I’ve been reading a lot of the smack/feminist rage against Lori Gottlieb and Marry Him, and, all due respect from a card-carrying member, I think it’s misplaced. Of course, Gottlieb (and/or her editor) is baiting the response with the title/subtitle of her book. She’s probably delighted by all the sturm und drang, which gets her media appearances and sells units. And, sure, if you don’t look beyond the stupidity of the book’s cover, it seems only natural that you’ll see Gottlieb as an anti-feminist throwback, preying on women’s societally inculcated fear of remaining single.
True enough: Gottlieb has that fear. As I said, she desperately wants to be married—though, of course, at least until writing the book, not desperate enough to open her heart to non-alpha men—and she seems to forget that there are women who aren’t straight, or who don’t want to be married, or who don’t want to have children, or even women whose standards for partners are depressingly low. That’s all part of the book’s narcissism, that it takes Gottlieb’s own personality profile as a cultural trend that supposedly says something about all women.
But if you read the book, it’s not too hard to see that Gottlieb is talking about a very specific kind of woman: the straight, upper-middle class, marriage-minded, hyper-intellectual, achievement-oriented, status-obsessed striver who refuses to date anyone but the alpha hottie who’s talented at sexy banter but miserable at real connection. She’s talking about herself. And sure, there are women like Gottlieb. Just last night on the phone, a friend told me about someone she knows, a 40-year-old woman who won’t date any man who isn’t extremely conventionally attractive, because she, apparently, “deserves no less.” So, there’s a Gottlieb.
The honest version of Marry Him would have a personal title, something like “Learning to Love,” and it would chart Gottlieb’s initial steps toward deepening as a person, without making any claims about women in general. But the book is designed to sell. The movie rights have already gone to Tobey Maguire: In two years we’ll get the predictable romantic comedy about the woman who goes through a series of charmers, only to find a goofy loveball at the end—the goofy loveball in this case played by the very conventionally handsome Tobey Maguire, handicapped only by a pair of glasses or a bow tie.
So, bottom line: Gottlieb strikes me as less than self-aware and not exactly a feminist. But she’s not trying to take us down. She’s trying to find love. And make a kamillion dollars. And I think she’s on track for the latter.