More Than a Memoir
Karen Hinton on the balcony of her French Quarter home. photo by Ellis Anderson
July 2023A review of Karen Hinton’s no-holds-barred book exploring toxic power relationships in school, the workplace, politics – and in her own life.
– by Rheta Grimsley Johnson
You might imagine that a book with the provocative title “Penis Politics” would be a ball-busting, name-dropping, lurid account of abusive men in power. It is all of that.
But Karen Hinton’s first book is also a melancholy and lovely coming-of-age story from Soso, Miss., population 408, where the female population is valued pretty much for one thing and one thing only. Think “The Last Picture Show” meets Janis Ian.
In school Hinton plays basketball and is part of a self-proclaimed “coterie” of four girls who use an abandoned rail passenger car, they call Midnight, as a clubhouse. Here they swap secrets and share dreams. They chase the passing trains as unofficial training for the love of all their young lives, basketball.
Hinton’s family has deep Mississippi roots. This portrait of her father’s family in Soho is circa 1916.
When one of the four is raped by the coach in the school’s bookroom, everything changes. Do they tell? Whom do they tell? And what happens when the victim assumes she will bear all the guilt if the story is ever told. Her only sin, of course, is being guileless and in awe of a powerful man.
The last few weeks of that summer, Janice lost interest in our conversations. She had stopped talking about “Pride and Prejudice” or any of her favorite books. She was losing interest in us. Her mind was taking her to other places, as though she was listening to a song or watching a movie or reading a book we could neither see nor hear.
High school junior Karen Hinton, number 22, playing for the West Jones Mustangs.
This story is so perfectly told it could be fiction. Would that parts of it were. Karen Hinton leaves Soso for Ole Miss where she is duped by sorority sisters she can never please, stiffed by dates and befriended by the dean of Mississippi writers, Willie Morris. At Morris’ behest, she drives visiting author William Styron back to his hotel room where the drunk genius propositions her.
“You are a great writer,” Hinton tells Styron. “And you have been drinking too much. Now go to sleep.”
Hinton at her graduation from Ole Miss
It is that kind of gutsy response that makes this book so different, makes Karen Hinton different. Even then, at age 21, she refused to be victimized -- or idealized by sororities or seduced by celebrities.
Wowed by heady prospects in the era of “All the President’s Men,” Hinton chooses journalism and political science as her academic majors and helps start an alternative campus publication, Hotty Toddy. After college, she goes to work for The Jackson Daily News and butts heads with editors while making less of a living than male reporters with less tenure. She heads West.
After a short stint with Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, Hinton returns to Mississippi to work for the winning campaign of Mike Espy, Mississippi’s first black congressman since Reconstruction. That opens doors and leads to Washington, and eventually New York. As press secretary for both former Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill De Blasio, Karen Hinton personifies the determined working woman in a man’s world at a time perhaps best symbolized by cigars -- and all of their uses.
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I guessed I wasn’t too smart because I decided I had no intention of being one of the ones who quit. There were moments I wanted to make myself disappear; but I resolved that I wasn’t going to be run out of my job and that I could give as good as I got.
You’ll find more proof of how tough Hinton was and is in the epilogue. In 2017, still in New York, Hinton was thrown from a treadmill while exercising, causing catastrophic brain injury. At first she was not expected to live. Then her scalp was peeled back to relieve pressure on her brain, and she wore a helmet for five weeks to protect it.
As part of her therapy to regain memory and job skills, she wrote this book. And it’s more than a listing of a Hall of Fame of leches. It speaks for an entire generation of women in newsrooms, board rooms, school rooms and the work world at large who have had to do a job while fending off a boss or colleague.
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