I envy Rebecca Traister and wish more women (including me) were like her. I can't stand the clutter, and probably for the same reason that Flanagan articulates: I feel as though someone is watching and disapproving. But that's because someone has been watching me and disapproving of me all my life: my mother, my mother-in-law, my sister, other girls, the ladies at my parents' church, Them, whoever They are.

So maybe it really is true that the vast majority of women hate clutter and disorder. That's irrelevant. The point is that Flanagan thinks that it should go on being true. She's the modern day Angel in the House, the one Virginia Woolf proudly announced she'd strangled (but which probably helped kill her in the end), the being who whispers in all our ears that we should forget writing and silly things like careers, because our true role is to be little helpmeets at home, and oh, by the way, we're not doing it right.

And the kicker is that Flanagan herself is an utter fraud. We should point this out over and over, the way we keep repeating until we're blue in the face that there never were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Flanagan does not cook her husband's dinners and apparently never did. Flanagan does not do any housework herself. Flanagan didn't even take care of her small children without the help of a nanny. And, interestingly enough, according to the Columbia Journalism Review Flanagan may even have "borrowed" someone else's research for an article she wrote about Mary Poppins a couple years back for the New Yorker (http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/1/lettertoeditor.asp), which would have made her a fraud as a researcher and writer as well as a housekeeper. She is not the shining paragon of self-sacrifice she'd like us all to believe she is, and if those allegations are true, she's not even the exemplar of Virtue Rewarded. She's just a little girl in a forty-something body who's still rebelling, as I suppose we all are, against her mommy.

One big problem with feminism has been its virtue: it's been too tolerant for too long of people like Flanagan. You can gabble sanctimoniously on about sisterhood all you like, but when your "sister" continually undermines your "family" while presenting a placid, perfect, and utterly false countenance to the rest of the world...you know, there are some family members from whom you finally just have to walk away because they are so destructive, so manipulative. I thought "sociopathic" was kind of a strong choice of word, but on further consideration, that's exactly what a sociopath would do. I think Walsh has hit the nail right on the head in this review (and I admire her tenacity--Flanagan's Atlantic Monthly essays were hard enough for me to stomach in their original form.)

As I've said in other letters, I feel sorry for Flanagan, but she is a fraud, and--it bears repeating--not just as a mother and housewife, but possibly as a writer as well. (Google Flanagan and the CJR.) When rank-and-file Democrats got serious about giving Joseph Lieberman the boot, it wasn't seen as a catfight but as a show of solidarity: we were rooting out the enemy from our midst. This "sisterhood" business is one of those suffocating matriarchalist lies, the same kind that claim that all women are meant to be nurturing caregivers and should therefore behave nicely. When liberals started deriding and disowning the pseudo-liberals among them, when progressive Christians and other religious liberals finally got a pair and refused to tolerate the religious right any longer, they didn't become weakened by the discord; they only became stronger by asserting what they believed. There's a big difference between refusing to tolerate valid differences and refusing to tolerate people who are actively trying to discredit the movement from inside.

I loved the Beezus and Ramona books. It sometimes felt like Ms. Cleary was writing about my little sister and me; the illustrations even bore an eerie resemblance to us. My kid sister was the cute pest who annoyed me constantly, but whom I loved in spite of everything, because, after all, she was my sister. I'm so happy that Beverly Cleary has been so prolific--there are lots of books that I liked when I was a kid that seem a bit dated now, but the Ramona books will never, never, never go out of date as long as little sisters pester their big ones.

OK, maybe I'm just easily impressed, but that Australian ad linked above in comments just convinced me to knock off 2-5 miles when driving in residential areas.

It occurs to me that Flanagan probably was trying to play along, to be more outrageous than Colbert. At least, I'm hoping that's the case. But if so, she didn't carry it off. Her strongest turn was when flirting with Colbert. Otherwise, she sounded a bit too earnest and unsure of herself to be doing effective parody. It would have been better if she'd gotten herself permed and hairsprayed up like a Dallas church lady, worn one of those retro pastel-colored dresses with the full skirts and the little waists, pearls, and heels, and spoken in stentorian Barbara Bush tones. Then, maybe, she might have outgunned Colbert.

If people now believe that she condemns date night at the Olive Garden (shudder), well, that's her own damn fault.

And she's still a fraud.