Pretty Good for a Girl by Leslie Heyward
A bodybuilding English professor with a MFA in poetry tells about her high school experiences as a champion runner. I bought this book at a garage sale intrigued only by the title and, after I found out it was about sports, became somewhat uneasy about reading it. I don’t read books about sports. Luckily, running was mostly just the form of competition she chose; thanks to her presentation, that became clear. Perhaps it was just because I read the psychologically-introspective The Day I Went Missing, but Heyward lacked the ability to look as introspectively as I would have liked — this all comes to a head in the conclusion.
It almost seems as if chapters have been cut out, perhaps they have. We skip from college to today and learn she has a Ph.D. and been through a divorce. A Ph.D. in what? More about the divorce, please, or don’t bother bringing it up. Instead we get a nice little introduction to watered-down studies about women in sports and a plea for Title IX. I’d rather she stick to concentrating on herself. The book leaves us feeling like she just disappeared after getting the news about an illness from her doctor that made her stop running. She needs to explain how she became something other than “a runner,” but we don’t get that.
Still, it was worth the twenty cents. Of course, do we really trust me when I’m like this?
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