I'm reading The Edible Woman -- Margaret Atwood's first novel, published in 1969 -- and I'm utterly struck by her main character, Marian McAlpin. Specifically, how Marian, in her struggle to be feminine and not be feminine, to be a career girl and not to be a career girl, is something of a blueprint for Peggy Olson.
I know, it's a terribly shallow comparison. But just 100 pages into the first part of Atwood's novel, there's such an obvious disconnect between who Marian is and who she thinks she should be, that a person who is obsessed with Mad Men can't help but draw a parallel.
If you haven't read this book at all, or not in a few years, please do pick it up and let me know if I've drawn a horrifying or appropriate conclusion.
Meanwhile, the last bit of millennium poetry I'll offer from Chasing Shakespeares:
"History is a point of view, over the same city, perhaps, but from a thousand eyes, not one. Wait five minutes, the light has changed, a wall has been demolished, a new window set in place, and from the top of the wheel another set of eyes are looking out over a different city. There's no one map, one story, one way to get to one truth; there is no single London and no single Shakespeare, no fact as sure as a story." (p. 329)
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