![]() I hoped my book would feel like a friend to women, just as my comic strip had.” A campus wallflower I also wanted to reconnect with readers who are going through these difficult transitions. “I wrote my book because I needed to get it out of me and onto paper. “Many women who grew up reading my comic strip about the tortuous dating, dieting, and dreaming years are in the same spot I am right now, trying to navigate this icky new phase,” Guisewite says. Many are squeezed between caring for rebellious offspring and set-in-their-ways parents while dealing with the annoying “H-es” of aging ― hip replacements, hypertension, hernias, hair loss, and hearing aids. With her lighthearted anecdotal approach, Guisewite finds wry humor in the quirks and quandaries that she, at age 69, and other Baby Boomers now confront. So, now she’s out with a new book, Fifty Things that Aren’t My Fault: Essays from the Grown-up Years (Penguin Random House, 2019) Guisewite is the first to admit she flunked retirement. having it all means having a child and a big career ― plus being a devoted parent, a school board member, an investment expert, an environmental activist, a global change-maker, a romantic partner, a weekend yoga instructor, an online entrepreneur, and a size 6.” “An icky new phase” “For the young woman today. She finally pulled the plug in October 2010. At its peak, Cathy appeared in almost 1,400 papers. Becoming a cartoonist was never in the cards.īut when the comic strip’s popularity grew to a tipping point, she ended up quitting her job at Doner, moving to California, and producing Cathy for 34 years. It was horrible!”Īt the time, Guisewite thought she would stay in the advertising business forever. “Then out comes this comic strip where the main character, Cathy, is sobbing over some guy. “I had worked so hard to present myself as a serious, professional, working woman,” Guisewite says. Young women in their 20s were torn between pursuing careers and mothballing marriage - or tying the knot, raising kids, and forever relinquishing the keys to the C-suite. The year was 1976, and the Age of Feminism was in full swing. “I was so embarrassed somebody would see the strip and that the artists at the agency would ridicule my artwork,” confesses Cathy Guisewite, BA ’72, who was then a vice president at W.B. On the first day the award-winning comic strip Cathy ran in 66 newspapers nationwide, its 26-year-old creator hid in the ladies’ room at a Detroit-area ad agency.
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