This virtual program was sponsored by Seattle Town Hall. Seeking guidance and inspiration, Roiphe delves into the lives of women writers, from Edith Wharton to Mary McCarthy, praising Simone de Beauvoir as a “brilliant elucidator,” which Roiphe is, too, to deeply clarifying and affirming effect. Cultural writer Katie Roiphe looks at how women experience and manage power. She ponders imbalances of power in personal relationships and in society, the perverse pleasures of jealousy and “female martyrdom,” and the persistent fear and resentment of strong women. The Power Notebooks Katie Roiphe Free Press, 2020 (Paperback) 235 pages Note: I recommend reading any book you feel called to, regardless of my opinion. Roiphe examines, anecdotally and analytically, the pain and bafflement of a failed marriage, the terrors and joy of single motherhood, the bewilderment of loving someone afflicted with addiction, the exhausting vicissitudes of academia, and the mortifying gap between emotion and intellect. Katie Roiphe (born July 13, 1968) is an American author and journalist. In this arrestingly intimate and cathartic work, drawn from notebooks she kept during a recent “time of upheaval,” she reveals her struggles with doubt, confusion, pain, and anxiety, forging an audaciously articulate, prodigiously candid, and thought-provoking blend of memoir, literary biography, confession, and dissection.

Roiphe is a forthright journalist and commentator whose views on women’s lives have ignited indignation and a commanding author of inquisitive books of literary history, including The Violet Hour (2016).

The power notebooks by katie roiphe