Did You Have the Life You Wanted?

When I saw the title, I knew I wanted to read Andrea Simon’s book, Did You Have the Life You Wanted? How would people answer? What would work in their lives and how would their experiences compare to mine?

On the back I read that it was fiction, but it seemed more like the biography of a woman, maybe partly real and partly fictitious, who grew up in the same years I did. We had a lot in common: she was bright, articulate, and independent. Unlike me, though, she hung out in Greenwich Village near the Stonewall Inn where history was made, gave up her college career until later life, and got involved in copywriting as a young woman while I went into teaching in high school and college.

Anita Rappaport lives independently in New York’s Greenwich Village when school strikes with racial overtones, the Stonewall Inn battle, and the Attica uprisings occurr along with the second feminist movement that creates more equality in both employment and marriage. It is both an exciting and a turbulent time to be alive.

Anita grapples with gang violence when she goes out on field work for the Department of Social Services. After surviving that trauma she tries other employment, becomes a copywriter in an office filled with sexism, seeks professional help, marries a doctor, and ultimately returns to school to get her MFA in creative writing. Her hard work brings her success, but the loss of a brother and a good friend bring deep thought about the ways she’s spent her life. As she ages, Anita asks herself and her friends the question: “Did you have the life you wanted?” Of course, she receives both surprising and heartbreaking responses.

Depending on a reader’s own life experiences, Anita might seem anywhere from average or typical to exceptional. As a reader I absorbed her story so fully that I felt like I was reading a well-plotted memoir of an adventurous woman whose character grew deeper as the years progressed. The story is fiction, though, not memoir. It’s well worth your time if you like stories of an ambitious and hard-working woman finding her way through the emotional evolution of a life lived between the late sixties and the present. And it’s an inspiring story as you watch her age.