Maybe It's Me On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman

Eileen is nine and too smart for the 4th grade, but when the clownish school psychologist tries to gain her trust with an offer of Oreos, she refuses. Afterall, she doesn't accept gifts from strangers. This is the start of a love-hate relationship with the rules as they were laid out for a girl in 1960s upstate New York, and as they persist in some form today. As she ascends through a physics degree at Yale--dashing prospects for work and love--, to a post-graduate summer that leaves her "peed on, shot at, and kidnapped", to a marriage of equals where both careers are respected but, as the wife, she's still expected to do all the housework, child-rearing, taxes, pay the bills, and make sure the roto-rooter guy arrives on time. Pollack shares with poignant humor and candid language, the trials of being smart and female in a world that's just learning the language for "being woke" to equality between the sexes. Maybe It's Me is a question all smart women have asked themselves, and Pollack's memoir takes us on the roller coaster ride between gratifyingly-humorous street-level stories of innocent curiosity and calculated meanness of 'tweeny' girls and threatened men to the 20,000-foot view of how we got here. In the end, Pollack's message is one of human connection and tenacity because she's still in the game.