The Female Persuasion

I finished The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer a few weeks ago but I haven’t been quite sure how I wanted to write about it, so this may be quite brief. To be honest I didn’t love the book but I didn’t hate it either. There were parts of it that I really enjoyed, but overall some of it annoyed the heck out of me. The one saving grace that kept me going to the end was that I wanted to see if I would hate the ending, which I didn’t.

The main character of the book is Greer, we meet her in high school as she’s about to go to college and follow her life through the next decade or so. In college she is assaulted, discovers feminism and a leader of the movement, and then goes on in her twenties to work in women’s issues. Greer is by no means perfect and she makes mistakes and allows ambition to cloud her judgement at times. But I related to her, especially in the college years, as she was desperately trying to figure out who she was and wanted to be.

I started to lose interest when Greer was in her twenties, working, and essentially not understanding nor caring about the people around her and the ways in which her best friend and her boyfriend had very different post college experiences. Greer finds success and she mends fences, but something about it all was a bit too trite and easy for me in the end.