Subway Reads: What I Read on My Winter Vacation

It's got to be a really good book to drown out hour upon hour of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young covers. Did I mention they were bluegrass covers? Nothing against the genre (I once lived with a woman who played the mountain dulcimer, after all), but when one is in a small, confined space ... say, a car, for 11 hours, well, the banjo loses some of its twangy appeal.

I was very lucky, then, to have on my lap a copy of The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe Vs. Wade. It's a book about secrets and whispers and gossip, about stiff necks and profound denial. It's about feminism and mothers and their daughters and their grandchildren. It's about manipulation, intimidation, and the notion of "choosing" when you have no choices. It's about guilt and silence.

It's also about the deepest love and longing imaginable. About how young girls were forced to give away their babies and how 50 years later they still remember every contour of their baby's face. They still think of who those babies may have become.

And it's also about America, where our sexual culture has come from and I couldn't help but wonder how much further we are along teaching girls about their bodies and how to keep themselves safe.