Blonde Like Me: The Roots of the Blonde Myth in Our Culture

In this irreverent, unsparing, and witty look at our cultural obsession with blonde, Natalia Ilyin shows us that our apparently modern fixation has truly primeval roots. Highlighting cultural criticism with personal experience, she cites ancient myths, Hollywood iconography, and the daily assault of advertising to reveal why the allure of being a blonde has crossed the boundaries of ethnicity, economics, and age. In essence, she shows us the difference between simply having blonde hair and being a blonde.

I really wanted to love this book and sadly that was not the case. I am fan of non-fiction and though this book has great bones- the writing is a bit scattered making it difficult to focus on the points being made in each section. The best parts of the book are the authors personal reflections about her own blondness which was a tad disappointing to me since I had hoped the book would be a touch more academic in feel. Overall an interesting book and sparked good conversation at our book club, but not something I would unequivocally recommend.

The author discusses different "types" of blondes, the trophy blonde, innocent blonde, etc in a funny way. It was an easy read, I read it all in one sitting. There's nothing too academic here. She also tells us about how she goes blonde and blonder each summer, then gets a haircolor kit from the store and goes dark again. Could have been longer but enjoyable

Natalia Ilyin is that most seductive of writers--she knows how to educate by telling a story. The entire utility of myth is being able to find our human selves in a confusing modern world. You can take the long road by consulting learned academic texts and risk losing yourself completely in the railroad timetable of indexes and exhaustive bibliographies from now until the cows come home, and never, never in spite of all the outlandish post-modernish jargon that permeates the texts of our professional class of cultural explainers, understand how myth, one of the engines of culture, expresses itself through the lives of ordinary people (or is it the other way around? Dr. Freud? Dr. Jung? Are y'all out there somewhere? Never mind. We've got Natalia Ilyin.).

Blonde Like Me, a personal meditation on how the myth of blondeness affects women who respond to its demands, is written as a series of connected personal essays, which makes it the perfect vehicle to express in human terms our tendency to conceive and measure perfection, only to struggle in vain to personify its qualities. Ilyin starts close to home, telling tales out of school, mostly on herself, mostly hilarious, and then warms to her point as she informally and lucidly describes the dilemmas and the paradoxes facing a woman as she tries to decide how to express who she wants to be by manipulating her appearance. Ilyin elegantly benchmarks (and circumscribes) the range of her choices by the hair coloring products arrayed on a drugstore shelf, which promise not only allure, but essence of personhood--of identity. But then Ilyin, and this is her genius, expands the ramifications of this deceptively parochial dilemma until she is grappling with, well, pretty much everything. I mean, why not?

As a man, reading Blonde Like Me, I feel as if my deepest and most paranoid suspicions are being confirmed at the same time I'm being given a privileged guided tour of the female psyche--an inexplicably authorized tour. Still, as I read I find myself feeling guilty, shooting furtive looks over my shoulder and thinking--am I supposed to be here? Suddenly I know what it must have felt like to crack the code for the enigma machine back in the "good" war.

There's the pedestal; there's the woman. She may as well get on the escalator and enjoy the ride. That seems to be where we want her and where she wants to be. So what if the pedestal is an illusion. So is personality; so is perfection. So am I with my GQ Quarterly, my Hemingway first editions, my top-of-the-line car, and my obscene bottom line ledger.

Men: if you want to understand the woman latched on to your arm as you charge through the world, or if you want to find a woman to latch on to your arm, buy this book. You will be entertained, educated, and perhaps, if you're lucky, transformed by Natalia Ilyin's subtle wit, charm, erudition, and compassionate insights into our drive to be more than we are. Blonde Like Me may address a dilemma closest to a woman's experience, but it really is about all of us.

I got this book for Christmas off of my wishlist. I had mistakenly assumed that it was a survey of blonde myth in culture, in which I would have been interested in reading. Unfortunately, this book is really a collection of stories about the author's life with a little myth interwoven. I'm extremely disappointed and couldn't even finish it. The title should not say "Roots of Blonde Myth in Our Culture", it should state: "Personal Stories that Have Little to Do With Culture"

And another thing: where in the world is the INDEX? How can the author use direct quotes or paraphasing and not site anything??? Maybe I would want to read a little more about the books or people she talks about - oh wait, I can't, because she apparently didn't have any other sources. When I was getting my English degree, I was taught that not siting any sources was called plagiarism. I think that's the thing that bothered me most about this book.

This book should have been titled, "Natalia Ilyin's whimsical and subjective musings about her life, having little if anything to do with the roots of the blonde myth in our culture." A discussion of the blonde myth within American culture that the book is purported to contain is nowhere to be found. Rather, we find a blurry barrage of Ilyin's personal memoirs and reflections on the meaning of blondeness in her own life. Ilyin's "culture" is replaced and limited by her own subjective experiences. The text would have been more suitable for an autobiography, not a commentary on blondeness in our culture. The book's title and back cover description betray its actual content. Unless your dying to know more about Natalia Ilyin's perceptions, this book will fall deeply short of your expectations.