Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories

Learning to Drive is an unforgettable self-portrait of the writer as a middle aged woman. Reviewers have rightly described these beautifully written autobiographical essays as wise, witty, and compassionate; because of the author's willingness to cast an unsparing eye on her own vulnerabilities and sorrows, they are also courageous and often deeply moving.

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 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.

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.