THE RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX

A memoir of crossword puzzles and self-discovery.

Essayist and crossword constructor Shechtman makes an absorbing book debut with a feminist history of crossword puzzles interwoven with a revealing examination of her experience of anorexia. In “a memoir wrapped in a cultural history,” the author reflects candidly on the connection between her puzzle-making and self-starvation. Both began when she was 15, and both represented “efforts to make my mental strength, the willed intensity of my interiority, obvious.” As evidence of intellectual prowess, crosswords have long attracted women—as constructors, solvers, and editors. Shechtman highlights Ruth Hale, a feminist activist in the 1920s and ’30s and founder of the Amateur Cross Word Puzzle League of America; Margaret Farrar, the founding editor of the New York Times crossword; Julia Penelope, a queer activist and linguist, author of Crossword Puzzles for Women; and Ruth von Phul, who became “a press sensation” after winning the first two crossword puzzle tournaments in 1924 and 1926. Shechtman interweaves their profiles with a chronicle of her seemingly intractable eating disorder. Although the culture fetishized thinness, paring her body was not her only goal; not eating, she believed, was evidence of supreme, exalted self-control. Devising crosswords felt similar: “The crossword constructor makes chaos out of language and then restores its order in the form of a neat solution.” Her puzzles were published in major venues, and in 2013-2014, she served as assistant to Will Shortz, puzzle editor of the New York Times. In a field dominated by nerdy white males, she has worked to identify racist, sexist, and cultural blind spots. Like the women she profiles, Shechtman uses crosswords “to negotiate the stereotypes, or expectations, of how a woman ought to look, act, and think—in the 1920s or 2020s—sometimes conforming to them, and sometimes subverting them.”

A forthright self-portrait and perceptive cultural critique.