Book reviews: 'Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves' and 'Notes to John'

'Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves' by Sophie Gilbert

"If you came of age around the late 1990s and early aughts, prepare to have the balloon string of sentimentality pried from your grip," said Maya Salam in The New York Times. Those years were cruel to American women in ways that warped the culture we live with still, and Atlantic critic Sophie Gilbert appears "intent on snapping Millennials out of any instinct to idealize the decades that shaped us." At the movies, as Gilbert points out, hits like American Pie and The Hangover made sexism a joke. In music, opinion-free pop idols like Britney Spears replaced outspoken rebels like Madonna. Degrading online porn, meanwhile, became ubiquitous, and all these strands contributed to a disdain for women that women themselves were taught to internalize. Gilbert's "blistering, sobering" book connects the dots, revealing "a previously uncharted map."

One of Gilbert's principle insights proves "so clear-eyed, it's startling," said Maggie Lange in The Washington Post. By the aughts, she argues, looking at women was America's most popular pastime. And troublingly, we resented the women who made us look. Gilbert shows "a particular talent" for spotting "galling" examples. In 2008, Esquire ran a photo of a topless Jessica Simpson on its cover and openly declared that the image was merely bait to draw readers to an unrelated story about the death of an Iraq War soldier. Simpson was nothing but a joke, and the best she could do was present herself as in on the gag. "What differentiates Gilbert from the recent reappraisals of the turn-of-the-21st-century misogyny is her objective." She's less interested in how this behavior affected celebrities like Simpson than how it harmed the rest of us, beginning with all the young women who were taught, in Gilbert's words, "that sex was our currency, and we were a joke."

Despite Girl on Girl's many strengths, I finished the book "looking for a bolder claim about where the real problem lies and what can be done about it," said Kate Womersley in The Guardian. Gilbert praises authors Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti, among others, for raising their voices to combat misogyny, but gives such voices too little room. And because she didn't want her book to lean heavily on anecdotal first-person writing, she "retreats from voicing her full indignation." Still, Gilbert's "skillful marshaling of evidence" is impressive, and her account of women's degradation since the late '90s "sounds a crescendo of doom toward this present moment," when women's rights are vanishing. Don't misread Gilbert's wry title as suggesting that women themselves are the problem. "It's the patriarchy, stupid."

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'Notes to John' by Joan Didion

Joan Didion may not have wanted the material in Notes to John published, said James Wolcott in Air Mail. "But here it is—ready or not." When the revered author died in 2021, she left behind a file of 150 unnumbered pages, all addressed to her husband, that summarize therapy sessions she attended from 1999 to 2002 when she was worried about her adult daughter's alcoholism and depression. "It would be misleading to give the impression that Notes to John is a writerly performance akin to The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights," the related memoirs Didion would subsequently write. But these collected notes are a gift to Didion fans, because they present "a more sympathetic self-portrait" than the polished books do. She's simply a mother, doing her best under trying circumstances.

It's "not a stretch" to trace the genesis of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights to these journals, said Heller McAlpin in NPR.org. In those acclaimed books, Didion dissected her own grief over the deaths of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 2003, and her daughter, Quintana, a mere 20 months later. Here, we see her digging into her neuroses under the guidance of a caring psychiatrist who believed that Quintana would benefit from the effort. And Didion was so fiercely attentive to her public image that she surely would have destroyed these documents if she felt the public should never see them. You can even sense in these "plainspoken" entries a kind of performance, said Taylor Antrim in Vogue. They show Didion laboring to know both herself and her daughter better. "Perhaps she wanted readers to know this, to know how hard she was working to persevere."

Whatever its value may be to parents facing a similar challenge, "this book is not art," said Lynn Steger Strong in The Atlantic. "Art-making lives in the act of crystallizing the mess of life into a tighter, sharper form." Though these pages do find Didion writing, the author as we see her here is "trapped and afraid, feeling helpless, entering sentences less to make new meaning than to get hold briefly of feelings that were in danger of slipping away." She was, in other words, human. "I'm not sure why we need a new book to know that."