If you're looking for a page-turner, a good rule of thumb is to steer clear of books based on doctoral dissertations. But if and when an academic work is published for a general audience, even if the prose isn't compelling, the bare minimum we'd expect is for the writer to get the facts right. Unfortunately for polemicist and bestselling feminist author Naomi Wolf, her latest book Outrages—which grew out of the Ph.D. she completed at Oxford in 2015—failed either to entertain or to be accurate. Yesterday, after several weeks of controversy, her publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that the book would no longer appear in the United States on June 18, its planned publication date, and is according to the New York Times, “taking the costly step of recalling finished copies.”
Yet I don't find it straightforward to dismiss Wolf as a writer and thinker, as some critics have. For many women of a certain generation—including but not limited to those who came of age around the turn of the millennium perhaps—discovering Wolf's earlier books was part of a hodgepodge, self-assembled feminist education. That was certainly true for me, in college in the nineties. I had never taken a women's studies class; I tended to get most of my information from women's magazines, from broadcast TV, from the canon of literature we read in my English classes, from late-night drunken conversations. Which is why my world burst open when my roommate handed me a copy of Naomi Wolf's debut. The Beauty Myth remains one of the most formative books in my life, and I'm grateful to have read it when I did.
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