But it isn’t the stereotype of Don Draper that is so attractive; it’s his desperate need to break out of the stereotype. Much like the characters in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road and Tom Perrotta’s Little Children—both recently made into films—he suffers from a classic case of upper middle-class suburban angst, adults petrified by how ordinary they’ve become. With his taste for strong women living outside the very rules he feels boxed in by, Don Draper seems as though he just might understand all angles of the domestic equation. “His sense of yearning, his sense of being confined by the home yet also craving that confinement and comfort, I identify with it,” said a Brooklyn mom of two and Draper-phile in her mid-thirties whose husband, a “screenwriter,” works from home while she commutes to a publishing job in Manhattan.
From the New York Observer (link).
