Related topics: •  Book Review: New York Times Book of Women's Health

Woman: An Intimate Geography
By Natalie Angier
Random House
Paperback 438 pp $15

Natalie Angier does not like Camille Paglia, and heaven help anyone whom Angier doesn't like. In her stunning book Woman: An Intimate Geography, recently released in paperback, Angier displays a shining wit, a deep thoughtfulness, and a lethal efficiency in skewering those whom she finds guilty of stupidity or cant.

"Flatulisms die hard," Angier observes in her introduction, referring to Paglia's famous work Sexual Personae. Paglia, who fancies herself a shock jock of post-feminism, could not have liked being held to account for tired orthodoxy -- or, in Angier's words, "fetid clichés." But then, Paglia did describe women as "bound to nature's calendar," yoked to the "brute inflexible rhythm of procreative law." Angier, a New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner for journalism, is thoroughly out of patience with such talk, whether it comes from social critics or bench scientists. "... I am frankly getting sick of how 'science' is pinned to our she-butts like donkey tails and then glued in place with talk of hardheaded realism," she writes.

In an encyclopedic journey through the female body, psyche, and soul, Angier takes on the woolly thinkers who have made femaleness a matter of stereotype and foreordained destiny for a millennium or more. Few writers would dare attempt what she does: to overturn a world's worth of received wisdom, then to reconceive it. This is no simple biology lesson, but a guided tour. Angier writes slashingly and yet with pinpoint aim, armed with data and hypotheses from decades of reporting, not to mention cultural and intellectual references galore. She succeeds because her knowledge is expansive and her stories so compelling, chiseled with vivid exactitude. If you were to use a strand of a baby's hair to poke a hole in a piece of paper, she tells us, you'd get an aperture roughly the size of a human egg.

Woman is, in part, social history and social critique. Yet it approaches the intimacy and immediacy of memoir in its rich attention to detail and anecdote culled from women's lives, including the author's own. Angier uses intimate reminiscences to illustrate her points, as when an argument between her parents sets up a discussion of the X and Y chromosomes. Her wild, loopy humor is pervasive. As symbols go, she writes, the phallus is a yawn, but the vagina seems to be a Rohrschach with legs. She is endlessly surprising. Who knew that a fallopian tube, normally devoted to the ovary on its own side of the body, is capable of reaching across the pelvic cavity to monitor and "snuffle" the far ovary, and catch any egg it should release?

The book falls into two sections, the first focusing on female anatomy and the second on the hormones and nerves that spark the body. It starts with the small and specific and broadens out to the grand and ineffable. "Anatomy" covers, among other items, the human egg, the X chromosome, the anatomy of the clitoris, and the mysterious properties of breast milk. The section on neural underpinnings examines hormones, including the overexposed and little understood estrogen. It is a hormone, Angier writes, that has dual designs: "Estrogens keep us healthy and make us sick. They build our breasts and then corrupt them with tumors. They ripen eggs and nurture new life in the womb, but they also give rise to those ropy purple fibroids that can expand like zucchinis or pumpkins."

Angier also discusses testosterone, recently recognized as crucial to female sexuality, and less familiar hormones such as aromatase, which is secreted from the adrenal glands and turns products from the adrenals into estrogen. (This may be significant for women of a certain age, since the adrenal glands don't shut down at menopause.) Later she moves on to the neurotransmitters, brain chemicals like serotonin, and the way hormones and neurotransmitters push and pull each other in a rough tango.

Angier is an exuberant writer, but the bounty can at times be overly rich. For instance, in the chapter called "A Gray and Yellow Basket," Angier describes the ovaries as "dull and gray." Over a lifetime, she explains, they become scarred and pitted, the shape of misshapen almonds, while most organs "jiggle and glow and are rosy pink." This reader, for one, is unsure that she's all that thankful the veils of ignorance have been lifted. But who says everything female is pretty? Certainly not Angier.

Whether or not you feel unsettled by that glimpse into the "Gray and Yellow Basket," start the book and you will almost certainly be enthralled. Angier takes us on a wild ride, but she is always in control -- better still, she's willing to let go of the steering wheel, because she knows she can grab it back with a quick turn of phrase. In one chapter, for example, she makes a case for the powers of exercise as an antidote to many ills. "A woman's need of exercise is practical," she writes. "She is a long-lived specimen, one of the longest this planet knows."

"Muscle is gracious. It does not hold grudges. Even an elderly woman who never learned to do cartwheels or bothered to join a fitness club in early adulthood can, in her oxidized age, become a mighty virago. Her muscles will be there for her."

Angier cautions in her introduction that Woman is not intended as another Our Bodies, Ourselves, the famous and practical guide to women's health care, but she does mean her work to be helpful. "I believe that we can learn from other species, and from our pasts, and from our parts, which is why I wrote this book as a kind of scientific fantasia of womanhood," she says at Woman's start. "As easily as we can be abused by science, we can use it to our own ends." At the end of the book, Angier describes herself as a utopian pessimist, but her profoundly optimistic vision of what it is to be female provides a joyous guide for the rest of us. She has given us a map of ourselves, one we can use to thrive -- as far as our breath takes us -- in our experience of being female.

-- Barbara Jamison, M.F.A., is a contributing editor at Consumer Health Interactive. She has written for Hippocrates and WebMD, and has received two PEN awards for fiction.

Last updated September 18, 2009
Copyright © 2001 Consumer Health Interactive

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