I’m a pimply whale.”įor me, a nerd who felt it was very unfair that her intense childhood interest in school didn’t translate into teenage social success, Reviving Ophelia felt extremely correct. But Monica-an icon-said flatly: “It’s my looks. We know more about chaos theory than we do about movie stars,” Monica’s mother said in therapy, speculating about the root causes of her daughter’s total lack of friends. We talk about philosophy and science at dinner. I identified most with Monica, whose parents were “kindhearted and slightly out-of-touch” professors who had raised the 15-year-old without “many common childhood experiences, such as television, Disneyland, camping, or sports.” (Very relatable to me, the product of a no-TV household and a long line of klutzes.) “We’re an odd family. There was Cassie, who was sexually assaulted at a party Jessica, who refused to go to school, and lay around in her mother’s bedroom all day watching TV Julia, whose mom got divorced and remarried a father with three boys who never, ever did chores. I gobbled up Pipher’s anecdotes about the young patients she saw in therapy in her Nebraska practice. Part of Ophelia’s appeal was pure voyeurism. When I interviewed Mary Pipher and her daughter Sara Pipher Gilliam, on the occasion of the book’s 25 th-anniversary edition, Pipher said that in the intervening years, “partly because of my book, and partly because of rising awareness and education, the culture really did change, and become more teenager-friendly.” Although my love for the book felt personal, it seems I wasn’t the only one affected. Ophelia inspired several painfully earnest term papers and eventually, in a roundabout way, my employment at a teen magazine, where I hoped to set a better example for girls coming up.

The volume, with its dreaming blond cover girl gazing out into the middle distance, traveled with me for years, from dorm to dorm to post-college apartment. The book, a bestselling publishing phenomenon, presented a complete explanation for so many of my feelings about the world it was my first time feeling seen by a work of popular psychology. When Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls came out in 1994, I was 16, and had recently passed through the early-adolescent crisis that Pipher’s book defined. NPR Laid Off Its War Correspondent in Ukraine. Think You Know What Happens in All-Guy “Boys’ Chats”? Don’t Be So Sure.

Let Me Just Describe the Deranged Spectacle That Will Unfold When King Charles Is Crowned The Royals Tried to Dodge a Major Scandal at Charles’ Coronation.

Reviving ophelia by mary pipher