Ophelia Speaks
   Sara Shandler
  1999 Harper Perennial
    ISBN: 0060952970


A poignant collection of writings culled from more than 800 contributions directly from the hearts of girls with various cultural backgrounds, ranging from 12-18, offering a real view on issues public & private, from body image to boys, politics to parents, school to sex.

“If Ophelia is to be revived, it should be by our own words and our own actions...”

Framing each chapter are Sara Shandler's own personal reflections, offering both the comfort of a trusted friend who shares her own story & an honest perspective from within the eye of the storm of adolescence.

After reading Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia at age 16, Sara Shandler, so felt the absence of the voices of America's daughters: “Yet, by book's end i was left unsettled. In fact, I felt Pipher was speaking for me, and I wanted to speak for myself.”

With rare determination & a book deal in hand, this teenager wrote letters to high school principals asking their assistance in finding the voices of America's girls. “As I described this frustrated desire to speak for myself and to hear the voices of other girls, my dad half-supportedly, half-jokingly retorted: “Sara, you should write a book called Ophelia Speaks.” The next morning I announced my plan...my intention was to enable girls to tell their own stories and hear the stories of other girls. I hoped to take the adult intermediary out from between us. I wanted us to see one other's intelligence and experience, pain and power directly, free from adult interpretation.”

“Before I began this project I had limited my perceptions to what I wanted to see; I saw my friends as others saw them -- the high-functioning, popular, National Honor society crowd, about to enter the halls of the Ivy League...That falsified vision was shattered by their contributions. With tear-filled eyes, I saw through the facade.”

Here are the voices of our Ophelias. Listen & weep, for they are coherent, lyrical & vivid & have much to teach us!

“Invited to speak honestly, girls told treasured and hidden stories. They wrote to communicate, to heal themselves, and to help other girls...they reflected on the most important experiences in their lives. sometimes, their stories made me laugh. More often, they made me cry.”

“Even now, despite my general happiness and healthfulness, I have moments of intense insecurity and self-deprecation. I was most compelled to write when I was living in darker times or in more difficult moments.”

It's strange how The Muse will create writers out of us only through angst.

“In this collection of personal essays, stories, and poems, we open a door, inviting adults intent on understanding us, and other adolescents eager to hear their own voices, to enter our reality....”

What a read! Had I been as coherent as these girls, maidens, Ophelias, at their age, I would have been unstoppable!

“...The contributors to this book are mature, insightful, self-reflective, but we are still teetering on the edge of our childhood. Our youth compounds the gravity of our words. In adolescence, stickers and dolls mix with sex and depression...”

It doesn't surprise me that in the land of plenty, so many girls are starving themselves. Hunger & starvation, unlike The Bomb or Civil Rights, War or Genocide, doesn't grab our attention. Whereas each generation seems to have had a battle over some social injustice, we have now had a generation of subliminal hatred toward food.

We may worry about whether a genetically altered grain has migrated into our food supply; we may have rages over how we obtain veal. We may shudder at all the technological names we must now read as the ingredients to our food -- still, we don't consider the epidemic of food disorders much to worry about.

Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia was the CPR this author needed to set about finding what her generation had to say for themselves. The process by which Ophelia Speaks came about reminds me of the story of how the now classic(& often forgotten or ridiculed) feminist eye-opener The Descent of Woman came about. Written with a magnificent rage & humorous, groundbreaking research by Elaine Morgan after she'd encountered Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape!

An amazing effort! Put it on your shopping list for every girl you know & for anyone interested in who our daughters really are & why.
(09/09/01)

Rebecca