Clearly, a touchstone of the zeitgeist: Read what the New York Times had to say about “Commencement“, one of the hottest new summer reading books, currently on backorder in bookstores near you:
[The author, J. Courtney Sullivan] is brave to characterize the modern female condition as equally bewildering and empowering: ‘They were the first generation of women,” one character notes, “whose struggle with choice had nothing to do with getting it and everything to do with having too much of it — there were so many options that it felt impossible and exhausting to pick the right ones.’
Shannon Kelley
Barbara Kelley
I could write a novel (or at least a 5 paragraph essay) on this book. The characters were faced with and made lots of interesting choices, and their friends did not have a shortage of judgments about them, probably different judgments than those friends from a different generation would have made. As a reader you can’t help but judge their choices either, and I’ve already talked to a few friends who felt similarly and some who felt different differently than I did about some of the choices they made. I’m curious to see how women (or men) from previous generations would relate to the characters.
One interesting tidbit, I thought, was from one of the character’s mothers, who said, while cooking dinner and doing 90% of the housework, is that women with careers and families makes life easier for one gender… men.
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