An Unexpected Life by Gloria Steinem – book review
In this candid, episodic memoir, the late feminist icon revisits experiences that shaped her, and passes on lessons around storytelling learned during six decades of activism to the next generation.
One night, while sleeping in a condemned farmhouse in East Toledo, Ohio, the young Gloria Steinem was bitten by a rat.
This could easily have been related through some bleakly Dickensian, melodramatic lens. But that’s not how Steinem tells it in An Unexpected Life. In the chapter ‘Bad Things I’m Glad Happened to Me,’ she mentions it to make a sharper point: poverty isn’t an abstract idea, but something that can climb into your bed and attack you while you sleep. It’s among a number of childhood experiences that taught her “I could survive almost anything” – and helped shape her political consciousness and her ideas about inequality.
Leading the women's movement
Steinem would go on to co‑found Ms. magazine in 1972, help lead the modern women’s movement and spend six decades campaigning for equality. This memoir fills in the gaps, with vignettes about the travelling salesman father who took her on the road, how she cared for her mentally ill mother after her parents separated, as explored in the chapter ‘A Small Person Looking After a Bigger Person,’ her two years in India on a fellowship, the writers and activists who changed her thinking, the women she met through organising.
Gloria Steinem's death
Her death on 2 September aged 92 only gives this, her final memoir, added poignancy: Steinem already had a roster of speaking engagements lined up before she died, which as Emma Brockes notes in the Guardian, only “illustrates the central theme of An Unexpected Life: just keep going.” So this memoir lands not as a victory lap, but as an immensely valuable, posthumous testament to a life spent making other people listen.
That voice was forged partly through journalism; and for those working in PR or communications, there’s a lot to learn here. Steinem understood the power of storytelling – of locating human stories inside bigger issues. Her 1963 undercover investigation of the Playboy Club, published as the two-part ‘A Bunny’s Tale’, did exactly this.
That instinct, to turn private experience into public evidence, rests on a simple idea she underlines in An Unexpected Life: the need to create “a place where one can tell the truth, say an ‘unsayable’ thing, and hear other people say, ‘You feel like that? I thought only I felt like that!’”
Or, as she once famously put it, in even more prosaic terms, “The truth will set you free – but first it will piss you off.”
An Unexpected Life: A Memoir is published by Ebury
Ali Catterall is an award-winning writer, journalist and filmmaker whose writing has featured in the Guardian, Time Out, GQ, Film4, Word magazine and the Big Issue, among many others. Ali is also the writer and director of the 2023 film Scala!!!