Memoirs of an Ex-prom Queen A Novel
Review The ex-prom queen of the title is Sasha Davis, a rebellious Midwestern girl who becomes one of the few women in her high school class to make it east for college. In grad school, she marries a fellow student, then trades school for clerical work. Trapped in a loveless union, Sasha has affairs, divorces ... meets a new love, marries him, has two children and finds this second, more "l;modern" union as difficult, in its own way, as her first. She divides her time between New York City and Maine. From The Washington Post Reviewed by Evelyn Small Called by its original publisher (Knopf) the "first feminist novel," Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen appeared 35 years ago and sold more than a million copies in just a few years. Now it's back, in an anniversary edition reprint. The narrator, Sasha Davis, an Ohio girl, high school prom queen, now divorced and in a second marriage "headed for the same miserable demise as the first," is still searching for herself. Touching on issues that continue to color the cultural landscape -- abortion, date rape, balancing work and motherhood -- Memoirs was, for some readers, what the Saturday Review (May 20, 1972) called a "break-through book," the "first important novel to emerge from the Women's Liberation movement." The Post's reviewer, Barbara Howar (April 26, 1972), took the messages of the book personally: "With uncomfortable frequency, I find myself torn between the warring factions of the Women's Rights Movement and its natural enemy, the Great White Male. So grand is my passion for both that I resent having to take sides which it becomes my sticky business to do in commenting on this first novel. . . . Heroine Sasha recounts with heavy humor her blundering quest for autonomy in a male-oriented society . . . terrorized by bullying, domineering little boys who grew into big ones. "Having been a Prom Queen a time or two, I can readily share Sasha's rage at being pushed into beauty-worship before she gets the message that a woman just might need something more in life than the identity of the man she marries. . . . "Sasha refuses to see that her parents as well as the goodly number of men in her life are victimized by the same system that did her in, that we are all in the soup together. . . . "After this cathartic memoir, my guess is that Alix Shulman will get her sense of humor and fair-play into some less paranoid perspective and write a constructive book better suited to her talent and to the vast army of troubled women who need her." Shulman has written three other novels, several children's books, two books on Emma Goldman and two memoirs, A Good Enough Daughter and Drinking the Rain. Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.