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.
★ 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.)
". . . An insightful gaggle of essays [that] 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 . . . .' This is a hoot." — Publishers Weekly, starred review
"A master of the long-form personal essay. . . The author’s candor, curiosity, humor, and gift for phrasemaking are engaging regardless of the topic. . . Yet more compelling work from a unique mind." — Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"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, author of You Know You Want This: "Cat Person" and Other Stories
Praise for Eileen Pollack: “Eileen Pollack is one of the smartest, funniest, and most companionable novelists out there.” — Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances
Praise for The Professor of Immortality: “Pollack (Breaking and Entering) adds a hearty dose of maternal fretting to her solid fictionalization of the Unabomber case.” — Publishers Weekly
“An earnest . . . examination of the side effects of technology on humanity.” — Kirkus Reviews
“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, author of Bowlaway
“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, author of Those Who Knew
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.
Praise for Eileen Pollack: “Eileen Pollack is one of the smartest, funniest, and most companionable novelists out there.
"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."
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.
★ 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.
