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Surrendering Oz: A Life in Essays
Surrendering Oz is a memoir in essays that charts the emotional awakening of a bookish Bronx girl. From her early job as a proofreader at The Guinness Book of World Records through a series of dominating and liberating friendships and secret connections, the author takes charge of her life as a Texas professor, writer, and wise student of her own soul.
Reader’s Digest says reading Surrendering Oz, “is like having a conversation with a bracingly honest but fundamentally kind friend. In 15 pitch-perfect essays, she chronicles her hard-earned rejection of the cultural fairytales of womanhood as she comes fully into possession of her life.”
Reader’s Digest says reading Surrendering Oz, “is like having a conversation with a bracingly honest but fundamentally kind friend. In 15 pitch-perfect essays, she chronicles her hard-earned rejection of the cultural fairytales of womanhood as she comes fully into possession of her life.”
241 pages, Paperback
First published October 13, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 20, 2015
I liked this book of essays quite a lot, and will go back to it for its simple, straight-forward, well articulated, truths. Friedman is a strong writer who has drawn some beautiful conclusions about the human condition, about the condition of being a woman, a lover, a writer, a daughter, a sister... all the roles we are assigned and take on as a matter of course. The way we perform and rely on a "mundane masochism." "How many of us," she writes, "acting on some instinct, find a bad mirror that restores the child we used to be?"
My book has many dogeared pages, marking affecting lines that spoke to me: Page 141 "I want to believe I am a character in a book, not a person alive on this earth. How to let oneself be alive, how to know it?--how to be a grown-up grown up?" page 180 "So I write to make things real. Otherwise oblivion devours my days. One's whole life can pass in peripheral vision. We sense something is there but don't know how to turn." page 199 "I live as if I'm make-believe, and nothing actually counts. I'll get another childhood, another first romance, another long marriage...Everything in my life allows for a do-over, I seem to believe."
Like Grace Paley, Amy Hempel, and others, Friedman illuminates these elements of existence that make us feel alone and lonely and reveals that even if they are not universal, neither are they unique to ourselves.
My book has many dogeared pages, marking affecting lines that spoke to me: Page 141 "I want to believe I am a character in a book, not a person alive on this earth. How to let oneself be alive, how to know it?--how to be a grown-up grown up?" page 180 "So I write to make things real. Otherwise oblivion devours my days. One's whole life can pass in peripheral vision. We sense something is there but don't know how to turn." page 199 "I live as if I'm make-believe, and nothing actually counts. I'll get another childhood, another first romance, another long marriage...Everything in my life allows for a do-over, I seem to believe."
Like Grace Paley, Amy Hempel, and others, Friedman illuminates these elements of existence that make us feel alone and lonely and reveals that even if they are not universal, neither are they unique to ourselves.
October 22, 2025
Surrendering Oz: A Life in Essays, by Bonnie Friedman is excellent writing. The title of the book is after the longest essay, a feminist review of the classic movie many of us watched repeatedly during childhood, i>The Wizard of Oz.
Much of this book uses a psychological view, some inside a therapy session, to show how she has changed herself. How a she came to view her growth and breaks out of the maze many people live in as they grow into adulthood, living routine jobs, never reaching their potential. Part of her process is getting a teaching position, first though she had to complete that CV, then she had to move for the job from NYC to TX. She did a retreat or residency in Greece She had a husband who pushed her to work so he could write. Both of them are writers.
Plus, she explores her affair in a couple of the essays, with a man who sees her beauty and helps her redefine her way of dressing so she begins to see her beauty. "Without the mirror of that other man's eyes, my own sense of self started to depart like the pupil of a person going walleyed. One part of me felt twisted away, while another stared straight ahead. Things had too many dimensions or too few. I craved to once again be the beautiful girl I'd been but didn't want to leave my marriage. It seemed my beauty lived on the staircase to that man's apartment..." In another story about this affair a male friend tells her, "What's making you attractive is castrating yourself," Whether she'll tell her husband is something she wonders about. Her husband notices her changing her clothing choices which has a positive impact on their relationship; she now realizes her husband sees and cares for her. And then she comes home after midnight one night and he is waiting up for her. He knows she wasn't at the Barnes and Noble that late because they closed at nine. They stay together.
The essay I liked least was the one where she swoops in to rescue her parents from bedbugs, titled "A Summons to Riverdale." She moves them out of their Bronx apartment, where she grew up, to live in a hotel somewhere outside the city. She makes arrangements for an extermination, then goes through their possessions, finding things she had no idea they saved from her childhood, much of which she throws away. This process feels abrasive, meanwhile she has a first dinner scheduled in TX with the head of her school, a big deal when one is on a career track. She made it back to TX for the dinner and to her surprise it was only her and her husband, not the social evening she expected. Then she went back to finish the job with her parents. After the extermination, their house in shambles, she gets a mattress bag! This baffled me, they spent a lot of money with two round trips and hotels. If they had the mattress bag before she could have went later and helped with less rush. Surely it would have been an easier solution, plus her parents told her not to come.
Through each essay she keeps learning and growing becoming more of the person she is and shifting her understanding of how people see her. One of the things I really liked was her use of process notes in the text, letting us know for example, when she, "removed the affair from an essay about keeping a writing notebook, and, in an instant, the essay went light and hard as a meringue." Being a New Yorker and someone who's also done a lot of psychology I enjoyed reading most of this book.
Much of this book uses a psychological view, some inside a therapy session, to show how she has changed herself. How a she came to view her growth and breaks out of the maze many people live in as they grow into adulthood, living routine jobs, never reaching their potential. Part of her process is getting a teaching position, first though she had to complete that CV, then she had to move for the job from NYC to TX. She did a retreat or residency in Greece She had a husband who pushed her to work so he could write. Both of them are writers.
Plus, she explores her affair in a couple of the essays, with a man who sees her beauty and helps her redefine her way of dressing so she begins to see her beauty. "Without the mirror of that other man's eyes, my own sense of self started to depart like the pupil of a person going walleyed. One part of me felt twisted away, while another stared straight ahead. Things had too many dimensions or too few. I craved to once again be the beautiful girl I'd been but didn't want to leave my marriage. It seemed my beauty lived on the staircase to that man's apartment..." In another story about this affair a male friend tells her, "What's making you attractive is castrating yourself," Whether she'll tell her husband is something she wonders about. Her husband notices her changing her clothing choices which has a positive impact on their relationship; she now realizes her husband sees and cares for her. And then she comes home after midnight one night and he is waiting up for her. He knows she wasn't at the Barnes and Noble that late because they closed at nine. They stay together.
The essay I liked least was the one where she swoops in to rescue her parents from bedbugs, titled "A Summons to Riverdale." She moves them out of their Bronx apartment, where she grew up, to live in a hotel somewhere outside the city. She makes arrangements for an extermination, then goes through their possessions, finding things she had no idea they saved from her childhood, much of which she throws away. This process feels abrasive, meanwhile she has a first dinner scheduled in TX with the head of her school, a big deal when one is on a career track. She made it back to TX for the dinner and to her surprise it was only her and her husband, not the social evening she expected. Then she went back to finish the job with her parents. After the extermination, their house in shambles, she gets a mattress bag! This baffled me, they spent a lot of money with two round trips and hotels. If they had the mattress bag before she could have went later and helped with less rush. Surely it would have been an easier solution, plus her parents told her not to come.
Through each essay she keeps learning and growing becoming more of the person she is and shifting her understanding of how people see her. One of the things I really liked was her use of process notes in the text, letting us know for example, when she, "removed the affair from an essay about keeping a writing notebook, and, in an instant, the essay went light and hard as a meringue." Being a New Yorker and someone who's also done a lot of psychology I enjoyed reading most of this book.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 28, 2023
I rather enjoyed “Writing Past Dark” and was enticed into ordering Bonnie’s collection of essays immediately. It was very unfortunate when I came to the novel’s end, after a laborious effort, only to be missing the great epiphanic moment(s) I was in search of.
In creative writing courses I’ve taken—particularly Creative Nonfiction (where falls the essay and memoir)—it is stressed that writing for a public audience needs to answer the essential reader’s question: “So what, why do I care?” I found myself asking this question without a callback. It seemed to me that this series of writings were epiphanic to the writer herself, but as the reader, I struggled to discover what I had learned about myself and/or about humanity/reality as a whole—which is what I come to CNF for.
I am of the opinion that this exploration of the writer’s self should have remained just that—with the writer. While I’m certainly glad Bonnie was able to successfully traverse through hardship and reach these growth points, these essays read more as individual reflection vs. revelations that translate to humanity as a whole.
I don’t believe the events/subjects explored in the collection were without gold to be mined, profundities to be explored and translated. Only that they didn’t translate.
Perhaps this is to do with an imbalance of anecdote and revelation—or that the revelations were elementary, or otherwise poorly translated. It’s hard to say. But there was something very profound that I felt lacking throughout the entire collection that made leafing through these pages an effort.
In creative writing courses I’ve taken—particularly Creative Nonfiction (where falls the essay and memoir)—it is stressed that writing for a public audience needs to answer the essential reader’s question: “So what, why do I care?” I found myself asking this question without a callback. It seemed to me that this series of writings were epiphanic to the writer herself, but as the reader, I struggled to discover what I had learned about myself and/or about humanity/reality as a whole—which is what I come to CNF for.
I am of the opinion that this exploration of the writer’s self should have remained just that—with the writer. While I’m certainly glad Bonnie was able to successfully traverse through hardship and reach these growth points, these essays read more as individual reflection vs. revelations that translate to humanity as a whole.
I don’t believe the events/subjects explored in the collection were without gold to be mined, profundities to be explored and translated. Only that they didn’t translate.
Perhaps this is to do with an imbalance of anecdote and revelation—or that the revelations were elementary, or otherwise poorly translated. It’s hard to say. But there was something very profound that I felt lacking throughout the entire collection that made leafing through these pages an effort.
February 4, 2016
The first time I ever went to a writer's conference at my college in Towson, I met Bonnie Friedman, who read a part of this book in front of other participants at her session of "Writing Past Dark". I was instantly inspired by her seminar and this book that I had to read more by her. As a writer myself, this was a very personal memoir as it was a guide on how to find inspiration and drive to write. This book is essential for women writers, and writers who want to get published in the future. In some way, we're all trapped in a dream-like state before someone wakes us up, just like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. As a matter of fact, my best friend, who's also a writer like me, would definitely feel the same way about this book since the introduction talks about her favorite movie about ruby slippers and the Emerald City. These essays paint perfect portraits of a writer trying to get a decent job, struggling with marriage, college, family, and getting older. No matter what kind of writer or woman you are, this book is worth putting your life aside for the moment and reading for inspiration, cover to cover.
February 10, 2015
Surrendering Oz by Bonnie Friedman is a great gift from one of the most gifted writers around. From the start of her illustrious writing career, Friedman has given us thrilling, illuminating work about the tricky relationship of the self to itself and to the outer world (oh, the tricky self-sabotage! the confusing negotiations with family and lovers and friends who are also rivals!). Now we have Surrendering Oz, which bristles with insights into what it means for a woman to come into her own as an adult. Though always treasured by writers--that brilliant prose! such tender guidance in Writing Past Dark!--Friedman possesses a gift and vision so deep and wide that it provides a bounty for all readers. Abigail Thomas recommends on the jacket, "Every woman who can read should read this book," but the men won't want to miss it either.
November 11, 2014
Reading Bonnie Friedman’s new collection of essays, SURRENDERING OZ, is like opening a jewelry box and finding it crammed with gorgeous, sparkling stones. I cannot praise the polished, lapidary brilliance of these essays enough; Friedman can take the smallest thing—a scrap of overheard conversation, the sight of gingko leaves on a tree—and from them, mine inestimable riches. Hers is a precise, loving attention, one that accords beauty and meaning to everything she sees, imbuing even the simplest acts with a kind of sacred aura and importance. The title essay, Surrendering Oz, is a fascinating and whip-smart interpretation of the classic movie as you could ever hope to read; her essays about her aged parents are both reverent and already mournful for lives that have almost run their course. Read these essays slowly, and savor the distinctive and rare intelligence that informs each and every one. And then read them again, because they are just that good.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews