Bossypants, by Tina Fey

I’m not big on role models, but I suspect that I’m highly typical among outspoken females in counting Tina Fey as one of mine (if you’re curious, the complete list includes Maeby Funke, Amanda Blank at 4:04 of that song, and… cannot think of any more). I’ve been a big-time fan of Miz Fey’s ever since I bought this fat history of SNL in 2002, and even more so since I found out that she was part of the lovingly, painfully nerd-face theater group I was lucky enough to partake in at UVA. So obviously I pre-ordered her book and signed up for Amazon Prime just to get the free two-day shipping so that this book could arrive yesterday and I could spend an unsatisfyingly short three hours in bed devouring it. I laughed out loud in an empty room about twenty times. Bossypants is funny, perceptive, and perfectly self-deprecating–exactly what you’d expect from one of the few current female celebrities famous for being talented rather than going to the gym a lot. Some critics have been complaining that it’s not quite a memoir and that it lacks some expected juicily emotional depth, but to me that’s why this book was so enjoyable: it’s about work, it’s not gratuitous, it’s there to tell you the things about Tina Fey’s life that are 1) funny and 2) actually interesting, and it’s not there for anything else.

Slate called Tina Fey’s attitude “tough girl feminism“–the kind where someone yells “Nice tits” and you yell back “Suck my dick”–and this is so agreeable to my mode of operation that I’m having a hard time imagining what else you’d do in that situation. As Mick Foley said on Fox News, the world may get an F with women, but we’re getting a C-minus and bragging about it; what else can you do with that other than take no shit and use the language of the shitters? Fey talks about being at a seminar with 200 women who were all asked to pinpoint the moment where they first “knew they were a woman.” Nearly all of them talked about the first time they were harassed, which rings true to the time I was at evangelical Baptist camp when I was eleven and some thirteen-year-old suggested I stick whatever I was holding “in my pussy.” On a semi-related note, I’m not sure too many men would buy this book, because it’s a lot more frankly feminist than everything else that will sell over 10,000 copies, but they should, because it’s funny. And anyway if Tina Fey’s very reasonable gender-equality slant is too much, then we really in trouble.

Some highlights from Bossypants:

On how beauty ideals have diversified admirably since the 70′s, with JLo bringing the butt and Beyonce the “leg meat”: “And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.”

Responding to an Internet bodybuilding forum where someone posted “I’d stick it in her tail pipe”: “Thank you so much for your interest! Whether you meant it in a sexual way or merely as an act of aggression, I am grateful. As a ‘woman of a certain age’ in this business, I feel incredibly lucky to still be ‘catching your eye’ ‘with my anus.’ You keep me relevant!”

About this UVA douche bag who invites her on a mountain hike just to talk to her about another girl the whole way: “He had to stop and smile at the adorableness of this–Gretchen had asked him to tear the piece of Trident in half because it was too big for her. ‘Can you believe that?’ he marveled. A girl so feminine and perfect that half a piece of Trident was the most she could handle. I tried to process what this meant for my evening. ‘So… you and I will not be dry humping, then?’… As I crawled into my bottom bunk, I thought about how I had climbed Old Rag. I thought about Gretchen, the girl who could only accommodate half a piece of gum. ‘I hope you marry her,’ I imagined saying to HRW, ‘and I hope she turns out to have a cavernous vagina.”

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

You probably know what this book is about even if you haven’t read it, since it’s been on at the top of the bestseller lists for about a hundred weeks. But if you don’t, The Help is a story about the black maids of civil rights-era Jackson, Mississippi, and the white woman who decides to write a controversial book about their lives. That sentence is boring, right? That’s because you can read it and instantly know exactly what you’re going to get from this book: aging white debutantes who care only about appearance and the Junior League; black maids who run the ever-nuanced Black Woman in the South gamut from saintly to sassy. Now, I think The Help is a relatively well-written book about a subject that’s tricky to portray, and it’s a pleasure to read: great plot, lively, with a note of unexpectedness that keeps it out of Oprah territory. But unless you’re a sort of unwitting racist type and it helps you come to the revelation that yes, white people have (in general) historically been very cruel to those “beneath” them–The Help is really not as insightful or important as people seem to find it.

Kathryn Stockett, who is herself white (a fact that becomes pretty obvious as soon as you start reading), wrote this book out of guilt and affection for the black woman who raised her as a child in Jackson. She’s great at writing from the perspective of Skeeter, the awkward and mildly subversive white girl (who is repeatedly described as not-cute in the book but is obviously going to be played by Emma Stone in the movie version). Considering the touchiness of what she’s trying to do, she’s not too bad writing as either of her two black narrators, who were originally intended to be the only narrators before Stockett decided it was too weird.

But as a Duke professor asked, “Who gets to tell these stories in a way that they earn public attention?” We trust the filter of a white female author; we’re comfortable with the fact that she writes the black characters in dialect, while the white characters’ accents were probably just as strong. There’s a significant, subconscious current of nostalgia in the writing, and I suspect there’s a bit of old-South nostalgia in the reading of it too. But also, no one said that every book involving black people has to be Invisible Man. So kudos to Kathryn Stockett here for attempting to write about something real. I can overlook tacky earth-mama sentences like “Truth. It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that’s been burning me up all my life” for that.

Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins

So, I really liked The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, its sequel. I like the idea of America collapsing in some industrial apocalypse and being separated into numbered districts that all have to pay tribute to a Capitol—tribute in the form of goods as well as children who have to train as psychotic gladiators and fight to their death in a rigged and televised arena. Katniss, the main character, is super tough and occasionally unpleasant, which I like. I think I’ve been into ideas of this sort ever since I read The Girl Who Owned a City or whatever that awesome book is called—and I think the world has been into ideas of this sort ever since the story of the Minotaur was written—and of course the whole children-graphically-murdering-each-other thing really ups the ante.

And after reading Mockingjay, the third book, I am still impressed by the sheer violence in this series. In this book, all the districts have rebelled and are fighting the Capitol. The battle scenes in which they try to breach the city, in their dusty vagueness and complete reliance on technology, seem unnervingly similar to (what I imagine to be) scenes from America’s current overseas conflicts. And I like that these books are very clear about the psychological damage that comes from going hungry.

What I am not impressed by is how much the writing sucks in this book! Did I just completely miss it in the first two? I think probably I did–I recently received a comment on my Twilight post that made me realize just how fully my memory sucks. I am embarrassed and sorry at how my brain works sometimes, and even in my fully callous element I shouldn’t be forgetting important details like which schools offered me scholarships, or the terrible writing of Suzanne Collins. For example: “Real or not real? I am on fire. A creature as unquenchable as the sun.” Also, “I shrug to communicate that my hair length’s a matter of complete indifference to me.”

Also this: “They can fatten me up. They can give me a full body polish, dress me up, and make me beautiful again. They can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them. I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise [sic] being one myself.”

Like I said, I like these books a lot, but this writing style is just absurd sometimes. Very “Middle School Anime Lover Uses the Thesaurus for the First Time.” Also, for a book with a 1.2 million first-run printing, shouldn’t the copy editing be just a little sharper?

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

In my former life as a person who ate green vegetables, I was all about the local thing. Charlottesville, where I went to college, kind of grooms you that way: there’s a farm profiled extensively in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that supplies all the good restaurants in town, there’s a restaurant called The Local, the only grocery store within walking distance from me was a vegetarian store called Integral Yoga, and, of course, the food’s just fucking amazing so in the end I got hooked on the taste as well as the ideas. And it’s obviously catching on if it’s made its way to Houston—there are not too many local or organic places in town, but Jesus, there’s this one drink they make at the best place that has tequila and lavender and a jalapeno-infused simple syrup ice cube… oh God.

I think Michael Pollan is a fantastic nonfiction writer and The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an absolutely readable, informative and fascinating book about the contortions our food economy has gone through to become the industrial monster that it is today. The details are best told, well, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I think the whole White House-vegetable-garden-trend-piece media season has educated the public well enough about the issues at stake. But in case you didn’t know, a Chicken McNugget has thirty-eight ingredients, including butane, and the farm industry is kind of disgustingly wasteful, and it takes 1.3 gallons of oil to produce 4,500 calories of fast food, and most of we eat is reconstituted corn. Etc etc. Here’s the thing. I’ve never needed much to make me a food believer. Although I am not overly watchful of my health, and for example once found both a day-old Egg McMuffin and a PBR in my purse during class, this issue seems really simple to me: real food tastes better.

Until I started climbing up the Ultimate Local Agro Crag in Kyrgyzstan, a challenge in which I start every meal by pulling something out of the ground, the maximum number of ingredients in my food is usually about four, and I’m currently existing on oatmeal, yogurt, and butter because eating seasonally is a lot less fancy in a Central Asian winter. I have certainly enjoyed this opportunity to learn how to cook completely from scratch, and the produce itself (when available) is unmatchable. But many things are ironic about this situation, including the price issue. In America, a lot of debate centers on how local and organic food is expensive; here, it’s the opposite. There is only one grocery store in country as big as your average Kroger, and very few people (or volunteers) have the access or the money to buy these glamorous, transport mile-laden products. Michael Pollan talks a lot about the “true cost” of industrial food products, and I agree with him, but you see an infinitely more basic idea of “true cost” when you live with a family that can’t afford anything that comes in a package.

I have also learned an interesting lesson about eating meat thoughtfully, which I will admit I absolutely never did in the States. Kyrgyzstan is all about sheep slaughtering for special occasions. They make this dish called “besh barmak” (translated, “five fingers”)—it’s a boiled sheep with salt and mush noodles, over which melted sheep fat broth is poured, and everyone eats it with their hands out of a communal bowl. The taste is both foul and boring, but it’s a very honored, traditional dish here, and I really respect the knowledge that Kyrgyz people have of the death of an animal. So when I read the sentence in Pollan’s book—“Now it was all a matter of doing well by the animal, which meant making the best use of its meat by preparing it thoughtfully and feeding it to people who would appreciate it—“ I had to pause. I’m going to give this one to you, Kyrgyzstan. I hate on your food culture all the time because so much of it involves congealed sheep fat in my face all the time, but you really do justice to the animal here—in every way except for taste.

So I think The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an extremely important and relevant book to anyone taking part in the American food system. However, as I am currently not doing so, I will be content respecting America for what its dominance and greed brings to my pantry, fantasizing about arugula and brie and considering how many years of my life I would give up for a Chipotle carnitas burrito to appear on my desk (the answer is… many).

Eat Pray Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert

From the book jacket: “In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern American woman was supposed to want, but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she felt consumed by panic and confusion. This wise and rapturous book is the story of how she left behind all these outward marks of success, and what she found in their place… pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence.”

Obviously I hate this book. Obviously. Aside from the fact that it has reached such a wide audience by dint of the author’s extreme self-involvement and confessional, silly-best-friend-at-Starbucks tone–and the fact that, because the ideas of Other Countries and Spirituality and Pleasure are central, most of these readers are deceived into thinking the book is indeed “wise and rapturous”–AND the fact that apparently there’s a Florence and the Machine song in the trailer for the movie, which my boyfriend told me just because he knew I would be enraged–bottom line is that this book is just so fucking lame. It kills me.

Let me say, I have never had any patience for problems of privilege. To read about “the fallout of a postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world,” and to try to muster sympathy for the fact that she tried everything from vegetarianism to therapy to special underwear to balance her chakras and oh, the horror, nothing worked–I just couldn’t possibly give a shit. I know that sadness is sadness, and I’m sure Elizabeth Gilbert’s divorce was very hard for her, but she’s a lucky motherfucker and rather than take this year-long pleasure cruise through making herself a better person, she should’ve just taken up residence in an American homeless shelter or perhaps joined the Peace Corps. Boom: an attitude adjustment requiring no sentences as irritating as “Here’s what’s strange, though. I haven’t seemed to be able to do any Yoga since getting to Rome.” She’s so dramatic about her day-to-day thought process throughout the entire book that she seems for the most part completely oblivious to the fact that any kind of (healthy) treatment for depression is off-limits to the vast majority of the world.

But of course, she could have just medicated herself extensively and become a wobbly, dependent, and even more superficial person, so Elizabeth Gilbert’s hunt for happiness/self-esteem/God isn’t so bad. It is a completely entertaining book to read. I appreciate that she put antidepressants in their place, stating that they worked for her only because she worked just as hard as they did to help herself recover. I appreciate that she traveled at all and I appreciate that she genuinely tried to follow the ritual meditation practices at her Indian ashram–despite the fact that in this attempt to find perspective, she never left it. I don’t doubt that Elizabeth Gilbert is a good and thoughtful person, and I suppose she couldn’t have gotten a best-selling book and a movie out of a jaunt into the slums of Mumbai.

As usual, there is a certain element of thoughtlessness in my reaction to this book. I have never found it difficult to locate the practical in the ideas of happiness and God, and maybe it’s out of pure conceitedness that I think self-esteem problems–no matter how real–are a waste of time. But I’m sick of extravagant solutions for problems that grow out of too much money and not enough purpose. My usual treatment for sadness and confusion–do some work, roll a joint, and imagine for a second that I have cystic acne and no legs–is cheaper, less public, and it’s working just fine for me.

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen

I had noticed this book popping up as required reading for some of the high schoolers that I tutored this fall–and they all grunted “It’s all right” in response to my asking how it was, which was a considerable step above the usual “Dunno, I thought you would have read it Jia”–so I felt favorably towards this little guy. It’s about the circus, which is cool, and it’s a bestseller. But then I looked it up and saw that Sara Gruen wrote it as part of National Novel Writing Month, something which I have ill feelings towards, and then saw that there’s an upcoming movie adaptation starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon, which is just… unfortunate. And then I read it. And then it sucked.

I will proceed in “negative sandwich” form–positive, negative, positive–the Peace Corps-approved method for giving any sort of criticism. Pretty much any person who has ever gone through school, rush, voting, debate, or life of any sort will automatically give feedback like this and probably not have to give it a silly name. Except for me when I write book reviews, and the format basically goes–bullshit, bullshit, three sentences about the book. Sorry.

Positive about Water for Elephants: there must have been a lot of awesome research that went into this book. Depression-era circuses, interesting for sure. Negative: I’d a thousand times rather read the research than read this book. Positive: there are a few great pictures at the end of really cute girls in circus costumes.

Positive: this book is long but not boring. Negative: this book has not a stitch of original writing in it. Positive: this is a good book for people who read bad books or no books, and who are unnerved by original writing anyway.

Well, I’m out of positives, so I’ll just leave you with a taste of the skills of Sara Gruen. This is literally the first paragraph I saw upon reopening the book. “Her throat is delicate, her shoulders square. A few curls of light brown hair peek from beneath the brim of her hat. She kneels on a cushion to pray, and a vice grip tightens around my heart. I retreat from the church before I can further damage my soul.”

Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld

Being a girl in rich old America is hard, right? You gotta be cool, you gotta get you some boy friendz, you gotta look like this chick to the left, and if you don’t have any of that, you’re fucked. Well, not fucked, and that’s the problemo.

This pressure is disguised in various ways and sublimated by religions of all sorts, but it pops up everywhere. Like Taylor Swift. I hate on this lady a lot, but she deserves it. For example, you know how in every one of her songs there’s a running theme of “She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts” or some other variation of “I’m an awkward nerd but I understand you better than the pretty girl,” etc. I find this infinitely annoying in light of the fact that Taylor Swift is the most intentionally cookie-cutter, packaged, traditionally beautiful star we’ve got going these days–that, in a nation of girls struck with Princess Syndrome since they watched their first Disney cartoon, Taylor Swift is succeeding because she is that pretty girl. For girls who are truly sidelined in the social Venus fly trap of high school, the situation is very different: the lacrosse players look at them with mild confusion, and years pass full of daily battles of un-narrated insecurity and overthinking. And if a happy chance miracle does occur and the quiet girl gets picked–something which does happen, and happens in Prep–the story gets more and not less complicated. Boys don’t just bring flowers and tell you you’re pretty, and giving blowjobs does not a state of self-actualization make.

This is why I like Prep. It’s not a brilliant book by any means, but there’s also nothing else like it: nothing that so maturely and honestly takes you through every step of an out-of-place girl’s adolescence. It’s boarding school in the eighties, and Lee, the protagonist, is never going to look like the girl on the cover of Contra. That alone–an awareness of beauty, or personal magnetism generally, and how it can become a haunting, pervasive, objective force working its way through the social order of a school–makes Lee an amazing narrator. She’s fully aware of the contrast between her life and the lives of the Beautiful People (class is a huge factor) and she states things with a flat, minor melancholy that I love: “In my whole life, Ault was the place with the greatest density of people to fall in love with.”

But back to Taylor Swift. The real nugget of genius is about Prep is that Lee is a girl who’s grown up believing the Taylor Swift stuff–what high school girl doesn’t, at some level?–and before she realizes that it’s false, she feels the part of it that’s real. In the voice of an methodical, self-aware but lonely eleventh-grader: “Before and after I was involved with Cross Sugarman, I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can’t make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.”

You Cannot Hate Twilight Like I Hate Twilight

I was planning to write about Twilight at some point. First of all, it’s stupid as shit. Second, it’s about time; people have been going nuts over it for a couple of years, and the fuss is even dying down (thank God). But the reason I haven’t reviewed the book is–a reason that is probably already obvious–is that I hate Twilight so much that I can’t think about it without getting into Evil Grandpa levels of cranky. I know plenty of people I like have a fondness for Twilight but it’s just: why this of all things? Why a vampire romance? Why why why?

But I’m running low on ideas for books that most people have read (send me some!) so today I thought I would just take the plunge. I searched “twilight” on my computer because I knew I had gotten high and written a rant about Twilight at some point fourth year. Instead, I found this gem, which I had completely forgotten about and don’t remember writing. The reason for this is as follows: I turned in my thesis on March 31st and after that, I had not a thing due until May 3rd, when I had a ten-page criticism paper due. And so, in accordance with the way that I spent the whole intervening month, it turns out I did get high and write a rant about Twilight. Rereading it I was half angry that this is what I ended up doing in college, and half totally jealous of myself for taking classes that permitted me to get on my high horse like this.

The paper is called “Edward Cullen and To-Be-Looked-At-Ness: Reversal of the Cinematic Gaze in Twilight.” A) Ridiculous and B) I remember telling my dear friend Walt about it, and he said, “That sounds interesting but what is the reversal of the gays?” Generally it is a thick, silly essay, dripping with formal indignation and feminist rage and the writing of a person who has been drunk and wearing a bathing suit for two weeks. I feel like I have about ten friends who would think it’s funny so I’m posting it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to Twilight after all, it’s just so irritating to me. Here are my views in a nutshell: Bella is boring and sucks. Girls only like her because Edward likes her and they want to be her, which is a harmful way to think, because Edward sucks too. Twilight, like a Taylor Swift song but to a much larger degree, seems innocuous and perfectly contemporary but is really passive/objectifying/repressive and most importantly, lame. It’s the same hundred words recycled over and over again (Bella said Edward stared glitter vampire brooding attraction flying werewolf gaze rain silent powerful etc), which again, is just like Taylor Swift (fifteen boy date car eyes window dream love princess etc). And I heard that in the last book Bella has some sort of alien baby that tries to eat her. Yeah, America. This one’s on you.

The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

Holy balls this book is awesome. Holy balls I want to mail you a copy right now. There is a select set of things that are awesome enough to be both mainstream and endlessly fascinating–the things that you’re like “I’m not going to bother explaining, just watch it/read it/eat it.” Like, I don’t know, Arrested Development and the margarita from Chili’s where you get the take-home shaker. The Hunger Games is like that. It’s so satisfying. It’s like late-night. Holy balls.

I will pause the party in my pants for a second to say, to be honest, this is pretty much my ideal book. Badass tough-girl protagonist, check. Post-apocalypse, check. American government gone amazingly psychotic, check. An annual nationally televised event starring twenty-four children who are trained for combat and then forced to kill each other in an elaborate rigged arena, fucking check. I knew that much about the book from reading reviews before I read it, and although my expectations were high, the book was all like, “Pssh Jia you think you know me?” and turned out to be better than I could have imagined. I mean, after I picked it up this weekend I could not put it down. As in, I’ve been skiing all day, I’m snowed into a comfy bed, I just ate a bacon cheeseburger and took three Tylenol PMs and still could not put the book down despite all other signs pointing to coma.

But don’t take my word for it. Read this book. It will take you two terrifically enjoyable hours. Don’t wait for the inevitable, slightly mishandled movie version starring Dakota Fanning with dirt on her face. It’s not perfect, but that’s because it’s too busy being perfect in other ways, do you know what I mean? Like, there’s no room to expand on the sociopolitical richness of the idea of post-collapse America divided into 12 economic “districts” and ruled by a pathological Capitol anchored securely within the Rocky Mountains–there’s no room to work those implications out while you’re guiding a dozen children through a Triwizard Tournament on serious acid. Sorry, I take that back, this book is perfect. Just read it.

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

One of my roommates and I were in this (wonderful) class and received The Blind Assassin, also by Margaret Atwood, as our weekly reading assignment. Several (smart, cool) ladies in the class started to wax enthusiastic about Queen Margaret, specifically speaking the praises of The Handmaid’s Tale, which is famous, honored, widely read and widely adapted. Walking away from class later, my roommate and I awkwardly finished each others’ sentences. She: “So, this book should be–” Me: “–good, but I don’t know, that whole sci-fi–” She: “–feminist, dystopian, ovaries, government thing–” Me: “–yeah, gross, Margaret Atwood’s not really–” She: “–what I want to read this weekend.”

But in retrospect, we were probably just being assholes feeling like it was our cool-duty as post-post-whatever-feminists to deny the absolutely revolutionary nature of this book. For example, I was at the bar yesterday enjoying the beautiful slice of Texas sunshine and this guy said something that reminded me to take my birth control. I took it, and he looked at my boyfriend and goes, “You’re welcome, sir.” I was like, “I’m welcome too!” and he said, “Blah blah our bodies ourselves, no lady shit at the table.” While I thought that was funny, I also thought it was telling of the fact that birth control sometimes seems to have been reduced to a girls’ chore; although we’re long past the Mad Men days, it’s akin to dusting in a French maid’s outfit, it signifies both promiscuity and a weird servility, it’s like a mild daily apology for the combination of liking sex and being pregnable. But then later that night, my boyfriend suggested that birth control rivals the Internet as far as Awesome Inventions go. And I agree so heartily that it should cancel out my previous kvetching. Because…

In The Handmaid’s Tale, set in a future dystopian America where disease and ecological meltdown has led a theocratic, military-enforced white male political party to completely take over the government, women are forced to be one thing to one person. They are either Wives, who are wives, Marthas, who are maids, or Handmaids, who bear children for the wives’ husbands, are named after the man to whom they are assigned, and are not allowed to read. The Handmaids, although forced into their duties, are seen as sluts by the Wives and Marthas. This all sounds ridiculous, but it’s written in the most understated, artful and whip-smart way possible. For example, Atwood doesn’t dodge any of the nuts-and-bolts details; as the magnitude of the situation unfolds, we find out that the women lost their power in scarily reasonable steps, their bank accounts being first transferred to their husbands’ then erased, their rights being suspended under what first was an emergency security situation and then bleak permanent reality. This is a great, important book and from now on I’ll freely admit my embrace of Margaret Atwood’s whole feminist sci-fi thing.