Reviewed by Adam Goldwyn
5.16.07

Alix Kate Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen has been a touchstone of feminist literature since its 1972 debut, selling over a million copies. But just in case you don’t know this, they will remind you—once on the back cover, once more in the biographical blurb and yet again in Jennifer Baumgardner’s new introduction (which is wonderfully engaging and insightful—when it is about Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen and not about Jennifer Baumgardner). What we are meant to see in this new thirty-fifth anniversary edition is not Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen the novel, but Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen the cultural artifact, the Rosetta stone of second wave feminism, the book which Baumgardner sees as the spiritual godmother of Molly Ringwald’s Brat Pack movies, Sex in the City, and the thriving genre of chick-lit (though these seem somewhat tame and sterilized in comparison). Baumgardner, for better or worse, assumes the book’s readers share these same cultural filters and have the same interest in literary antiquarianism. The cover even has in bold block letters “A classic of feminist thought.”

What this marketing strategy obscures, however, is just how good a novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen really is. And it is good. It is a beautiful novel, a dark novel, a novel of great artistry. There are many feminist novels, but what makes this novel worth printing and reading and, in the case of this edition, reprinting and rereading, is that it is not just a feminist novel, nor is it just another great novel (and let’s be honest, there are lots of great novels not worth reading, much less rereading), but that it combines the two. To see its beauty as a work of art as separate from its feminism is to miss the point.

An example of Shulman’s synthesis of feminism and art comes in the book’s opening set piece. In the work’s second sentence, the protagonist and narrator Sasha Davis tells us: “I knew only that I had slightly under two minutes in which to bundle myself up, gather my dictionaries and belongings, fish out my ticket, and find the precise and perfect words with which to shed my spouse.” Shulman gives us a list of the banalities of international train travel: tickets, dictionaries, luggage, and then, without any special emphasis, as if it is no more important than the trivialities which preceded it, concludes her list with the almost thoughtless aside that she is going to leave her husband. Both author and character are as concerned with “find[ing] the precise and perfect English words” as they are with “shedding [the] spouse.” In Shulman’s world, the artistry is as important as the message it conveys.

Shulman waits six agonizing pages, sparing us none of the awkwardness and humiliation that comes with a break-up, before finding those perfect words. Sasha tells her husband: “I guess I don’t love you any more. I don’t belong to you any more.’ Well, at least it was the truth. I looked down into my beer. After a suitable number of seconds had elapsed I took a swallow.” Shulman’s prose here, and wherever it is at its best, is simple, plain, direct and devastating. But combined with this artful simplicity is a powerful feminist message: Sasha’s ambivalence toward her husband is presented as reason enough for a divorce; she neither offers another, nor does her husband—whose consummately generic name, Frank, practically begs for an allegorical reading of him as Everyman and she as Everywoman. She is a free woman: the property of no one, and certainly no man. The message, though somewhat less shocking in 2007 than in 1972, is almost universally accepted in America, yet something about it still cries out for constant repetition. And though we in the twenty-first century may have become accustomed to the strong woman leaving her husband, Shulman’s description of it remains startlingly fresh. Having proudly claimed a strong and independent feminine identity in such “precise and perfect English words,” Sasha goes back to her beer. The raw power of Shulman’s prose style is most captivating at moments like this, when, by means of such stark transitions, it oscillates between the momentous and the mundane, the trivial and the transcendent.