One Life by Megan Rapinoe
A review of One Life by Megan Rapinoe.
One Life by Megan Rapinoe (2020). Published by Penguin Press.
I grew up playing soccer, up until the competitive club level and my varsity soccer team, and Megan Rapinoe was the first ever jersey
I bought from any soccer player. I wanted to be her for a hot minute; I played midfield, she played midfield, and I wanted to be better at soccer so I’d watch videos on YouTube of her tricks and technique on the pitch.
And so now, years later, when I saw this book on display at my local library, I grabbed it immediately due to fondness for who Rapinoe was on and off the pitch.
In recent years, after my adolescent infatuation with her, Rapinoe has really blown up for her political stances and basically for being who she is.
If you knew who she was even before she blew up, it comes as no surprise considering the media-heavy and centric world that we’ve come to live in nowadays. Evidently, that has landed in this book deal, which I have a lot of thoughts about. Onwards to the review!
Book Blurb
Megan Rapinoe, Olympic gold medalist and two-time Women's World Cup champion, has become a galvanizing force for social change; here, she urges all of us to take up the mantle, with actions big and small, to continue the fight for justice and equality
Megan Rapinoe is one of the world's most talented athletes. But beyond her massive professional success on the soccer field, Rapinoe has become an icon and ally to millions, boldly speaking out on the issues that matter most. In recent years, she's become one of the faces of the equal pay movement and her tireless activism for LGBTQ rights has earned her global support.
In One Life, Rapinoe embarks on a thoughtful and unapologetic discussion of social justice and politics. Raised in a conservative small town in northern California, the youngest of six, Rapinoe was four years old when she kicked her first soccer ball. Her parents encouraged her love for the game, but also urged her to volunteer at homeless shelters and food banks.
Her passion for community engagement never wavered through high school or college, all the way up to 2016, when she took a knee during the national anthem in solidarity with former NFL player Colin Kaepernick, to protest racial injustice and police brutality - the first high-profile white athlete to do so. The backlash was immediate, but it couldn't compare to the overwhelming support. Rapinoe became a force of social change, both on and off the field.
Using anecdotes from her own life and career, from suing the United States Soccer Federation alongside her teammates over gender discrimination to her widely publicized refusal to visit the White House, Rapinoe discusses the obligation we all have to speak up, and reveals the impact each of us can have on our communities.
As she declared during the soccer team's victory parade in New York in 2019, "[T]his is everybody's responsibility, every single person here, every single person who is not here, every single person who doesn't want to be here, every single person who agrees and doesn't agree.... It takes everybody. This is my charge to everybody. Do what you can. Do what you have to do. Step outside yourself. Be more. Be better. Be bigger than you've ever been before."
Content
As a big USWNT and Rapinoe fan, I feel that I have to start with the obvious: a good chunk of this book was just retelling certain things that I already knew, in word forms, things I had already seen in the matches, friendly games, Olympics, and World Cups.
I don’t need a play-by-play account of games I’ve seen multiple times—that seems to be included to be more friendly to the casual reader, but I found these sections to be quite tedious and I started skipping these pages. Maybe they would’ve worked if Rapinoe had inserted more of herself into these games, like her thoughts and emotions, which she does do at times, but it seems redundant for a more dedicated fan.
The writing is mediocre. It was conversational and easy to read; I finished the book in under two hours, which means it wasn’t a dense read.
Rapinoe goes into a lot of heavier topics; like her brother’s drug abuse while she was growing up, coming from a conservative town, being attacked by Trump, etc. and she seems pretty honest, so I’ll take her word for a chunk of this. She discusses a lot about LGBTQ+ issues in the world and in sports, about how she was the first woman to officially come out from the USWNT and not many people actually cared about that.
Rapinoe also does a great job in acknowledging her privilege, and while she does mention important names and figures, I find myself questioning if she’s the right person to be discussing all of this, especially in memoir. I totally get how she’s become intertwined with it and everything going on in the world, but, at the same time, she’s a white woman.
She did indeed use her privilege to kneel and speak out when not many other white athletes did, but, at the end of the day, I think to me it’s more important to see how Black voices are interacting with these events rather than a white woman who has admitted she makes up to $500,000 a year.
Like Rapinoe has done a lot for minority groups during her time, I just can’t vibe with her story when soccer is an expensive and gatekeeping sport, one that keeps out minorities in the United States.
I played club soccer on a minor level and it cost my family thousands each year. That was for a lower level team, and club soccer is kind of necessary in order to get onto the college and national circuit. This kind of makes me side eye anyone who has quote-on-quote made it in soccer, because my experience in these circuits was filled with rich kids.
Overall Thoughts
I think it’s a decent memoir if you’re vaguely interested in Rapinoe. I read it straight through but I found myself wondering if I had wasted my time a bit, because of the rehashing of certain events that I already knew a lot about, and found the smaller moments more insightful than the larger ones.
All in all, I think it’s worth particular insights about her life, not just the moments where she describes things that we already know. We also get a little bit of Jill Ellis beef and drama if you’re into that, but I think that beef is already known if you followed/follow the USWNT.
