Maybe It's Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman

by Eileen Pollack

Overview

Eileen is too smart for the third grade, but when she gets a chance to be skipped ahead, she fails the test. The clownish school psychologist tries to gain her trust with an offer of Oreos, but she refuses. After all, he is a stranger and might try to poison her! This is the start of the author’s love-hate relationship with the rules as they were laid out for a girl in the 1960s and as they persist in some form today. As she ascends through a physics degree at Yale that dashes her hopes for love and romance, to a post-graduate summer that leaves her “peed on, shot at, and kidnapped,” to a marriage of supposed equals in which she is expected to do all the housework, child-rearing, and bill paying and make sure the Roto-Rooter guy arrives on time, Pollack shares with poignant humor the trials of being smart and female in a world in which women are rarely appreciated for both their bodies and their minds. Maybe It’s Me is a question all women have asked themselves. But Pollack’s message will resonate with readers of all genders as a story of the very human search for connection, love, acceptance, and self-respect. The author of the groundbreaking memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club, Pollack proves that even in her sixties, wiser and more bruised but no less hilarious, she is still very much in the game.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953002211
Publisher:	Delphinium
Publication date:	01/24/2023
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Eileen Pollack grew up in Liberty, N.Y., the heart of the Jewish Catskills. One of the first two women to graduate from Yale with a BS in physics, she earned an MFA in creative writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of five critically acclaimed novels and two award-winning collections of short fiction. Pollack’s work of creative nonfiction Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull was made into a movie starring Jessica Chastain. Her investigative memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine and went viral. “The Bris” appeared in the Best American Short Stories 2007; “Pigeons” was selected for Best American Essays 2013 and “Righteous Gentile” for Best American Travel Writing 2018. A former director of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, she now lives and writes in Boston.

Table of Contents

Pigeons 1

Thin Air 14

The Jewish Shah 27

Ranch House 51

A Friendly Book of Facts for Boys and Girls 70

The House of the World 81

I Tried to Raise a Jew and He Turned Out a Communist 100

Righteous Gentile 104

The Young Friends Pleasure and Benefit Society 116

All of Us, We All Are Arameans 126

Didn't Anyone Tell You 176

Hallucinations 188

HoJo's 196

One a Day 210

Maybe It's Me 227

How Sweet the Sound 258

Editorial Reviews

"Eileen Pollack's essay collection Maybe It's Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman asks the kind of probing questions that all autobiographical writing ought to pose, but only the most fearless dares to answer. 'Why am I the way I am? What experiences shaped me into the person I've become? What can I see now, looking back on my past, that I couldn't see then?' With a clear eye and a sharp wit, Pollack traces the path by which an outwardly ordinary girlhood gave rise to an extraordinary woman."

Kristen Roupenian

Eileen Pollack’s essays are striking for their tender, smart, explorations of love and longing, fear and injustice, memory and history, and the everyday project of claiming one’s place in the world. An illuminating portrait of womanhood and all its sorrows, challenges, and triumphs, Maybe It’s Me is a marvelous collection with a bold, powerful sensibility.” — Natalie Bakopoulus, author of The Green Shore and Scorpionfish

“Pollack’s riffs on online dating, admittedly an easy target, are hilarious. And her rueful observations about the challenges smart, accomplished women face in heterosexual relationships are even more resonant.... [Her] prose is exact and lucid, devoid of self-conscious flourishes.” — Forward

From the Publisher

Eileen Pollack’s essays are striking for their tender, smart, explorations of love and longing, fear and injustice, memory and history, and the everyday project of claiming one’s place in the world. An illuminating portrait of womanhood and all its sorrows, challenges, and triumphs, Maybe It’s Me is a marvelous collection with a bold, powerful sensibility.

Natalie Bakopoulus

★ 10/18/2021

Novelist Pollack (The Only Woman in the Room) delivers an insightful gaggle of essays about her life, largely through the lens of being an American Jewish woman. With wry intellect, she reflects on coming of age in New York’s “Borscht Belt” in the 1960s with her “soulmate,” a parakeet named Ish Kabibble; wistfully mourns the summer waitressing job where, at 16, she learned more about herself than what went into Howard Johnson’s “lumpy” milkshakes; explores such universal dilemmas as dating via apps as an adult (“If you tell me you are six feet tall, and when you show up you are five foot two, you know what I am going to think you are? A liar”); and ruefully laments the harsh realities of growing older (“Here is what it is like to be in your sixties. You lie in bed wondering if anyone will ever see your breasts again”). Together these essays underscore Pollack’s knack for wringing humor from the mundane, successfully striking at the paradoxical ways in which “sex and birth (and love) can be beautiful as well as ugly, wondrous as well as painful, enticing and mysterious as well as frightening and repulsive.” This is a hoot. Agent: Jenni Ferrari-Adler, Union Literary. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

In this exceptional novel, Eileen Pollack writes with great immediacy about the impact of grief on a parent’s perception of the world. Tender, wry, full of unexpected revelations, The Professor of Immortality gripped me from the first scene, and the urgent questions it poses have stayed with me.

Idra Novey

Praise for Eileen Pollack: “Eileen Pollack is one of the smartest, funniest, and most companionable novelists out there.

Rivka Galchen

The Professor of Immortality is intimate and sweeping, funny and terrifying, and most of all dead-on in its observations of what it means to want to know everything about people we love while still being frightened of what we might find out: it’s a detective story, and a story of motherlove. Eileen Pollack is a splendid writer.

Elizabeth McCracken

★ 2021-09-29
A master of the long-form personal essay discourses on a variety of subjects.

Novelist, physicist, and writing professor Pollack serves up 16 essays, some previously published in Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, New England Review, and other literary journals, digging deep into memoir material and other topics of interest to her. Among others, these include whether the shah of Iran could possibly be Jewish, as a friend of her family claimed, and a critical dissection of an antiquated sex education book she was given as a child. “The hideous black-and-white diagram of 'the mother's reproductive system' resembled a disapproving, big-nosed secretary in hideous cat's eye glasses, while the map of 'the father's reproductive system' reminded me of an evil alien with testicles for eyes and a penis and foreskin for the nose," she writes. The author’s candor, curiosity, humor, and gift for phrasemaking are engaging regardless of the topic, many of which are misfortunes of varying severity. Pollack’s childhood was largely unhappy, as she was singled out in school for both her intelligence and her orneriness, but many of her classmates, it turns out, suffered much worse. Later in life, she was “peed on, shot at, and kidnapped”—all in one summer. After her marriage, which produced her lovely son ("I Tried To Raise a Jew and He Turned Out a Communist"), she had little luck with men. There was the "Righteous Gentile”—"When I told my mother I was dating a Polish Catholic, the abyss that opened in our conversation was so deep and dark I could see three generations of our family tumble into it"—followed by a slew of lesser men, documented in the title essay, aptly subtitled "The One Woman Show I'll Never Perform in Public." Why not? At almost 30 pages, it's ripe for a comedy special.

Yet more compelling work from a unique mind.

Kirkus Reviews