Book Description
Area Women Unite! In this sharp and sophisticated collection of essays, columnist Patricia Pearson takes us on a hilarious tour of our twenty-first-century obsessions and distractions.
Patricia Pearson is a working woman, wife, and mother on the verge. Whether it's being humiliated by the "Beauty Bullies" at the Lancome counter or failing to live up to the "Serene Mother" ideal, Pearson has had enough of negotiating our present-day myths and fads. In fact, she's formed a few opinions on the matter and can't wait to share them with you.
In Area Woman Blows Gasket, Pearson plumbs every facet of modern life, marriage, and motherhood, from choosing the right vegan-bran-hemp diet for your family to confronting your husband's irrational fear of mayonnaise to finding a way to return to work and not turn your child into a contract killer. Adult education classes, therapy, $100 haircuts, the latest news on what causes cancer, Christmas shopping-all come into sharp focus with the help of Pearson's comic eye. Her wry brand of wisdom is a refreshing and long-awaited release from our confusing and often contradictory world.
About the Author
Patricia Pearson is a columnist for McLean's and a former columnist for Canada's National Post. She is also a frequent contributor to USA Today and the author of the novel Playing House. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Observer, the Guardian, and Cosmopolitan, and she has won three Canadian National Magazine Awards. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two children.
Area Woman Blows Gasket: And Other Tales from the Domestic Frontier FROM THE PUBLISHER
"In this collection of essays, columnist Patricia Pearson takes us on a hilarious tour of our twenty-first-century obsessions and distractions." In Area Woman Blows Gasket, Pearson plumbs every facet of modern life, marriage, and motherhood, from choosing the right vegan-bran-hemp diet for your family to confronting your husband's irrational fear of mayonnaise to finding a way to return to work and not turn your child into a contract killer. Adult education classes, therapy, $100 haircuts, the latest news on what causes cancer, Christmas shopping - all come into sharp focus with the help of Pearson's comic eye.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
Many of us are fed up with our peculiar North American lifestyle, given the relentless pressure to purchase still more despite all our existing creature comforts. Often, it's the bizarre advertising methods and messages to incite our consuming responses that most provoke Canadian freelance journalist Pearson, who writes about it with excitable and pointed, if uneven, hilarity. She takes on Christmas, health news and fads, early-morning television programs, gadgetry, and common childcare issues (e.g., getting a tired-but-wired child to sleep before mom) with a refreshingly comic eye for the absurd, including herself. For larger memoir collections. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Canadian journalist Pearson (When She Was Bad, 1997, etc.) offers some mildly amusing, finally innocuous comments on organic foods, daycare and surviving motherhood. Pearson's gently satiric essays, many originally published in the National Post, seem to have lost their stringency this far south, where debates on carcinogenic foods, the invasion of privacy by credit departments and the evils of daycare have been swirling around for years. Written in a punchy, bulleted style meant for easy digestion, Pearson's flippant pieces excoriate the newfangled (American) way of food efficiency in favor of old-fashioned cooking: e.g., microwave popcorn's "flavor vapors" may cause cancer, so she offers the cheaper kernel-pot method. For Christmas, she eschews annoying electronic toys for her two small children in favor of such home-style devices as a stick, the cat and toilet paper. She has rejected the "hostile little ecosystem of female rivalry, with a smell of sugar-coated bitchiness," also known as the department-store beauty department, and now frequents a barbershop for a $15 haircut. To mitigate the guilt of dumping children in daycare, Pearson "researched" biographies of some famous people who grew up under surrogate parents (Elizabeth I, Jane Austen) and concludes, "Studies show that thinking of oneself as a semi-divine being can often compensate for decapitated or working mother." The substantial last section takes place in the village of Tepoztlan, Mexico, where the author holed her family up for six months to find "simplicity," and instead battled mangy dogs and importunate landlords. Frustrated by the language barrier, she offers some poignant remarks on being a new immigrant (she nowsympathizes with New Canadians who bemoan the "Aura of Rank Stupidity" their beginning English conveys) and a very funny anecdote about visiting el dentista where "dolor" becomes "dollars." Overall, Pearson's voice is almost engagingly naive, though her subjects are fairly derivative. A Great White North pundit altogether too nice for south of the border. . .
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