The Female Persuasion, Meg Wolitzer

5 stars

First Sentence: Greer Kadetsky met Faith Frank in October of 2006 at Ryland College, where Faith had come to deliver the Edmund and Wilhelmina Ryland Memorial Lecture; and though that night the chapel was full of students, some of them boiling over with the loudmouthed commentary, it seemed astonishing but true that out of everyone there, Greer was the one to interest Faith.

Thoughts: I was looking over the other reviews on GoodReads as I am wont to do when I’m stuck on ideas, and I noticed that everyone said this book is about feminism and they didn’t like it. We must have been reading different books again, because I thought this book was about the difference between the life you plan for yourself in your early twenties and the life you end up living after graduating college. Also there is some feminism. Also, I liked it.

Liking it does not mean I didn’t spend the entire book yelling at the characters. Every single one of them spent at least part of the story working against their own self-interests. Half of them manage to redeem themselves. One of them I still can’t stand even after redemption.

Our main characters are Greer and Cory. They’ve been dating since high school and hope to keep their relationship going through college and then get married. They manage to keep the relationship going, but the marriage doesn’t happen because, as anyone over thirty can tell you, college changes everything. It certainly changed Greer.

She started college as a shy, quiet, bookish girl. Then she went to her first round of weekend college parties with a girl in her dorm named Zee. While they were drinking and partying, the School Creeper came by and creeped on Greer. It wasn’t exactly sexual assault, but it was definitely sitting on sexual assault’s doorstep. Later Greer found out the Creeper had been creeping on other girls at the school and they spoke out. A disciplinary board was formed, the Creeper was sternly told to knock it off, he said he was very sorry, and the board said that’s okay, go back to class now.

Obviously, Greer is not happy about this. She tries to speak out again, but gets slapped down. Then Zee takes her to a lecture by noted feminist Faith Frank. At the Q&A, Greer asks Faith what she should do about the whole Creeper Situation. Faith tells her to keep speaking out. Afterwards they meet in the ladies’ room and Faith gives Greer her card. This leads to Greer (eventually) getting hired on at Faith’s foundation, Loci, writing speeches for feminist conferences and talks. She is the only one to achieve her college dreams.

Zee had planned to get a job with Faith as well, but that didn’t work out thanks to Greer being a complete twat. She works as a paralegal for her big-shot judge parents for a while before saying the heck with this and taking a job with a sketchy educational foundation. There Zee finds both the love of her life and her true calling as a trauma therapist. Zee is the most sympathetic character in the whole book. Her female role models all did her dirty when she was a teenager (including her counselor who was unforgivable) but she was stronger than they thought and made the best life for herself. I like Zee.

I do not like Cory even though he was the only other character who had real trauma in his life. Maybe it was because we first meet him as a cringey, sex-obsessed teenage boy and then as a cringey testosterone-fueled stock bro wannabe. The only good luck he had was quitting his job as a stock bro before the financial collapse of 2008, but the reason why was because his little brother was killed in a terrible accident, so maybe no luck there. The accident ended up tearing Cory’s family apart. His father went back to Portugal, leaving Cory to deal with his mother who went into a complete emotional collapse. Cory did the best he could, taking over his mother’s house-cleaning business so they’d have some money coming in, but he’s overwhelmed with grief as well. Eventually he channels his grief into his new passion: video games.

Greer, meanwhile, is doing her best to lose all the goodwill she gained in the early part of the book. She becomes completely obsessed with Faith Frank to the extent that she gives up her vegetarianism for a bite of steak because Faith grilled it. Honestly, I was surprised she didn’t have a shrine to Faith in her apartment. And believe me, Faith didn’t deserve all the adulation. She was stuck in the feminism of the 1970s, despite her insistence that she’s part of the modern movement. (Narrator: she was not.) Eventually the scales are ripped off of Greer’s eyes regarding both Faith and her foundation and she finally moves on with her life.

The ending of this book made me very angry but I’ll get into that in a footnote because it’s a spoiler.*

Despite all the ranting above, I really did like this book. The characters were entertainingly annoying. Zee made up for a lot of the shortcomings of everyone else. This is also the most true-to-life story about post-college life in the early 2000s, and you can trust me because I lived it. What I do for money now has very little to do with what I went to school for but I think I’m better off because of that. One thing we’ve learned from 2008 is how to make our own way.

Side note: this book has one of the prettiest covers I’ve seen. The current cover art style seems to be lots of bright colors in various arrangements, but this one with the triangles and stripes works well. It’s the reason why I pulled this book off the shelf instead of the others. It’s cheerful. We could all use a lot more cheerfulness in our lives.

*SPOILER FOOTNOTE: I really didn’t want Greer and Cory to end up together after all but dammit that’s what they did. I’m sure it was supposed to be so very romantic but I hated them together.