Salon.com: Caitlin Flanagan, The Happy Hypocrite

I hesitate to give Caitlin Flanagan any more publicity than she already has, but Salon.com editor-in-chief Joan Walsh has written an amazing critique of Flanagan and her contradictions. Her four-page essay The Happy Hypocrite is definitely worth reading in full. In fact it's finally gotten me motivated to subscribe to Salon.com premium. Here's where Walsh is coming from:

"As the book's publicity machine gathered steam, it suddenly mattered very much to me what's true about Caitlin Flanagan, and what isn't true. Flanagan has come to feel like another publishing-industry hoax, not as fake as James Frey or J.T. Leroy/Laura Albert, but in some ways worse: a hoaxer who's using a great gift from the cosmos -- recovery from breast cancer -- to rail against feminism, evangelize for traditional gender roles, and to debase women who can't or won't make the same choices she did. So maybe we do have to get to the bottom of this one. Who is Caitlin Flanagan, and why is she writing this crazy stuff?"