Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 18, 1992 TAG: 9202180194
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
WRITING LOCATED SELF-ESTEEM
When Gloria Steinem sat down to write a new book four years ago, she was recovering from a brush with breast cancer. Ms. magazine, which she had co-founded and nurtured, had been sold. Her relationship with real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman had fallen apart. The writer in Steinem was frustrated that she had not produced anything longer than magazine articles, which were collected in an earlier book. And she had not saved a cent.With a $700,000 advance and a longing to write about self-esteem ("We write what we need"), Steinem spent several months putting together a 250-page manuscript. But it was not until a friend read the first draft that she began to explore what would become the true spine of the book.
"I don't know how to tell you this," said the friend, a therapist, "but I think you have a self-esteem problem. You forgot to put yourself in."
Steinem was devastated. But over the next three years she stayed put and wrote and rewrote, instead of traveling five days a week for the cause. She also sought psychological counseling, but it all did not come together easily.
"In every chapter I recapitulated the process of writing the book," she says. "I would write a chapter, leave myself out and then start again."
"I finally began to admit," she writes, "that I, too, was more aware of other people's feelings than my own; that I had been repeating the patterns of my childhood without recognizing them . . . that my image of myself was very distant from other people's image of me; that, in short, my childhood years - a part of my life I thought I had walled off - were still shaping the present as surely as a concealed magnet shapes metal dust."
Steinem wove her own experiences with inspirational tales of others, from a lesbian activist to Mohandas Gandhi. The result is a compilation of philosophy, politics, history, several relentlessly cheery self-help homilies and stories from Steinem's 20 years of witnessing revolution.