Pipher, Mary. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Ballantine, 1995.
Reason read: as part of a New Year’s resolution for a friend, I am reading this with a few other books about raising daughters.
Reviving Ophelia takes personal stories of girls and connects them to larger cultural issues. While written in the mid-nineties, and a little out of date in places, for the most part Dr. Pipher still delivers sound advice, often sharing tidbits about herself along the way. Pipher is a child of the 1950s, and even though the writing is over thirty years old, her stories still hold up. Who hasn’t been “untrue” to themselves, lying about their level of hunger, downplaying grades, pretending to like a style of music or fashion to impress someone else? Peggy Orenstein addresses eating disorders in Schoolgirls in much the same way as Pipher. At times, the stories of girls with overwhelming desires to be thin were so similar I would forget which book, Pipher or Orenstein, I was reading. Reviving Ophelia is different from Schoolgirls in that Pipher is drawing from actual therapy sessions while Orenstein visited two different middle schools and interviewed children in a different atmosphere.
Quote to quote, “My relationship with my mother, like all relationships with mothers was extremely complex, filled with love, longing, a need for closeness and distance, separation and fusion” (p 102). Sounds very familiar. One other line to like, “Strong girls may protect themselves by being quiet and guarded so that their rebellion in known only by a few trusted others” (p 266).
Author fact: Mary Pipher has her own website here. Her blog, while brief, is beautiful.
Book trivia: Pipher does not include photographs in her book.
Nancy said: Pearl said Pipher should be read with The Body Project (Bromberg), Schoolgirls (Orenstein), and Queen Bees & Wannabes (Wiseman) as they are all about “teenage girls’ problems with both society and themselves” (More Book Lust p 227).
BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Two, or Three, are Better Than One” (p 226).
~*LunaSea*~ 