Mary Pipher - Selected Works

Selected Works

• Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders
• Letters to a Young Therapist
• The Middle of Everywhere: The World's Refugees Come to our Town
• Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls; best seller for over three years

Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls is Mary Pipher’s most celebrated work. Published in 1994, many thematic elements pertain to that decade. However, many messages within transcend: in 2012 David Lose brings attention to the role of religion and beauty standards as they relate to the war on girls Pipher describes. The novel combines case studies with exposition of theory regarding the trial-ridden, formative adolescent years. As the title suggests, Ophelia serves as the work’s chief allegory. She loses her youthful happiness and interest in everything with the arrival of adolescence. She struggles to maintain the expectations of the men in her life—Hamlet and her father. Pipher writes, “Ophelia died because she could not grow. She became the object of others’ lives and lost her subjective true self. Many of the girls I describe in this book suffer from a thwarting of their development, a truncating of their potential.” (292) Socially and developmentally, adolescence forces girls to understand their female role. Parents battle for the retention of their daughter’s “true selves” while adolescent girls struggle with confusion on how to merge their wholeness with social pressure. They feverishly swim through the years of their adolescence while “Like Ophelia, all are in danger of drowning.” (73)

• The Shelter of Each Other: Rebuilding Our Families to Enrich Our Lives, New York Times best seller
• Writing to Change the World
• Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World