Heidi's Moonlighting

By Tom

YA Wednesday fans: just a shout out that our own Heidi Broadhead has also debuted as the BookNerd at Publicola, a new news-and-culture site here in Seattle that's started up to fill the gap left by newsroom cutbacks. (Full disclosure: it's run by a very good friend of mine whose own booknerdism runs heavily toward the Federalist Papers (hence the site's name) and the late '60s NBA.) She'll be posting every Sunday on whatever bookish thing she pleases, beginning with this account of what it was like to go back and read The Second Sex way after it was cool:

I figured I already knew what was in it. I was raised in the wake
of said movement: My mom taught me to get a job not a man. She
purposefully did not teach me how to cook or sew. She had "the talk"
with me (complete with a mail-order kit and pamphlet) when I was 10. I
didn't know if the book would be illuminating (like, oh, I totally get
my mom now!) or if I would be completely bored.

--Tom