nonfiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. THE POWER NOTEBOOKSBy Katie Roiphe Throughout her career, which has included books praising messy lives and untraditional marriages, Katie Roiphe has militated against women defining themselves as victims, arguing — most controversially in her 1993 book “The Morning After” — that we give our power away when we see ourselves as fragile beings in need of protection from overbearing men; that our sexual experience, even in fraught encounters, may be more complex than terms like “date rape” or “abuse” would seem to allow. In her searching, pensive new book, “The Power Notebooks,” Roiphe turns her theorizing on herself. Departing from the argumentative style for which she is best known, she records instead, in a series of short, diarylike essays, the “uncertainties, doubts, shifts” that preoccupied her during a particularly tumultuous period and prompted her to reflect on the history of her romantic relationships with men.
The book encompasses the breakdown of her first marriage and the beginning of her second, to a former addict who threatens her need for stability but to whom she nevertheless feels bound for life. In between are affairs with other men of varying duration, one of which results in the birth of her second child. “Is there a particular kind of abjection that some of us are drawn to, participate in, possibly romanticize? ” she asks, while also wondering, touchingly — at this point as a single mother of two — “what deep security am I withholding from the children?
” by insisting on living life on her own terms. Roiphe’s aim is to investigate a profound contradiction within herself, between her submissive attitude toward men she desires and her fierce, feminist self-reliance. She revisits an article she wrote in her 20s about her initiation into sex, at 15, by a rabbi more than twice her age. He may have had power in the relationship, she wrote, but so did she; she was complicit in the seduction: “If he was exploiting me in the traditional ways in which older men exploit young girls, I was exploiting him in the less well publicized ways in which young girls exploit older men.
” She now believes the piece was not “dishonest,” but nevertheless she was “still obscuring something” in the telling. “Even as I wrote, I was aware of something unruly I couldn’t quite catch in words, something just beyond my reach. ” In her 20s, she had been trying to turn the story into one of “empowerment,” but in her hurry not to occupy the victim role, she lost track of the “wrongness” of the relationship. “Can I admit even now that whatever else was going on, he had power over me and he misused that power?
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” A direct answer to the question may be unnecessary, but it doesn’t actually arrive. In the next essay, Roiphe shares a paragraph from a school assignment by her teenage daughter, a set of instructions the girl has written to herself about how to ride the subway: “Move away from those creepy men who watch and talk about you, and make sure to adjust your shirt so it doesn’t show any skin. Actually, put your sweatshirt on. That will help.
” But rather than railing against the men on the subway ogling her 14-year-old, Roiphe focuses instead on her daughter’s insight: She has learned to perceive her sexual power as a “threat” from which she must protect herself. Interludes on the private lives of writers including Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Rhys and Mary McCarthy allow Roiphe a less personal space in which to wonder how women simultaneously claim power over and cede it to the men they love. “Why did Edith Wharton, at the height of her success, write to her faithless lover, ‘I don’t want to win — I want to lose everything to you! ’?
” she asks. How did Sylvia Plath try to “solve the problem of herself,” so that her husband, Ted Hughes, would love her? And, more broadly, how can you have power and still be a woman to whom men do bad things? Roiphe has a tendency to think mainly about how power affects her and women like her — white, straight, upper-middle-class, with elite educations and successful careers.
Perhaps because she rose to prominence during the 1990s, the media world she describes doesn’t seem to have changed much since then. All her friends and lovers seem to be heterosexual and rich. All seem to have houses in the city and houses in the country.
“I half expected John F.”
Kennedy Jr. to saunter across the page, a copy of George rolled up under his arm. Today, the media’s center of gravity has shifted to Twitter, a great democratizer or a pernicious evil, depending on whom you ask and, probably, when you were born. In an essay called “Twitter,” Roiphe details the impact on her of her infamous 2018 article in Harper’s about #MeToo, for which she was attacked online before it even appeared.
The article argued that the #MeToo movement was failing to distinguish between petty offenses and serious assaults, and gave as an example a spreadsheet, then making the rounds in publishing circles, listing men who anonymous tipsters claimed had transgressed professional boundaries in ways ranging from inappropriate flirting to rape. Before Roiphe’s article was published, rumors circulated that she would be naming the spreadsheet’s anonymous female creator — a fact checker’s email to the woman implied as much — and though in the end the woman’s name was not included, the vitriol directed at Roiphe online was intense. The hate keeps her up at night. She worries no one will hire her to write again.
She fantasizes about “going out to coffee with a stranger who hates me. … What happens when there is an actual human confrontation with this vivid disembodied hate? ” Notably, though, she does not describe the events that triggered the online fury, or spare a thought about the harm it might have caused had she unmasked the spreadsheet’s author. She doesn’t worry about whether the woman might have trouble getting work as a result.
(By the time Roiphe’s article came out, the woman had outed herself in an article for The Cut. ) For all her commitment to honesty, Roiphe has blind spots, including an inability to reckon with her own professional clout. Finally, there is something troubling about the way abuse figures in these essays. Early on, Roiphe recalls how “H.
,” her now ex-husband, once kicked her out of their car and made her walk more than a mile home carrying their baby. Neighbors heard the frequent yelling in their apartment; the landlord came to check on them. The shouting was so bad that the baby trembled and couldn’t eat. But Roiphe balks before calling this “abuse.
” The word reeks of jargon, she says; it “thinks your thoughts for you,” in George Orwell’s phrase. “The word abusive strikes me as impossible,” she concludes, “not because of what it says about H. but because of what it says about me. ” H.
may have his own version of things, she says. “Had I done something intolerable or said something awful? ” These passages made me want to sit Roiphe down and say: “Katie! There’s nothing you could have said or done that would justify kicking you and your baby out of the car.
” Chalking this kind of behavior up to complexity is how we encourage women to censor themselves, to fail to speak up when they are threatened. It’s not Twitter groupthink to say: This is not acceptable. Roiphe’s larger goal here is to investigate the lived reality of her romantic dynamics, not to get on a soap box and opine. The result is a beautifully written and thoughtful book.
But there is a limit to the responsibility that women can take, the ambiguity in which we can dwell; at a certain point, we have a duty to make men who behave like this acknowledge their culpability.
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