Book review: 'Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life' By Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith

MOLLY IVINS

A Rebel Life

By Bill Minutaglio and W. Michael Smith

PublicAffairs. 334 pp. $26.95

The turning point in Molly Ivins's life, suggest the authors of this biography, may have been the motorcycle accident that killed her college boyfriend, Hank Holland. At first blush, that seems an odd claim to make about the outspoken feminist and wittily acerbic political columnist from Texas whose fearless remarks -- and the reactions to them -- led to the title of one of her books: "Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?"

Could the career of such a strong woman actually have been shaped by the fate of a man? For Ivins, the authors suggest, the handsome and brilliant Holland was her last chance to do what everyone said a young woman of the 1960s should: snag a promising husband and make a point of getting to know the right people. "Ivins's friends said that after Holland's death she was especially disgusted with the expectations," write Minutaglio and Smith, "and maybe that's why she mocked her upbringing and Texas even more -- and smoked more cigarettes, drank more, and insisted on telling people she was going to do something, that she was going to work, have a job."

As for those things she supposedly couldn't say, she once wrote of a Republican congressman that if his "IQ slips any lower, we'll have to water him twice a day." Politicians might fulminate and readers might complain, but Ivins rose to defend the state of being opinionated: "There is no such thing as objectivity. . . . I actually think it is pernicious as a goal." Molly Ivins died in January of 2007, after a long battle with cancer, at age 62.

-- Dennis Drabelle drabelled@washpost.com