“I stand in the sunny noon of life…what concerns me now is, that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life.”
To say that Margaret Fuller was a woman ahead of her time would be an understatement. A born intellectual, she was educated in accordance with her father’s exacting standards; in a time when Harvard didn’t admit women, her father saw to it that she received the equivalent of a Harvard education anyway. Fuller grew up to be a quick-witted and worldly woman desperate to leave her mark. She was a talented conversationalist and considered herself an equal to — and in some cases, even smarter than — the well-educated men she encountered in her circles, encouraged women to speak their minds, was friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited some of Henry David Thoreau’s early works, and wrote a book about women’s rights that far exceeded the reach of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication on the Rights of Women.
Fuller would later work as a newspaper columnist under Horace Greeley at the New York Tribune. At a time when few women worked, Fuller was demanding pay equity, insisting she should be payed the same as her male counterparts. She advocated on behalf of prostitutes and the poor and eschewed the conventions of marriage. When she died in a shipwreck at the age of forty, the revelation that she had had a child with her Italian lover (both of whom also died in the shipwreck) caused a scandal.
In her introduction to Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, Megan Marshall writes about how Nathaniel Hawthorne preferred to call his works “Romances,” quoting him saying that romances allowed the writer to, “bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.” (Imagine the Nathaniel Hawthorne of today — whoever that is — saying such a thing!) In that vein, Marshall explains that she also chose to write this biography as a “romance,” explaining that doing so allowed her to focus on parts of Fuller’s life more than others, all while incorporating Fuller’s words into the narrative, in order to better convey the complexities of Fuller’s life.
What does it mean to be a father? A mother? As a transgender woman who was a father for ten years and has been a mother for eight years and counting, Jennifer Finney Boylan is in a unique position to examine these roles from both angles, as well as a “third gender,” a reference to the in-between period during her transition.
I don’t think I ever fully appreciated how wacky Jonathan Franzen can be until I read Strong Motion. We see a lot of it in The Corrections and a little of it in Freedom, but by then he had become Jonathan Franzen, 
I first encountered John Baxter’s writing a few years ago when I came across 
I Want to Show You More
The Guy’s Guide to Feminism
Tristan Hart is a wealthy and fiercely intelligent twenty-year-old who has been chosen to study medicine in London. Having been left to his own devices while growing up in the country, Tristan can’t wait to experience London and finally be challenged by one of the best minds in medicine. He won’t be completely left alone, though. Tristan has already experienced at least one violent episode that left his family fearing for his sanity. In London, he’ll be closely watched, lest he experience another “nervous” outburst. But Tristan harbors dark secrets about his personality that go much further than his mental stability. He’s obsessed with pain, especially inducing it. Studying medicine allows him to channel his interests productively, allowing him to cause pain (though surgery, etc.) in order to fix medical conditions. The problem is that as pressure on him increases, he has a harder time telling fantasy from reality, especially when the woman he loves is involved.
Once upon a time, Tyrese Gibson was a master MAN-ipulator who would sneak around behind his girlfriends’ backs in order to whet his ravenous appetite for T&A. If his girlfriends started to suspect anything, he’d turn into a MAN-gician, pulling out all the stops to dazzle himself back into their good graces and convince them of his MAN-ogamy. It didn’t matter if the woman was hot, smart, successful, and great in bed. Once he got what he wanted from them, he’d move on. Tyrese cites the Tyler Perry classic, Why Did I Get Married?, to explain his logic: “men are going to get 80 percent of what they need in a relationship, yet when a new woman comes around offering that other 20 percent, most men will be ready to leave the good thing they have.”
You might have noticed all the Sylvia Plath talk going around the internet as of late. That’s because this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Bell Jar, a novel about a young woman named Esther Greenwood who earns an internship position at a magazine in New York City; when she returns home, she suffers a breakdown and is subjected to various treatments for her depression.
