If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?
By Cynthia Heimel
Picador, 181 pp., $14.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Dave Riley
It's true that the US of A isn't short of columnists. Name your preference, and there is sure to be some self-righteous wag claiming a few column centimetres in one of any number of rags circulated by the publishing industry. Even the doyen of the Republican right, Pat Buchanan, trades on his credentials as a "columnist", and savvy with words can get you serialised sometimes in the most unlikely journals.
Take someone like P.J. O'Rourke. As a satirist, the guy is good. His prose zings as much as it stings. But O'Rourke is a level nine libertarian conservative who has turned on his youthful leftward leanings to now commit his keyboard to shoring up the post-Reagan offensive on the gains of the past. To read him is easy.
O'Rourke is now a standard-bearer for Rolling Stone. That's right, the counter-cultural, sometime hippy music journal that was once home to much outlaw and gonzo style journalism now runs the latest from rabidly right-wing O'Rourke.
And here's another: Cynthia Heimel is a regular writer for Playboy. How could she? What's a self-respecting feminist doing squeezed between an eyeful of Miss January's breasts and the latest in bunny jokes?
The way Heimel calls it, she likes to eat; Playboy doesn't censor her work; and she prefers to preach to the unconverted. All I can say is: don't be put off by the packaging, nor is there a need to go looking for her column in situ among "Men's Interests" at your local newsagent.
This is her sixth selected anthology of columns. With snappy titles such as this, you'd think Heimel was a determined flippant. Not so. Sure, she's funny and audacious but the Cynthia Heimel in these pages has the courage to say what seldom is said. She grasps feminism firmly by its sundry notions and mercilessly converts them into common sense.
Despite all her smart talk and brutal honesty there's a war raging in the written world of Cynthia Heimel as feminism negotiates the orchestrated backlash and defends itself from its detractors.
This makes her something of a populist, because what Heimel manages to do is make gender politics accessible. For her, the problem is much more than the dope you married. It's bigger and more important than both he and she. Ultimately, a dose of Heimel is both comforting for the boldness of her assertiveness and discomfiting because it reveals so much of what is taken for granted as sexual tyranny. Not for nothing do they (i.e. reviewers other than me) call this woman's writing a revelation, or her good self a goddess.
And besides, her no-nonsense approach to the page leaves most other columnists for dead. For me, she's up there with Dorothy Parker, and I'm dotty about Dot.