Molly Jong-Fast grew up in a town house with a pink door and paintings of ladies playing naked Twister. There were world-famous therapists living in her cellar, a secretary with a brain tumor, a nanny who was a numbers runner, and grandparents who revealed that they had sex on their first date. Leading therapists agree: a normal childhood. In Girl [Maladjusted], Molly Jong-Fast takes us on a tour of her big fat Jewish bohemian upbringing. With the same keen insight, effortless cool, and buoyant wit that won her legions of devoted readers in Normal Girl, she offers a riotous and affecting coming-of-age story that is both uniquely weird and weirdly universal.
"Randa, what's wrong with you?" "Nothing. I mean, I'm a crazy cocaine addict with a hankering for heroin, but other than that, I'm just a nice Jewish girl from the Upper East Side with Prada shoes. How could anything be wrong?" Molly Jong-Fast's Normal Girl is striking-and as funny as it as real. Inspired by her own experiences growing up in the decadent, fast-paced netherworld of New York City's jet set, Jong-Fast's debut novel is a hilarious, hard-edged walk past the velvet rope. At just nineteen, Miranda Woke seems to have it all. Her parents are famous socialites, she's already been written up on Page Six sixteen times, she's on all the right invitation lists, and drugs and alcohol are never in short supply. But while her image screams "It girl," she'd rather be a normal girl, and the A-list feels even more uncomfortable than her Manolo Blahnik shoes. In fact, she's become the "living embodiment of an awkward phase" with "more issues than Harper's Bazaar." Neither Xanax nor Deepak Chopra tapes help. And now that her junkie party has trashed her parents' house, she has to liquidate her trust fund to pay Mom's decorator for a quick fix. But worst of all, Miranda thinks she just murdered her own boyfriend. In an all-too-glamorous world where the cell phone is always ringing, Miranda sees no escape other than a downward spiral of cocaine, Valium, and heroin. It takes friends who offer more than air kisses to force Miranda to look in the mirror and get some help.
Combining biography, history, and literary theory, this work looks at three of the most significant women writers to emerge from American radicalism of the 1930s. Le Sueur, Olsen, and Herbst were influenced by the Communist movement of the time, but each also forged an independent vision of feminist socialist literary milieu. Drawing on Marxist and post-Marxist theory, and addressing the challenge of such new feminist theorists as Jean Bethke Elshtain, Roberts takes a theoretical approach that encompasses the social vision and feminist practice of the writers and places them in their historical, cultural, and social contexts. The study covers their lives from the turn of the century to the 1970s, with an emphasis on the 1930s; examines their views of the Cold War; links the three to the Progressive tradition; and analyzes their key literary works. Resources for analysis include historical and contemporary theory; excerpts from the radical press of the 1920s and 1930s; and primary materials from the writers themselves, including journals, notes, and unpublished archival materials.
Research has documented the reciprocal effects of exceptionality and secondary psychosocial and behavioral characteristics. This in-depth handbook examines the categories of exceptionality most often described in educational, behavioral, and health practices. Leading authorities from psychology, education, and medicine evaluate the key characteristics of particular exceptionalities from the vantage point of theory, research, assessment, and intervention.
This is Volume I of twenty-eight in the Sociology of Education series. Originally published in 1969, Adolescent Girls in Approved Schools looks at the subject of delinquency in relation to women and girls.
