Read “The Girl I Left Behind”

I recently finished a fantastic book, one that has sat on my to-be-read shelf for a few months. I devoured it, the whole thing was finished in less than 24 hours, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it or recommending it to people.

From a work perspective, the writing itself has given me much to think about. Nies does not lay out events in a linear fashion. The book grew out of her attempt to explain to her daughter how she became radicalized. And in doing so, the story goes back in forth in time, reveals “persons of interest” at unexpected moments, it’s a bit of a centrifuge of storytelling. I found it very suspenseful for a memoir and it has me thinking about ways to present work stories in a similar, compelling fashion.

“The Girl I Left Behind” by Judith Nies is described in its blurb as:

At the height of the Vietnam War protests, twenty-eight-year-old Judith Nies and her husband lived a seemingly idyllic life. Both were building their respective careers in Washington—Nies as the speechwriter and chief staffer to a core group of antiwar congressmen, her husband as a Treasury department economist. They lived in the carriage house of the famed Marjorie Merriweather Post estate. But when her husband brought home a list of questions from an FBI file with Judith’s name on the front, Nies soon realized that her life was about to take a radical turn. Shocked to find herself the focus of an FBI investigation into her political activities, Nies began to reevaluate her role as grateful employee and dutiful wife. In The Girl I Left Behind, she chronicles the experiences of those women who, like herself, reinvented their lives in the midst of a wildly shifting social and political landscape.

In a fresh, candid look at the 1960s, Nies pairs illuminating descriptions of feminist leaders, women’s liberation protests, and other pivotal social developments with the story of her own transformation into a staunch activist and writer. From exposing institutionalized sexism on Capitol Hill in her first published article to orchestrating the removal of a separate “Ladies Gallery” on the House floor to taking leadership of the Women in Fellowships Committee, Nies discusses her own efforts to enlarge women’s choices and to change the workplace—and how the repercussions of those efforts in the sixties can still be felt today.

A heartfelt memoir and piercing social commentary, The Girl I Left Behind recounts one woman’s courageous journey toward independence and equality. It also evaluates the consequences of the feminist movement on the same women who made it happen—and on the daughters born in their wake.