Peggy Orenstein is a journalist and author whose work often focuses on the politics of everyday life. She has written about Japanese "parasite singles," the politics of egg donation and what a biracial president might mean for the country for The New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. Orenstein is also the author of three books: Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love and Life in a Half-Changed World, SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap and her most recent book, the memoir Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, An Oscar, An Atomic Bomb, A Romantic Night and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother, which was a New York Times Bestseller. Orenstein has also written for The New Yorker, Vogue, Mother Jones and O: The Oprah Magazine.  She is now working on a book, tentatively titled "Cinderella Ate My Daughter," about the challenges of a feminist mother trying to raise her daughter in a marketing-saturated world.

How did you get started in journalism?

My real start was when I was 14 – I really never wanted to be anything else. I was in tenth grade and I took a journalism class. The first assignment was to do what they called a sights and sounds story – just write down whatever you see. I went to the annual Minneapolis tent sale, and I sat there and just wrote about this mother and daughter fighting over skis she wanted. And it was like a lightning bolt went off in my head, and I thought ‘this is it, this is what I want to do.’ And I never really wavered. But really, after college I got a job at Esquire – I wasn’t even an editorial assistant; I was just called ‘staff.’ But, I worked my way up at Esquire as an editor. Editing was a great way to learn writing. You got your hands really dirty with other people’s writing; you really learned the structure of a story. It was like going to graduate school for me.

You’ve focused on covering issues about girls and women for much of your career. How did that come to be? 

When I went to Mother Jones, I started writing for Vogue. They had me writing about spas – and then they were also asking me to write pieces about abortion. In reproductive rights issues, there was a lot going on politically. That put me on the women track – but because I had been a general interest magazine editor I also could write whatever I felt like in other realms. It was just sort of my interest that kept leading me back. And you know, women are over half the population. It’s not a small beat. It is kind of endlessly fascinating.

Two of your books are traditional journalistic subjects and the third was a memoir. Which is harder?

They are difficult in different ways. Writing myself, what I love about it, is it generally gives me a chance to stretch out in my own voice and be authentic. I feel like I get to be more myself. I really love that. But the hard part about writing about myself – in addition to the impact it has on other people in my life, which is not a small thing – is trying to figure out what the components of a narrative are and how to prioritize the material. It’s really hard when the material is infinite. Establishing and prioritizing material, figuring your voice out – abstracting yourself from the material, so it isn’t your life anymore – it’s a version of your life. You have to create this artifice out of your life and to do that you have to let go of much of what happened and turn it into this kind of symbolic narrative.

What part of the reporting process do you find most challenging?

Whatever it is that I’m not doing, I think I like. I like reporting, and I have to stop myself from reporting forever. And I have to stop myself from going down weird little rabbit holes of research; it’s harder now that there’s an Internet.The ideas that I tend to seize on are ideas that flit across my consciousness. When I miss them, I get very upset. You have to be so sort of constantly on it. By the time I get around to it, it’s too late. It has passed.

Are there stories you haven’t been able to do? 

There’s one piece in particular I’ve never gotten over. In 2000, I proposed a piece about how Japanese imagination was taking over American childhood culture to the New York Times Magazine. I must have pitched it five times; I’ve never pushed a story so hard. I kept saying, this is a huge story, it’s a cover story, and you need to put Hello Kitty on the cover. There are kids passing around Manga cards translated into English! Now it’s so patently obvious you couldn’t do a story like that. I was so on that story. It would have been a story that defined an era – It’s breaking my heart even now. 

I’m always curious, what are you reading now?

I’m reading mostly for my book, so I'm reading the Annotated Grimm's Fairy Tales, which are fascinating --- people always describe them as really gory but the Grimm’s actually toned them down. In the real original versions there were wicked mothers not wicked stepmothers. I'm also reading, for the same reason, Consuming Kids, about the rise of marketing to kids, which pretty much makes a parent want to lock their kid in a tower, a la Rapunzel. And then for fun I'm reading Meg Wolitzer's novel The Position, about a family in the 1970s in which the parents publish a Joy of Sex kind of book featuring illustrations of them in flagrante delicto. I love Wolitzer and the book is really funny, though for me also a reminder that when you put the intimate details of your life out for public consumption it has an impact on your kids and family life.