Caitlin Flanagan Returns
Posted on 15. Dec, 2005 by Brian Reid in General
The lifeblood of blogs appears to be a steady stream of stuff to get really, really worked up about. Everyone has their own favorite source: O’Reilly sets off the liberals, Hillary sets off the conservatives, Google (of late) sets off the geeks. And for a long time, Caitlin Flanagan was the go-to writer to get me steamed. But about a year and a half ago, she moved to the New Yorker, penned a pretty mild piece, wrote a couple of other articles and then pretty much disappeared. (Yeah, I know she wrote a review of the Raising Boys Without Men book a couple of months ago for the Atlantic, but she didn’t really cut loose.)
So she returned this week in the New Yorker with an altogether interesting history of Mary Poppins, which seems to be surprisingly free of the working-mother-bashing that so infused her last stab at writing about nannies. In short, there’s not much in there to raise my blood pressure.
But good news is afoot, at least when it comes to future blogging. Flanagan will soon give us plenty to chew over (from the “Contributors” section):
Caitlin Flanagan (“Becoming Mary Poppins,” p. 40) will publish a book about modern motherhood, “To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife,” next spring.
Should be one hell of a book.
Rebel Dad
29. Nov, 2010
True, but she passes up so many other chances to insert (and then twist) the knife. Once upon a time, you didn’t have to scan for the jabs … you had only to open the page.
Elizabeth
16. Dec, 2005
There’s a little bit of a jab in there, but I wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t Flanagan:
“It is Mary Poppins who earns the deepest love a child has to offer: that which is bound in his trusting dependence on the person who provides his physical care.”
Jody
21. Dec, 2005
Here via Technorati, because I just blogged about this piece. I’m completely steamed, because when Flanagan isn’t doing a workable, decent job of writing about P.L. Travers, it seems to me she’s riding nothing BUT the same stupid horses she’s always ridden. She turns the movie from a fairytale about bad fathres into a fairytale about bad mothers, on the strength of nothing but a kite-tail and a couple of writers’ memories of their first script treatment. Flanagan punishes Mrs. Banks something fierce, admittedly on the fly, because that’s what Flanagan does: work out her own conflicted feelings about employing a nanny at the expense of mothers everywhere.
It was only mild because most of the article stuck to Travers. The minute Flanagan started writing about ideas, she was back up on her hobby-horse again. I don’t know whether she’s stabled it for the New Yorker because she has tougher editors or whether she just wanted a break from the collective abuse of her crusade.
Sorry to go off so much on my first comment, but I’m amazed that no one else seems as worked up about Flanagan’s latest as I am. I thought she presented such an easy target!