Letters from Rona / Women / Sort by date

I'd been counting on Diana Nyad to prove that you're never too old to score the success of a lifetime. Instead she proved that there's more to success than achieving the vision in her head. She will never swim from Cuba to Key West, but she did her absolute best and I'll remember her grit next time I shy away from a daunting goal. [more]

When I was growing up in the days of crinolines and penny loafers, every girl learned three things about breasts. They were not a fitting subject for polite conversation. They drove men wild with desire (hence their prominent display in the kind of magazine not found on anyone's coffee table). They made you a woman, which meant that if you lost a breast to a certain unmentionable disease, you were not a woman anymore. We all heard stories about women who would not show a breast lump to their doctor until cancer had them in a death grip. One woman changed that--former First Lady Betty Ford, who died yesterday at 93. [more]

I just ran into a 50-something colleague, normally a take-charge sort, who confessed to soul-destroying frazzlement: emotional meltdowns, scrambled thoughts, night sweats that ravaged her sleep. She was tempted to start taking hormones, but had been spooked by another onslaught of scare-mongering headlines. This woman has vanquished severe depression that might come galloping back if she lets herself get run down. "Take the pills!" I said. "I've been on them for 15 years and when I'm not on them, you wouldn't want to know me." [more]

It's been 199 years since a now-obscure English novelist, Fanny Burney, endured a harrowing mastectomy, performed in her own bedroom with nothing but a wine cordial to blunt the pain. Nine months passed before she could speak of the surgery to anyone; the thought of it made her ill. Then she summoned the courage to describe---and relive---the whole ordeal in a letter to her sister that captures not only the forgotten suffering of countless generations of women but the power of memoir to console even as it terrifies. What Fanny had to face has more in common with slasher movies than with modern surgery, yet through it all she remained absolutely, unshakeably herself. [more]

I expected to remember Helen Thomas, the legendary White House correspondent who retired this week at 89 after holding presidents to account for close to half a century, as a model for my own old age---scrappy, tenacious and relentlessly committed to her craft. "I think I'll work all my life," she once said. "When you're having fun, why stop having fun?" Why, indeed. [more]

It's been seventeen years since a piece of my prose inspired a week or so of headline-making fury. A Toronto Sun columnist accused me of "pathetic, whining, whacko, feminist claptrap." A radio host denounced my "evil, vile pamphlet dripping with slime." Irate callers lambasted the Ontario Women's Directorate for having the temerity to publish a 35-page booklet on non-sexist language, anonymously written by me. I've never felt more reviled---or less visible. I would read the morning paper in my bathrobe, wondering what new slurs were coming my way from people who had no idea I existed. [more]

Kate MGarrigle, the singer/songwriter who died of cancer this week at 63, was so wholly and happily bound up in my mind with her sister and partner Anna that in 30-odd years of loving their luminous harmonies I never bothered to distinguish the two. But any fan can tell that "Matapedia" is a story from Kate's life as daughter, mother and middle-aged woman contemplating mortality. I couldn't get Kate off my mind tonight. And so on the elliptical machine, where I usually pump away to hard-driving stuff, I couldn't stop playing "Matapedia." [more]

The difference between Raymond Carver and your typical bad-boy writer, boozing and bedding his way to premature decrepitude, is that Carver, pushing 40, got scared enough to dry out---a decision that rekindled his sputtering creative fire and made him a grateful man who viewed each day as a gift. His last poems credit a late-blooming love affair with a fellow writer, Tess Gallagher, as the emotional centre of this extraordinary transformation. Yet Carol Sklenicka's new biography clearly shows that if not for the selfless devotion of his first wife Maryann, Carver would have drowned the gifts that made his name. [more]

Soon after the Montreal Massacre, Flare magazine asked me for an essay on its meaning to women. There were many who dismissed the lethal shooting spree as the act of a madman. I saw it as the far extreme of attitudes that threaten women in their own neighbourhoods and bedrooms. Yes, even women like me. I didn't want to think about that, but I've learned that the stories I most resist are the ones I most need to tell. [more]

In the December issue of Vogue, a magazine I rarely buy but this month couldn't resist, Hillary Clinton is profiled by Jonathan Van Meter, who closes his eye-opening interview with this question: why is she such an inspiration to women when Margaret Thatcher, who reached greater heights, was rarely described in those terms? [more]

In 1976, when we still believed in "having it all" and "glass ceiling" was a skylight with pretensions, I landed my first magazine job. Career gurus told me I should learn to act more like men. These days it's career-minded men who are being told to emulate women. So says Men's Health, the modern guy's mentor on every aspect of manhood from getting laid to getting ahead. [more]

There's a depth of desire---fierce, wholehearted and relentless---that can seize the heart of a teenage girl and carry her away, perhaps forever. Some girls are so determined to be thin that they'll starve for their notion of beauty. Others have staked their sense of self on joining violent gangs where rape is the price of admission. Laura Dekker, 14, is raising teen obsession to a loftier plane. She intends to become the youngest person to sail around the world solo. [more]