Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Vignettes from a life of activism, writing, speaking, and service, mined for insights and advice. Steinem’s second memoir, followingMy Life on the Road (2015), is a mostly grateful, sometimes rueful accounting of the people and places that have shaped her 92 years on earth. A chapter titled “Bad Things I’m Glad Happened to Me” includes a moving section called “A Small Person Looking After a Bigger Person,” about her experience as the caretaker of her mentally ill mother after her parents divorced. For a while, the two lived in a condemned farmhouse in East Toledo, Ohio, where Gloria was bitten by a rat in her sleep. Despite these vicissitudes, she finds humor where she can, explaining that, according to her upbringing, you weren’t allowed to be unhappy unless a disaster had befallen you. But in her undergrad years at Smith College, “I discovered that a mood was a prerogative one could exercise from time to time and no one would think worse of you. I was delighted. I immediately began to have moods.” She traces the experiences that shaped her political consciousness, including a racially mixed dance club her father owned on a lake in southern Michigan, years spent in India on a fellowship after college, and obstacles she faced as a beginning journalist, public speaker, and organizer. A chapter on key influences includes interesting stories about James Baldwin, Wilma Mankiller, and Simone de Beauvoir, along with few characters she despises, including Andy Warhol and Hugh Hefner. She can get a little preachy with lines like “When we look at history this way, we live a more fulfilled present” and “It’s fun to take the stones of our lives and make stone soup that nourishes all of us.” But sometimes, the moral of the story does resound: “There is nothing more basic or radical than telling the truth and listening to other people do so.” This beloved principle led to decades of hosting “talking circles” from those who led to the founding ofMs. magazine in 1972 to a 2025 gathering to talk about artificial intelligence. Numerous photos and artifacts add charm and interest. Down to earth, heartfelt, and illuminated by a lifelong commitment to principles. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Writing a memoir at age 92, Steinem could turn out a doorstop of a book. The activists she’s inspired, the politicians she’s influenced, the causes she’s embraced, the movements she’s championed—each aspect of her long and remarkable life could support a volume of its own. But in typical Steinem fashion, she homes in on what’s essential in this spare but powerful reflection on the people and places who have meant the most to her. Pivotal episodes from her childhood demonstrate how, in retrospect, each experience presaged a behavior or philosophy that would serve her well later on. College brought travel to India and exposure to the wonders of a diverse society. Variety in writing assignments when she was a freelance journalist provided the confidence to co-launch Ms., the first national feminist magazine in the U.S. While many episodes in her life’s journey may have been unexpected, the outcomes were purposeful. With unabashed generosity, Steinem celebrates those who have shared her unconventional and iconic life as she continues to guide generations to come.

Publishers Weekly
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“Revolutions that last don’t happen from the top down; they grow from the bottom up like a tree,” writes feminist pioneer Steinem (My Life on the Road) in this revealing memoir-in-essays. She highlights the key events that formed her political philosophy: a childhood rat bite exposed her to the dangers and prevalence of poverty while growing up in 1940s Ohio; seeing wedding rings appear on the fingers of her female classmates at Smith College shaped her complicated feelings about marriage in the early ’50s. In measured, matter-of-fact prose, Steinem recalls how meeting luminaries including James Baldwin and bell hooks deepened her activism, how studying geology expanded her empathy, and how her years living in India in the late ’50s informed her commitment to antiracist work as well as women’s rights. Steinem’s stirring reflections offer a road map for future generations to forge a better future by learning from the curiosity, empathy, and commitment to community that motivated the author and her contemporaries. (“Hope is a form of planning,” she writes.) Both an engrossing self-portrait and a useful political handbook, this is essential reading. Photos. Agent: Kim Schefler, Levine Plotkin. (Sept.)