PORTRAIT OF A FEMINIST

A woman recalls her ideological awakening in memoiristic vignettes that interrogate what it means to be a feminist.

Marlowe was raised in Peru, California, and Ecuador by a Peruvian mother and an American father who met in San Francisco. Each home is described in this memoir with a rich sense of place, but what connects each chapter is the author’s account of her emerging feminist identity. She tells of listening to her parents argue and aligning herself with her mother’s point of view; she discusses how she attended an evangelical missionary school in Quito but later rejected the Bible’s patriarchal norms; and she writes that “lascivious” men attempted to prey on her and other young women and girls in her life. In college at the University of California, Berkeley, she was exposed to gender studies and academic feminism. During her early 20s and her time as a graduate student in Seattle, her life and career became increasingly intertwined with her feminist politics; later, Marlowe became a faculty member, using feminist ideas and women’s narratives as guides to inform her teaching. From her early adulthood on, the memoir’s narrative becomes a reflection on small, meaningful moments, as when she attempts to breastfeed her child in an art gallery, only to be chastised by a docent; she also reflects on larger subjects, including her marriage and her own motherhood. Marlowe’s assured prose relates a narrative that is neither sweeping nor linear but understands how concepts of feminism and femininity can become complicated, as in a chapter titled “Red Lipstick”: “I want to revel, when I feel like it, in prettiness. I want to seek beauty of every kind. I want to find it and focus on it and embrace it and live it.” Her revelations of her own psyche, in these short, intimate essays, propel the narrative forward and effectively add nuance and color to familiar topics.

A confident, impressionist portrait of a feminist life.