Becoming Myself: Reflections on Growing Up Female Book

"The women in this collection were asked, simply, to recall a significant memory of growing up female. They responded generously, with intimate stories of their lives. Instead of the superficial prepackaged blurbs of TV sound bites and press releases, they told stories from their hearts; they told secrets never spoken before. They revealed themselves through stories of personal confusion and discovery, pain and overcoming, rejection and celebration."
—From Willa Shalit's Introduction

The stories shared by these sixty-seven remarkable women—writers, actors, musicians, journalists, activists—include:

--Kate Winslet on the media's eagerness to distort women's images.
—Zane on her belief in a woman's right to satisfaction.
—Lillian Vernon on being a trailblazing entrepreneur.
—J.K. Rowling on the transformation wrought by giving birth.

Filled with sparkling insights and powerful reflections, Becoming Myself is a gift for every woman.

Willa Shalit is the daughter of Gene Shalit and was the producer for The Vagina Monologues. She is also the co-founder and first executive director of V-Day, the worldwide movement to end violence against women that grew out of the play. Shalit is an internationally recognized sculptor and the founder of the Touch Foundation for the Blind. The subject of the Emmy winning PBS documentary Willa: Behind the Mask, and author of the book Lifecast: Behind the Mask, she lives in New York and Santa Fe.

Publishers Weekly

Sculptor and Vagina Monologues producer Shalit asked a group of celebrities and writers to recall a significant memory of growing up female. The result is an uneven collection of 67 short pieces, with unfocused or perfunctory contributions by such notables as J.K. Rowling, Kate Winslet, Vanessa Williams, Brooke Shields and Janis Ian. A few of the pieces, such as those by Patti LaBelle, Rue McClanahan and Lily Tomlin are frustratingly short. Longer and more literary pieces by Joyce Carol Oates, Kitty Carlisle Hart and Tawni O'Dell stand out as moving, thought provoking and completely to the point. Oates writes about her disturbing experiences as a sexually na ve undergraduate in the late 1950s trying to navigate the chaotic rituals of a fraternity party at which her drunken female peers were taking sexual risks. In an affectionately comic piece, actress Hart, born into a comfortable New Orleans family in 1910, describes how she suffered and evolved under a domineering but loving mother, while O'Dell paints a stark picture of herself as a tough, sensitive 10-year-old in the 1970s coal-mining region of western Pennsylvania, coming to grips with the critical difference in girls' and boys' natures. (Apr. 18) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.