Waltzing the Tango: Confessions of an Out-of-Step Boomer

Marie T. Gillis is a member of the Angus L. Macdonald Library staff at
St. Francis Xavier University.

With Waltzing the Tango, Gabrielle Bauer, award-winning author of Tokyo,
My Everest, has written a memoir that is frustratingly superficial. In
reviewing her life, she “confesses” to a number of misguided
choices, but never examines how these choices have affected anyone else.
The character she portrays in this work is not merely the centre of her
own world; she is the totality of it.

Lacking career goals of her own, Bauer desultorily follows the path
outlined by her mother, a Holocaust survivor, who wants to her daughter
to become a doctor. By the time she has earned an honours degree in
biochemistry from McGill, she is sufficiently self-aware to recognize
that she has no interest in medicine and no talent for research. She has
already, through a series of summer jobs, established a pattern of lying
in job interviews, on the theory that telling an interviewer what he
wants to hear will lead to employment. Unfortunately, employment does
not equal job satisfaction and, over an indeterminate number of years,
Bauer flits through a succession of occupations, with tenures ranging
from two hours to four years.

Her personal life is no more satisfying. Her first husband makes
self-absorption a fine art. An unrequited love affair in Tokyo leads to
despair and hospitalization back in Canada. Finally, through a dating
agency, Bauer meets her second husband, only to face the problem of
infertility. Quick as a wink, she overcomes this and has two children.
More serious are the bouts of postpartum depression she suffers after
each birth.

Bauer eventually decides on a career as a freelance writer, a choice
that suits both her lifestyle and her talents. Waltzing the Tango moves
along briskly, the pace far more that of a tango than a waltz. This
quick tempo, however, leaves many unanswered questions, and allows the
reader only glimpses of the thoughtful and sincere person the author
appears to have become. A less breezy approach might have produced a
significant and moving chronicle. As it is, Waltzing the Tango is little
more than a diversion.