As someone who comes from a long line of people who learned how to drive late in life, and who only got her own license in her late 20s, I loved the title essay of Katha Pollitt's collection Learning to Drive, And Other Life Stories when it came out in The New Yorker. I've recommended it to so many of my non-driving New York friends over the years that I was a bit taken aback to find it at all controversial upon republication. To me, this essay was much more about learning to drive than about a failed relationship, but then again I always thought not knowing how to drive was a quintessentially New York City thing, rather than a chick thing.
Indeed, because my father has the world's best series of excuses for not having learned how to drive until he was in his 50s, I want to address the driving issue before I dive into other questions, such as feminism, love, betrayal, nature of the self, etc., etc. Read on.
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