Ladyparts
Facilitated by Deborah Copaken
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
2:00PM - 3:00PM
Location: Virtual Event via Zoom
A frank, witty, and dazzlingly written memoir of one Jewish woman trying to keep it together while her body falls apart.
Part cri de coeur cautionary tale, part dystopian tragicomedy, Ladyparts is Copaken’s irreverent and Borscht-belt humor-infused inventory of both the female body and the body politic of womanhood in America. With her journalist’s eye, her novelist’s heart, and her performer’s sense of timing, she provides a frontline account of one woman brought to her knees by the one-two-twelve punch of divorce, solo motherhood, lack of healthcare, unaffordable childcare, shady landlords, her father’s death, college tuitions, sexual harassment, corporate indifference, ageism, sexism, and just plain old bad luck. Plus seven serious illnesses, one on top of the other, which provide the book’s narrative skeleton: vagina, uterus, breast, heart, cervix, brain, and lungs. She keeps bouncing back from each bum body part and finding the black humor in every setback, but in her struggle to survive a steep plunge off the middle-class ladder, she is suddenly awoken to what it means to have no safety net.
Deborah Copaken is the New York Times bestselling author of Shutterbabe & The Red Book. A contributing writer at The Atlantic, she’s also a Golden Globe-nominated TV writer (Emily in Paris), performer, Emmy-winning news producer, and photojournalist. Her photographs have appeared in Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Guardian, Observer, The Wall Street Journal, and The Nation. Her column “When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist” was adapted for the Modern Love Amazon series.