In her 2005 New York Times Bestselling memoir, Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress: Tales of Growing up Groovy and Clueless, modern day feminist Susan Jane Gilman humorously and honestly recounts her life growing up in New York City during the 1970s. She divides the book into three sections, which are representative of the stages of her life up to her late 20s. Starting logically at her early childhood, she entitles Part 1 "Grape Juice and Humiliation," before moving on to her adolescence in Part 2: "Not Just Horny, But Obnoxious, Too." The concluding section chronicles her awkward transition into adulthood and the responsibility it brings. Part 3 is cleverly entitled "Reality Says Hello." In her memoir Gilman puts forth a kind of feminism that encourages women to both acknowledge their own mistakes, and learn to let them go.
In the forward, which she calls the "Author's Soapbox", Gilman herself admits that “It’s hope that these 'coming of age' stories will make readers laugh, and prove once and for all that a girl doesn't need a guy in her life in order to act like a complete idiot." Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress is most notably acclaimed by established memoirist Frank McCourt (Angela's Ashes, ’Tis) who is quoted on the back cover. He says, "She ranges over the days and dilemmas of her generation like Erica Jong over a prairie of libido...This is a memoir men should read. It explains a generation that is neither Lost nor Beat, Silent nor Xed, and Susan Gilman is its saucy chronicler."
Famous quotes containing the words hypocrite, white and/or dress:
“What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as slaves and degraded them as another man’s slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four years of bloody war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“Iconic clothing has been secularized.... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)