Tiptoe Through the Tulips
Kiba’s gettin’ her summer on:
FatGrrl Reviews: Supergirls Speak Out
It’s easy to spot author Liz Funk for a Supergirl: her birth year (1988) appears on the back jacket of her book, Supergirls Speak Out: Inside the Secret Crisis of Overachieving Girls. A quick peek inside the cover tells you the book was published in 2009, and then you do the math.
OMG! Published at 21! Amazing!
I think that may be part of the intent, and as Ms. Funk presents in her book, greater and greater achievements at younger and younger ages is part of the Supergirl syndrome. I also think it’s important that Ms. Funk outed herself right on the back cover of the book, because readers should know going in that Liz is someone who has been there, and done that.
I was really looking forward to Supergirls because I consider myself a Supergirl in Recovery. I look back at my past and see a pursuit-of-perfection streak a mile long: I was a high school valedictorian that carried a full-load of classes, participated in a ridiculous number of clubs, AND – because I didn’t have enough to do, it seemed – I studied for the AP Calculus exam on my own because the class wasn’t offered at my school. Did you read that carefully? I fucking created an AP Calculus class for myself. As an interesting bit of trivia: I also wrote my first novel at age 14. It was nine hundred double-spaced pages of vampire-inspired drivel that shall never see the light of day (ha. ha.), but that’s not the point. The point is my mom got to say, “My 14-year-old just finished her first novel.”
From there I got myself a wicked academic scholarship to a private college (a college I started looking for as a high school sophomore), helped start a sorority, competed at the national level in speech, went head-to-head with the Computer Science & Math Boys Club, and graduated suma cum laude. All by age 21. And what did all this work get me?
Crazy. Lots and lots of Crazy. And I am still dealing with the effects of The Crazy to this day.
Funk’s book is full of stories just like mine, and it is staggering to read some of the quotes from these girls who candidly discussed with Funk their obsession with perfection. And it isn’t that these girls aren’t unaware of the tremendous amounts of pressure they are putting on themselves, but their attitude seems more along the lines of: “If you want to get anywhere in life, this is how it’s got to be done. It sucks, but that’s the way it is.” While I was in college, tucked away in a bathroom cubicle having my third breakdown in a day, that’s what I told myself.
Funk gives a quick run-down of the Supergirl psyche as such:
Supergirls have:
The top grades
The best clothes
A great body
A cute boyfriend
And then she counters that these girls who seem to have it all may also have:
Exhaustion
Anxiety
Eating disorders
Crippling Insecurity
Ms. Funk goes into great depth on each of these traits and consequences, supporting it with research data and loads of interview material from Supergirls far and wide. As I read the book, my mind kept coming back to these lists. I still struggle today with exhaustion, anxiety, an eating disorder, and crippling insecurity. But back in my Supergirl heyday I got to claim just one item off the list: top grades. My clothes were often second hand and ill-fitting because I was tall and fat, which usually put me in boys’ clothes. I had a fat body which was ridiculed by peers and family. The attention from boys was often mocking and sexually degrading.
I actually started to feel a bit resentful as the book went along, full of these girls with looks, clothes, grades, and guys. It felt like it was a club I wasn’t allowed to be in, as if I was somehow less of a Supergirl than I could have been; that I failed and I wasn’t really a Supergirl at all. (Hear that? That’s The Crazy talkin’.) I keep trying to tell myself a lot of this is in my head, but I haven’t resolved the nagging feeling that there is a Supergirl Clique in this book and I felt pretty side-lined as a result, or that my experience was somehow minimized. Now Funk does address the double-standard of beauty, and that successful women invariably are beautiful and that beauty is a requisite component of her success, but really, this just made me feel worse. I think there are a lot of girls struggling with this endless pursuit of perfection, but Funk’s definition of a Supergirl left me feeling a bit excluded.
That being said, I imagine this would be a good book to slip to a friend/daughter/niece/cousin who is a Supergirl, but is totally in the dark about what is driving her to do what she does.
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Praise & Adoration
FatGrrl: “Where’d you go? Bike ride?”
Canadian: “I had to leave the house immediately.”
F: “Huh?”
C: “That dog is disgusting.”
F: “I know you cannot possibly be referring to my Angel Hound.”
C: “THAT DOG got off the couch, stretched, stuck her butt in the air and farted for ten long seconds. Ten seconds at least!”
F: “I’m actually very sorry I missed that.”
C: “Brutal beast!”
F: “Awwww, settle down now. She loves you. Think of it as her singing you a song. With her butt.”
Filed under Canadia-Land, Kiba | Comments (6)