By the time I hit 17-years-old, I was pretty sure that there was something to all of this feminist stuff that my mom had been jabbering on about for years. I certainly wasn’t about to admit that to her, but I began creeping into my parents’ bedroom and plucking select titles off of their bookshelf. The Company of Women by Mary Gordon. Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown. The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. I was looking for an answer to a very specific question: Why are all of my friends and I falling apart?
We weren’t just falling apart in the good old-fashioned ways — eating disorders, cutting, sex, and drugs. We were also cracking under our own outlandish expectations. We were the smartest kids in the school, the editors of the newspaper, the valedictorians, the presidents of every club. It was as if, on the surface, all of my mom’s feminist dreams had come true. Girls really did think they could do anything, myself included. But underneath it all was an abyss of insecurity, self-destruction, and crippling perfectionism.
