Kingston, Anne

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Kingston, Anne

PERSONAL: Female.

ADDRESSES: Home—Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Office—National Post, 300-1450 Don Mills Rd., Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3R5, Canada.

CAREER: Newspaper journalist, columnist, and editor.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Business Book Award, 1995, for The Edible Man: Dave Nichol, President's Choice, and the Making of Popular Taste; National Magazine Award for Arts, for writing in Saturday Night magazine.

WRITINGS:

The Edible Man: Dave Nichol, President's Choice and the Making of Popular Taste, Macfarlane, Walter & Ross (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1994.

The Meaning of Wife, HarperCollins (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2003, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals such as Toronto Life, Globe and Mail, Chicago Sun-Times Magazine, and Saturday Night. Author of regular column for Canada's National Post.

SIDELIGHTS: Anne Kingston is a noted Canadian journalist and cultural critic whose columns for the National Post cover important social issues and contemporary topics. Her book The Meaning of Wife is Kingston's "pitiless meditation on a myth that won't leave us alone," noted London Times reviewer Kate Saunders. Here the author dispels the common myths about wifehood in modern society. She also traces forty years of social, cultural, and individual evolution in the institution of marriage, and she looks at important family issues that surround the concept of wife, including that of child rearing in traditional family settings. One of the concepts she explores is the "wife gap," in which traditional caregivers (wives) work outside the home while vitally important family and domestic roles remain unfilled. In such cases, Kingston asks, who can reasonably be expected to take on undervalued domestic roles when greater economic advancement exists in the world at large?

The author exposes a pernicious tendency of the wedding industry to encourage brides-to-be to splurge extravagantly on their nuptials. She also examines modern ambivalence toward assuming the role of a wife, symbolized by the free, often hedonistic lifestyle represented in popular entertainment such as television's Sex and the City. Kingston's scrutiny falls on wives of all kinds: wives-to-be, ex-wives, trophy wives, abused wives, even "unwives": unattached and unmarried single women who enjoy the freedoms denied many wives. From retaliation for spousal abuse to the fairy-tale-like myths of wives as storybook heroines to the economic effects of divorce upon a wife, Kingston covers both the positives and negatives of marriage and wifehood.

Saunders called The Meaning of Wife "a witty, incisive deconstruction of the entire bridal myth," but added: "It is not a call to arms. Kingston is not urging us to burn our white frocks. Although unmarried herself, she is not against the institution of marriage." Kingston's "scope is broad and her writing is entertaining," commented a Psychology Today contributor, while noting that the author's analysis of the meaning of being a wife is not quite coherent. A Publishers Weekly contributor felt that "this encyclopedic examination of wifedom should trump wedding magazines on the list of required reading for prospective brides," and a Kirkus Reviews critic concluded that The Meaning of Wife is "pleasantly amusing, wonderfully readable, and sometimes thought-provoking."