Publications
 

"Incredibly moving and sweetly honest, this beautiful memoir has a light touch with a bright flame. Feisty traces the lines of the female movement through the nooks and crannies of Jean's experiences-divinely feminine and full of rumbling urgency. A powerful female tale-radical in its dignified honesty and powerful in its scope, while remaining sweetly intimate."

LIZ TIGELAAR, Executive producer of the series Life Unexpected, Little Fires Everywhere, and Tiny Beautiful Things

 

"In short chapters, with photographs, poetry, and even a recipe, Jean Peelen shares her life as a nascent to fully- emerged feminist, as a wife and mother, as a civil rights lawyer-all with the joy in being human firstly My wish would be for young people to read this work, to witness history, the lengthy and exhausting and joyous path others have broken. "

ALISON ACHESON, Author of Dance Me to the End: Ten Months and Ten Days with ALS

 

"Peelen's eighty-plus years draw a portrait of a woman's life that is simultaneously familiar and unknown, intimidating and exhilarating, especially the price women pay in pursuit of self, freedom, and not least of all, joy."

JILL NELSON, Journalist and author of Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience and Let's Get It On

 

"There is a world of wisdom in this little book. It is one of the funniest and saddest things I have ever read and full of hard- won humanity. It is brief only because there is not a wasted word, but any woman who was ever a child, a daughter, a mother, a sister, a schoolgirl, a citizen, was married or divorced, in fact, who was ever born will find echoes of the journey in this magical account of growing up and finally growing old."

JANE CAMPBELL, Author of Cat Brushing

 

"In sixty-five brush strokes, Jean Peelen paints a portrait of her own life, but also a landscape of the socioeconomic change experienced by women who came of age with the women's liberation movement of the 1970s. Readers will love the honesty and humor with which young Jean asks, and mature Jean answers, 'What do I want?'"

HEATHER NEWTON, Author of Under the Mercy Trees and McMullen Circle