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

Eileen is nine and too smart for the 4^th 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.