From our decrying of ”the abuse excuse” to our cheers of Free the Juice,” our reactions to violent crime fluctuate wildly. Expanding on her well-known ideas about self-help and the American psyche, Wendy Kaminer shows us how pop-psychology and religious fervor vie with law and rationality in our courtrooms and in our minds. She doesn't offer up any easy solutions; rather, with her trademark epigrammatic brilliance, she gives us an alarming picture of the emotional needs and cultural forces behind our righteous proclamations about crime and punishment.

True Love Waits brings together fifteen years of Kaminer's best writings from publications including The Village Voice, The New York Times, Mirabella, and The Atlantic - thoughtful, acerbic, and prescient essays that have helped us understand ourselves. Though her topics range from popular culture to politics and law, and her thinking has evolved over the years, her concerns have remained constant. This is no accidental collection but a cohesive set of reflections on fundamental themes - self-reliance, justice, sex, and civil liberty. First and foremost, Wendy Kaminer is concerned with feminism, a diverse and conflictual movement that includes among its adherents women who oppose pornography and women who consume it, women who want to integrate the military and women who'd like to dismantle it. A longtime proponent of equality feminism, Kaminer has been surveying the feminist landscape for over a decade, mapping its contradictory ideologies. She was also a critic of popular celebrations of victimhood long before criticism of victimism became fashionable, and Kaminer turns from questions of personal responsibility raised by the feminist movement to questions of accountability in the criminal courts. A onetime practicing attorney, her early writing on our confusion about crime, punishment, and retribution and the balancing of social injustice with the demands of criminal justice seems practically clairvoyant today. She examines the equation of the personal and the political, in the courts, the feminist movement, and the culture at large and finds a tendency to trivialize the political and inflate the personal to sometimes ridiculous proportions. And, of course, she trains her eye on thepersonal development tradition, the subject of her celebrated I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, offering trenchant analyses of self-help literature, popular therapeutic culture, and politics.