A review by emmaraecohen
My Butch Career: A Memoir by Esther Newton

4.0

A difficult but important read. I was worried it would be outdated, as the outset of the book chronicles her struggles with WASPish positionality, politics, and puritanical upbringing, ripe with painful-to-read internalized homophobia. It thankfully ended with Esther making significant personal and professional realizations that were a long time coming throughout her life (and to the reader’s detriment, were often drawn out with unhappy conclusions). I found much of her worldview was framed in personal experiences in Freudian psychoanalysis in which she is still obviously unsettled by deep, unresolved personal traumas. But to the reader, this makes her more human. Though an emotionally difficult read, I believe it’s an important work worth getting through. The insights in the second half of the book about her connections to the emerging field of queer studies at the time are well worth reading to understand academic lineages in this space.