SOURCE: Benn, Melissa. “Vogue Desire.” New Statesman and Society 5, no. 186 (24 January 1992): 39.

In the following review, Benn discusses the domestic frame of reference of How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.

I warn you. There is not much laughing in [How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.] Originally commissioned as an essay in the US feminist magazine Ms., Slavenka Drakulic, one of Yugoslavia's founding feminists, has written one of the first insider accounts of what it was like to be a woman under eastern European Communism. It is neither a comprehensive nor an academic study; more, a set of connected allusions, observations and recorded conversations.

For anyone used to those fictional and journalistic accounts of eastern Europe that concentrate on the shadowy state censor, the samizdat press, the professor-forcibly-turned-window-cleaner, Drakulic's resolutely domestic frame of reference is both shocking and exhilarating. Most of her action takes place not in the...