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OUTRAGED and raucous, US feminist Naomi Wolf burst into the international media spotlight in 1991 with the publication of The Beauty Myth -- a denunciation of the beauty and fashion industries' exploitation of women's concerns about their appearance.
Ironically, her good looks helped to rocket Wolf to fame. Defying stereotypes of feminists, with her pretty face and swishing long hair, she became the spokesperson for the 'third phase" of feminism, which tried to take the women's movement to the mainstream and advocated that women could -- and should -- have it all: career, relationship and family.
THE TREEHOUSE:
Eccentric Wisdom
from My Father on
How to Live, Love
and See
by Naomi Wolf
Virago £12.99, 320 pages
And yet, after years arguing against the patriarchal society's oppression of women in her fiercely emotive prose, Wolf's latest book, The Treehouse, is an overtly sentimental homily to her own patriarch -- her father, Leonard Wolf. It describes how he taught her a series of lessons about life, love and art as he helped her build a treehouse for her daughter, Rosa, in her country home in upstate New York.
As they hammer nails and paint offcuts of wood, Wolf gradually comes round to her father's world view which she had previously rebelled against -- and decides to try to live by his principles.
Strange as this may seem, The Treehouse is engaging and memorable.
An eccentric idealist and poet, Leonard, and his ideas, are beguiling. He believes that everyone is fundamentally an artist and that personal creativity is the secret of happiness. Not that he thinks everyone is a closet Van Gogh or Beethoven.
For him, creativity can relate to gardening, baking, telling amusing anecdotes to friends or even setting up a small business. The key is to "identify your heart's desire" and to follow your dreams as creatively as possible.
This could all be just too twee, but Leonard's presence -- with all his idiosyncrasies, posturing and imperfections -- saves the book from becoming a pseudo-intellectual take on a homespun self-help manual.
By birth an Orthodox Jew, he spent his early childhood in Romania before leaving for New York with his family in the late 1920s. Enduring the poverty and isolation of the immigrant, compounded by the Depression and the second world war, Leonard saw poetry as the way to live in worlds beyond the real one.
As well as being a biography of Leonard and a treatise on his ideas, The Treehouse contains auto-biographical details about Wolf's own life. But contrary to her previously self-obsessed and assertive written voice, the Wolf of The Treehouse constantly questions her behaviour and her rectitude.
This may or may not be a classic mid-life crisis, but the woman who advised President Clinton on getting women's votes and derided Al Gore as a "beta male" has mellowed and matured to write a moving homage to her father that will soften the heart of even the most entrenched cynic.
Under syndication
arrangement with FE
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