Marie Claire (May 2008)

I’m a magazine junkie. There’s nothing better than coming home to find your favorite magazine in the mailbox. I love thumbing through the ads and fashion spreads knowing full well that I will never be able to afford most of the clothes, but trying to glean some sense of what the latest themes are and how they will trickle down into my utilitarian wardrobe. Most importantly, from my favorite magazines, I’m looking for articles and content that entertain and educate me, and hopefully, even open my world up a little bit.

So it was with some anticipation that I opened up the May 2008 issue of Marie Claire for the first time. Sporting a cover that featured a raincoat clad Tina Fey on the cover, some of the headlines that jumped out at me were: “Fashion Forecast,” “The Dirty Truth about Tina Fey” (tongue-in-cheek, of course), “The Blowout!” hair issue, “Work from Home with Killing Your Career,” and “The Female Freak Show, We Need to Stop Now.”

That was enough to pique my interest, and I immediately zeroed in on some of the articles that interested me most. I discovered that “The Female Freak Show” article was about long-necked women in Thailand who, because of their tradition of wearing coils around their neck, are put on display for foreign tourists. The article “I Wasted Two Years on a Man I Never Met,” about one woman’s personal experience with Internet dating, was topical, well-written, and informative. “The Baby Dilemma: Hope in a Tank” focused on a 30-something woman who took $13,000 from her savings to freeze her eggs and spoke directly to me, a childless 40-something woman whose childbearing years are, for all practical purposes, over.

Being a fan of Tina Fey, I scanned the article that was written about her by friend and Baby Mama costar Amy Poehler, but found the overly humorous tone of the Q&A off-putting. All in all, this issue of Marie Claire met or exceeded my expectations, for the most part, in terms of what I look for in a women’s magazine. Am I going to add it to my subscription list? Not right now, but I would definitely recommend it to my female friends and relatives.

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