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Time Out New York

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Time Out New York Time Out New York / Issue 593: February 8–14, 2007

In 2004, Evelyn McDonnell, the pop-culture critic at The Miami Herald, helped expose a hush-hush operation at the Miami and Miami Beach police departments in which cops were surveilling world-famous hip-hop stars. The article she cowrote touched off widespread accusations of police harassment and racial profiling, and ultimately led to the discovery of a similar operation at the NYPD. McDonnell spends some time in her new memoir describing the excitement (and the stress) of her investigation, but she devotes the majority of Mamarama to a series of even more difficult endeavors: growing up marooned in the Midwest, inheriting two headstrong stepdaughters and giving birth to her own baby boy at the age of 38.

A loud-and-proud feminist and old-school East Villager, McDonnell describes her journey into (relatively) conventional adulthood with an endearing, true-to-life skepticism. As she writes, “I was having sex and smoking pot in high school, wearing miniskirts, and saying ‘fuck you’ to Ronald Reagan.” So how can she command her teenage kids to study and expect to be taken seriously? Similarly, she wonders if it’s reasonable to want them to dig the same music she does when she readily admits her own obstinancy in matters of taste: At pro-choice rallies, she always felt slightly out of place because she “couldn’t bear ‘womyn’s music,’ that righteous New Age folk shit.”

The answers to her many questions, of course, don’t come easy. But throughout this lightweight account of a heavyweight life, McDonnell reports honestly and movingly from the front line of a struggle she never expected to fight. — Mikael Wood