It took her until she reached her 60s, but after decades spent as a square peg in a world of round holes, novelist Eileen Pollack (Breaking and Entering) seems to have found something resembling peace. Together, the 16 punchy and agile personal essays in Maybe It's Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman loosely form an autobiography in which its subject takes a feminist look at the forces that forged her identity, or at least tried to.
Pollack was born in 1956, raised in a middle-class Orthodox Jewish household in the Catskills, and essentially batted aside every rule that came her way. "Hallucinations," a meditation on Pollack's retired dentist father's last days, includes a reflection on her decision to choose the writer's life over a stable career in the sciences. In "Pigeons," what begins as a look back at her behavior problems in elementary school becomes a consideration of whether she inadvertently contributed to a classmate's downfall. In fact, many of the essays in Maybe It's Me take this rewardingly unexpected three-point-turn approach to their subjects. "All of Us, We All Are Arameans," initially a travelogue-like piece about Pollack's solo trip to Israel when she was in her 50s, winds up casting her romantic life in stingingly sharp relief: "If I couldn't find a way to share my life with my Polish-Catholic boyfriend, how could I criticize the Israelis and Palestinians for not finding a way to surmount their differences and share their lives?" --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer