She can be calculating in her deft manipulation of those who would stand in her way. Though revered for her beneficence, Faith is not always kindhearted. That you could work toward something important, and there would be this person there who actually took an interest in you, which was the best feeling.

I wanted to stand for those things too, because it made everything feel more hopeful. “I loved what she stood for,” Greer thinks, She quietly resents them and grabs onto Faith as a role model and provider of the emotional support and encouragement that she craves. Smart and driven, Greer chafes against her parents’ seeming apathy and detachment from everything, including her. Greer idolizes Faith and sees in her the traits - nurturing, attentive, sophisticated, and socially engaged - she always wished of her hippie parents, who spend their days smoking pot and selling protein bars from their home. A chance encounter with Faith provides Greer with the necessary hook to land a job at Faith’s foundation four years later. Yet when Faith visits Greer’s college in 2006 to give a speech, the 63-year-old feminist wins over the audience with her elegance and compelling personality. To Greer’s generation Faith feels outdated - the doyenne of a soft brand of feminism that mostly appeals to wealthier women. The founding editor of a long-running women’s magazine and author of several books on female empowerment, Faith Frank is an icon of the feminist movement. These themes are confidently articulated within the framework of a classic coming-of-age story: Greer, a bright, impressionable college freshman from a small town, meets Faith, a renowned and glamorous activist, and the encounter changes the course of Greer’s life. The book critiques the assumption that feminism is defined only by organized public acts and mobilized demonstrations and not by the quiet, humble, everyday acts of individuals. In her latest novel, The Female Persuasion, Meg Wolitzer looks at personal ambition in the context of social activism and feminist identity.

It can also make us arrogant, dismissive of those we regard as aiming lower and striving less than we do. It can skew our judgment, luring us into moral equivocation and thin justifications for what we do in pursuit of our goals. DESPITE ITS MERITS, ambition can be corrosive.

The female persuasion meg wolitzer