Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

LADYPARTS

Deborah Copaken

By shining a light on herself and sharing her most private struggle, Copaken strips for parts all our preconceived notions about female pain, rage, and resilience, and puts them, and herself, back together again.

Between escaping from an abusive marriage, facing down the challenge of single-parenthood, and attempting to find love again, getting her bearings after everything she knew fell to pieces proved more elusive than she ever could have anticipated.
LADYPARTS is Copaken's irreverent inventory of the female body and all the ailments that can befall it. Themes including assumptions about gender, sexuality, and fertility, are common to all.

Using her unique style and voice, this book mines for irony the breakdown of a body during a time of intense spiritual and psychological upheaval, and paints with both black humor and breathtaking candor the portrait of a woman in revolt. From blood clots and breast exams, heart palpitations and heartbreaks, to the terror, loneliness, and empowerment of a woman fighting for her life, Copaken weaves her harrowing experiences together with insights from medical and historical research to show how many of these common health issues and disabilities merely amplify what women around the world confront on a daily basis: warped beauty standards, workplace sexism, worries about romantic partners, and mistrust of their own bodies.
This fascinating book is for readers of nonfiction about feminism, trauma, and the female body like ASK ME ABOUT MY UTERUS, THE BODY KEEPS SCORE, and DOING HARM: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick. And also for fans of irreverent feminist memoirs like Tina Fey's BOSSYPANTS, Cheryl Strayed's Wild, Elizabeth Gilbert's EAT PRAY LOVE, Roxane Gay's HUNGER, and Nora Ephron's I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK.

Deborah Copaken is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of SHUTTERBABE, THE RED BOOK, and BETWEEN HERE AND APRIL, among others. She is an Emmy Award-winning TV news producer; an award-winning photojournalist published in Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times; a columnist at The Atlantic; and a former columnist at the Financial Times and the Observer. Her writing appears regularly in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Slate, Elle, Glamour, and Paris Match. Her New York Times Modern Love column, "When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist," was adapted for the streaming series of the same name (https://nyti.ms/3d1Uwyk). She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Available products
Book Published 2021-08-03 by Random House

Comments

The most laugh-out-loud story of resilience you'll ever read, but also one that provides an essential road map for the importance of narrative as a tool of healing: how we tell our stories is just as important - if not more so - as the plot twists we experience.

Ladyparts is a memoir unlike any I've ever read it's quite literally visceral, from the unforgettable first moment where Copaken crawls on the tile floor collecting what she takes to be her own bloody organs. With breathtaking candor, Copaken catalogues the calamities of her body, part by part, spinning out a raw, raucous, often hilarious account of herself with so much insight and generosity that I finished the book feeling re-made.

Every chapter of Deborah Copaken's memoir contains information about women's bodies that I couldn't believe no one had told me before. I was constantly outraged at what she had to endure to learn it all, but the book is so funny, smart, and entertaining that I'm grateful to have her as a guide. Ladyparts is essential reading for all women, and for the people who love them.

Utterly vital. Ladyparts enraged and amused me in equal measure. Deborah Copaken shows what it means to barely survive beyond the hallowed slice of privilege, where moving through the world in a woman's body can be dangerous, absurd, frustrating, beautiful, and sometimes all at once. A wickedly smart, thoroughly investigated and elegantly written takedown of the gender discrimination and institutional misogyny we have accepted for too long. This book howls for women in a world that too often only allows us a whisper.

This book is a must read for anyone who knows a woman, loves a woman, or is a woman. Deborah's sharp wit, heartfelt humor and unabashed honesty turn what could be a tragic tale into a heroic journey of perseverance. Anyone who reads it will walk away feeling inspired.

Is it fair to comment on a book in which you are a character? Fair or not, I will, because I want every single woman, and every human who has loved (or even met) a woman, to read this essential book. This deeply personal memoir manages to encapsulate in its pages virtually every way society conspires to screw us over, from sexual assault to workplace harassment to the absurd and nearly fatal gender inequities in the healthcare system. And yet it is also warm and compassionate and, yes, hysterically funny. It is a page-turner that makes you scream in empathetic frustration and laugh so hard you have to put the book down. I'm honestly not sure whether I cried more because I was laughing or because I was so very sad.

A fierce, caustic, joyful and deeply courageous account of what it means to go through life in a female body, this book (like women ourselves) is so much greater than the sum of its parts, yet each part, and each page, is truly phenomenal.

Ladyparts is a beautifully written, boots-on-the-ground, first person chronicle of everything that can go wrong with women's bodies and too often, does. Deb's book is an important addition to the field of women's health, from the lens of a patient.