This account describes the daily struggles of women under the Marxist regime in the former republic of Yugoslavia. It contains 19 essays, comprising reportage through personal experience by Croatia’s leading writer. Slavenka Drakulic takes as her subject the ordinary lives of women left weary in mind, body and soul after 45 years of communism. She has not written a critique of Marxism, but a grass-roots narrative that reveals everyday life under the regime. Slavenka Drakulic is the author of Holograms of Fear and The Baltic Express .