Picture an open landscape under an ominous, purple sky, perhaps at sunset. An empty road leads from you to the distant horizon where it finally meets both the last rays of the setting sun and the increasing darkness of the horizon itself. But you cannot really see that meeting point. It is too far away and the sky is too dark. If you wish to know what might lie behind the horizon you must travel down that road.

This is how I see the image on the front cover of my copy of Katha Pollitt's Learning to Drive, and this is also how I see the essential story that the book is telling us; a story about roads to take, about finding directions in life, about trying to make sense of our lives, the choices we make and the circumstances which are sometimes forced upon us. This activity: personal map-making, is to me the central theme of Pollitt's essays.

In the title essay "Learning to Drive" it takes the concrete form of "observing" reality (traffic, pedestrians, the stop signs) and of doubting that very ability to observe. What happens when for some reason we can't use direct observation to guide us? How do we recognize the landmarks and the hidden perils? How do we navigate around them?

The other essays offer various substitutes for physical observation, substitutes which human beings employ in their private map-making and history writing. In "Webstalker" Pollit uses the Internet to "stalk" the life of her ex-lover, to make a map of the actual events, to try to understand his sexual infidelities. She writes:

Late at night, sipping my cold coffee, I saw the Web as a parallel world, the verbal equivalent of the life we live, a shimmering net of information that exactly and completely corresponds to the world. It was like something a medieval rabbi might conjure up out of the Kabbalah: a magical set of propositions that acted as a mirror of reality and perhaps even allowed you to control it and change it.

She continues this quest for mirrors of reality in other essays: In "Sisterhood" she interrogates the women his ex-lover had bedded, not to accuse them but to learn what happened so that the right signs could be added to her life's map. Two essays, "In the Study Group" (about a group of Marxists meeting to discuss communism after its demise) and "Memoir of a Shy Pornographer" (about Pollitt's stint as an editor of pornographic books) describe the way books themselves can serve as maps or mirrors of reality, however distorted. Can the mystery of men's desires be learned from reading pornography? Can communism continue living inside the covers of books and within study circles if it no longer thrives in reality? Could we actually live inside a book, happily?

The essays about Pollitt's parents, their lives and deaths, take the search for meaning and the making of maps to a more concrete level. Evidence may hide in old dusty files or on pieces of yellowing paper. These can serve as the voices of the dead. In "Good-Bye, Lenin" we follow Pollitt to her late father's house and join her in rummaging through his old legal files in the basement, searching for further understanding. And in "Mrs. Razzmatazz" we watch Pollitt trying to understand her late mother better through the files the FBI kept on her and through a few remembered comments of her mother's physicians; all poor substitutes for the actual living reality that her mother once was.

Poor substitutes such map-making devices may well be, but Pollitt shows us that this is what humans do. We are map makers. Some of our maps are silly, others are helpful and yet others are masterpieces of ingenuity, self-deception and pointlessness.

I have spent some time on this theme the book had for me, because I believe it is significant in adding to the kinds of questions others have addressed in this series, questions about what it means when a feminist writer shows herself as sometimes not being in control of her own life, as possibly even being out-of-control, questions about the advisability of a feminist icon exposing herself to the public dissection of her private follies.

Others have already pointed out that feminists should be allowed to be human, with the usual amount of flaws and follies, and that Pollitt's collection of essays is not meant as an Autobiography of a Bitter Feminist or even as a description of a few especially horrible times in her life. That some would always interpret it in exactly those terms goes without saying.

To assume that Pollitt missed all these considerations in her careful choice of the essays would be presumptuous. Much better to trust Pollitt-the-author that the material she picked from Pollitt-the-woman's life was picked for a reason, and the reason I see is that the strength of the stories about the maps we all make would be much diluted, if not completely lost, should the stories all be about good days, easy victories and great feminist achievements. We don't need a map when we have found the mountain top and relax after the long climb. We need the maps when we are lost and confused and scared. And those are the most interesting maps to interpret.

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For a longer review of the book and its reviews, check out my blog Echidne of the snakes.