Rusty is only one of many Norma Klein characters who is sexually active and, like the rest of them, her sexual activity leads to more complicated issues. (She says of her father, “Daddy is a socialist, sort of, meaning he worries about how many poor people there are in the world and feels guilty that he isn’t poor.”) Rusty’s parents are cheating on each other, she can’t decide whether she actually enjoys sleeping with her boyfriend, and her appearance is constantly commodified by men who can’t resist ogling her. Take, for example, the teenage heroine of Domestic Arrangements (1981), nicknamed Rusty for her deviant red hair. But while Klein’s feminist literature may not signify an end to my research journey, it offers consolation by presenting characters who, despite being flawed and despite living in a society that is broken, manage to turn out OK, surviving on ruthless introspection and politically incorrect humor. Her female characters, intelligent young (mostly Jewish) women whose families can somehow afford apartments in Manhattan, make decisions with which I often disagree. No matter how much I read, I never got a straight answer from Klein about how to be a woman. Fortunately, Klein wrote more than 50 books before her premature death at age 50, some of which are for children but most of which are for teens or adults. Once I got them, I swallowed them up one after the other after the other. As she was praised for her precocious feminism, I made it my business to get a hold of her books even though they were mostly out of print. In the summer before I went to college, my research led me to a book that in turn led me to Norma Klein, a writer whose scandalous young adult novels of the seventies and eighties earned her a spot on a list of most-banned authors. In the past three years, I’ve read well over 100 books by female authors. My plan was to keep reading books until I found an author or character whose womanhood I could emulate perfectly.
Since high school, I’ve actively sought books that I believed would help me answer the question of how I can be a woman in a world that makes being one practically impossible.
I read for those reasons, too, but I also read to conduct About three years ago, when I was a senior in high school, I embarked upon a project that I don’t expect to finish anytime soon.
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