Scientist and author of The Only Woman in the Room explores her intelligence up against social inequality in this collection of personal essays.

Eileen Pollack has always had a love-hate relationship with society’s rules for women and girls—especially as they were laid out for her while growing up in 1960s upstate New York. In Maybe It’s Me, she recounts her many trials, triumphs, and misadventures as a smart woman navigating a world that is only just learning to imagine equality between the sexes.

With poignant humor and candid honesty, Pollack describes her journey from high school—where she wasn’t allowed to take advanced courses in science or math because she was female—to earning a physics degree at Yale; a post-graduate summer in which she was shot at and kidnapped; and a theoretically equal marriage in which she was nonetheless expected to do all the housework and child-rearing, pay the taxes, and make sure the Roto-Rooter guy arrived on time.

“Maybe it’s me” is a thought all women have struggled with at one time or another. Pollack’s autobiographical essays take us from intimate, humorous stories of innocent curiosity to the calculated meanness of tween girls, from the defensive strategies of threatened men to incisive examinations of how society got here. In the end, Pollack’s message is one of human connection and tenacity along the unending search for love, acceptance, and equality.