I devoured it. Again and again. Though an academic text in some ways, it spoke to me plainly, and for once I didn't need to search far and wide for understanding. It's thanks to my identities as a psychoanalytic candidate and psychiatrist that I was introduced to these pages, but it's because of all the other identities I hold that I felt them deeply—woman, mother, immigrant. This volume is for anyone interested in understanding the complex psychological factors that characterize the often missing, misunderstood, or misrepresented experience of women. While covering a range of psychoanalytic concepts and history, the book is current, ardent, and inherently a conversation.