Girl Rearing

Successfully recounting a life without true suffering requires a certain degree of cool objectivity, critical self-awareness and humane wisdom. Unfortunately, Aldrich's first book of roughly chronological essays (some of which originally appeared in the Northwest Review) lacks such depth. Aldrich grew up as the comfortably middle-class child of an estate lawyer and a homemaker. The grievances of her childhood seem to be that her room was too pink; she didn't like her given name; she had to eat tomatoes; and her mother was overwhelmingly tidy. It can be hard to see beyond the kvetching to the writing, but even that can seem strained, as in these two passages about the loathed fruit: ""So I ate the tomato, but not without consequences for her who made me eat it"" and, later, in a deeply improbable dialogue, ""I hate the way sliced tomatoes lay inert on cold white plates. Lizzie Borden hated tomatoes."" What the reader immediately sees, but Aldrich doesn't seem to, is that her mother, the child of an early divorce whose first husband (not Aldrich's father) and eldest daughter both died tragically, desperately needed to impose order and control in the domestic sphere that she lacked in the larger world. And though she might have been a neatnik, she did rebel against the tyranny that dinnertime held over a woman's life in the '50s and '60s when Aldrich was growing up. For her part, Aldrich, like many other comfortable baby boomers, lacked specific grievances but luxuriated in the romance of rebellion. By comparison to memoirs of dire poverty, abuse, persecution, this comes across as profoundly self-indulgent. (Sept.)