ANNE KREAMER HAS BEEN fortunate to be in a
lot of the right places at the right times. In the late 1970s and early 80s she
was part of the team that distributed and co-produced Sesame Street around the
world. A few years later she helped launch SPY magazine, about which has been
said, “It's pretty safe to say that SPY was the most influential magazine of the
1980s.” In the 1990s when her children were young she had the perfect job --
Worldwide Creative Director for Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite, where she created
and launched Nickelodeon magazine.
She switched careers at the turn of the century, becoming a columnist for the
cutting-edge business magazine Fast Company. Kreamer created the monthly
“American Treasures” column for Martha Stewart Living. And today, with Going
Gray, What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity And
Everything Else That Matters, and her Yahoo blog, “Going Gray, Getting Real,”
Kreamer is once again in the vanguard, good-naturedly encouraging baby-boomer
women to rediscover their generation's youthful embrace of honesty and
authenticity and to swim against the tide.
Kreamer graduated from Harvard College and lives in Brooklyn with her
husband, Kurt Andersen, the novelist and host of public radio’s Studio 360, and
their two daughters, Kate and Lucy.
About "Going Gray"
Maud Lavin of the Chicago Tribune wrote this review about Anne's book
Going Gray, What I Learned about Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity,
and Everything Else That Matters:
"To read Anne Kreamer's "Going Gray" is to enjoy that comfortable illusion
that you are chatting with a friend. A friend whose confidences are told in a
way that's concise, entertaining and thoughtful.
"Going Gray" is Kreamer's first book. It developed from a feature she did for
More magazine about the process, when she was 49, of letting her hair grow out
to show her natural gray after diligently dyeing it from age 25. This visible
graying may seem like small potatoes, and she has the grace to acknowledge there
are larger issues in life. But Kreamer skillfully uses that experience and its
anxieties to explore thoughts about aging and femininity, and these are, of
course, the memoir's real hook.
Kreamer also takes an almost girlish, Nancy-Drew-detective approach to
examining what other women --and some men -- think about the cultural pressures
and self-images that connect to dyeing hair, especially for midlifers. Although
happily married, she wrote an Internet dating profile for herself pretending to
be divorced and put it, along with a photograph of herself, on Match.com. At
times she used one with dyed hair and at others one with gray locks, to compare
how many responses she got. Those of you who, like me, already have a happy
vanity about the lively gray streaks in your hair, will be pleased to know she
got more approaches with her natural gray look. In addition, Kreamer hired a
data-gathering business to conduct a national survey to learn more about
attitudes toward graying.
For the reader interested in cultural shifts in attitudes toward women and
aging, some of the most thought-provoking parts of Kreamer's book are the
contextual and historical perspectives she gives. She notes that fewer than 10
percent of American women colored their hair in the 1950s, compared with a
reported 40 to 75 percent today. And her observation on the potential parallel
between that statistical growth and a likely increase in women's involvement
with plastic surgery is a cogent one:
"In the national survey I conducted for this book, of four hundred women,
average age forty-nine, 15 percent reported having had cosmetic injections or
surgery -- probably about the same percentage of middle-aged women who, back in
the '50s when the artificial-coloring boom began, dyed their hair. . . .
Extrapolate the trend line, double the available technologies, and imagine the
choices and pressures our great-grandchildren may face."
