March 1, 2021
Dragged down by cancer, kidney failure, and recurring pneumonia, Pulitzer Prize winner Bragg had his heart lifted by The Speckled Beauty--a rambunctious stray dog who also needed love. In Seeing Ghosts, a study of grief and family, journalist Chow opens with emigration from China and Hong Kong to Cuba and America and moves to her mother's death from cancer (75,000-copy first printing). From award-winning news producer and photojournalist Copaken, author of the New York Times best-selling Shutterbabe, Ladyparts contextualizes soured marriage, solo parenting, and dating while ill with the substandard treatment of women by U.S. health care. In I Left My Homework in the Hamptons, Grossberg reveals exactly what it's like to tutor the children of New York's wealthiest families (50,000-copy first printing). Author of the New York Times best-booked Ten Thousand Saints, Henderson explores a long-term marriage that has survived her husband's struggles with physical and mental illness in Everything I Have Is Yours (75,000-copy first printing). Ranging from 38 Grand Slam titles to embracing her sexual identity at age 51, King details a life lived spectacularly in All In. In Honor Bound, McGrath recounts serving as the first woman to fly a combat mission for the Marine Corps and efforts to unseat Mitch McConnell as Kentucky senator. Winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, Yangon, Myanmar-born, Bangkok- and San Jos�-raised Myint's Names for Light probes silence, absence, and death over three generations of her family, defined by postcolonial struggle. In Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be, a Roxane Gay Audacious Bookclub November Pick, Perkins plumbs racism, wealth, poverty, beauty, and more from the perspective of a Southern Black woman. Qu's Made in China captures the challenges of an immigrant childhood, which included a mother so brutally demanding that Qu finally complained to New York's Office of Children and Family Services. In This Will All Be Over Soon, Saturday Night Live cast member Strong addresses grief over a close cousin's death from glioblastoma in the midst of the pandemic (75,000-copy first printing)..
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June 7, 2021
Copaken (Shutterbabe), a contributing writer at the Atlantic, returns to memoir in this often flimsy tragicomedy of all the ways a woman can fall apart. Structuring the work as an inventory of body parts (uterus, cervix, heart), Copaken tells war stories of ailments (including a near-fatal hysterectomy), divorce, sexual harassment, and literal battles as a combat photographer in the ’80s to investigate the complicated relationship between her body and the patriarchal world she inhabits. She writes heartfelt tributes to the people who mentored her—including the late Nora Ephron, who used “the most humiliating parts of herself... as her superpower”—and skillfully explores the roots of her own emotional undoing, exacerbated by medical bills and her father’s death in 2008. While funny and tender, the work’s tone is frustratingly inconsistent; Copaken can careen from being urgent at one moment to deeply indulgent the next, while some anecdotes hit with a thud, as with a story about a fight with her now ex-husband in which she “strained vocal cords until they broke,” which, Copaken offhandedly explains, was particularly tragic because she planned to perform a live storytelling at the 92nd Street Y later that day, undermining the tension almost completely. The tangle of platitudes yields an amorphous, rushed-feeling narrative. Copaken takes a fresh approach to difficult topics, but the delivery is lacking.
June 15, 2021
A bestselling author and former war photographer chronicles a decade of personal traumas by examining the malfunctioning body parts associated with each new upheaval. Copaken, author of both fiction and nonfiction, reflects on personal crises by connecting bodily scars and their roles in her life. She begins with the graphic story of how, in the middle of a divorce, she suffered a ' "vaginal cuff dehiscence': the clinical name for uh-oh, the stitches where they sewed up the top of your vaginal canal have come undone, and now you're a blood clot howitzer." The closing image of that section--in a hospital, "bleeding body on a slab, arms spread, wrists bound"--establishes the primary textual metaphor of the suffering female body. The author then explores other afflicted body parts and the troubles that dominated her life. In discussing her uterus, for example, she recalls how a hysterectomy coincided with both the end of her marriage and the death of her mentor and friend Nora Ephron. This was followed by a breast lump and the financial problems caused by marital separation. By 2014, at age 48, after she lost a job and started to date again, Copaken developed the heart palpitations doctors diagnose as PVCs. A few years later, a diagnosis of precancerous cervical lesions put a pause on a newly flourishing romantic life that included sympathetic younger men. The string of overwhelmingly bad luck continued into 2020, when the author contracted Covid-19 while trying to manage a urinary tract infection. Throughout this often overly detailed, highly informative, photographically illustrated memoir, Copaken uses her misfortunes to comment on, among other issues, corporate policies that force working women/mothers out of jobs; income inequality; female sexual harassment; and the many complications of the American unemployment system. The result is a conceptually unique narrative from a talented author that is sometimes undercut by informational excess. Overlong but sharp and funny and always extremely candid.
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June 1, 2021
In a candid, confessional voice, photojournalist and writer Copaken (Shutterbabe) chronicles her turbulent journey into situational poverty without healthcare after leaving a dysfunctional marriage. Shouldering marital and medical debt, faced with the serious needs of a damaged body, she had to enter the fraught reality of healthcare tied to employment, at the mercy of the corporate world's indifference to a single mother's childcare plight. Copaken, subject to the whims of capricious bosses in the changing landscape of journalism, endures sexist backlash both in the industry and from audiences against her writing about womanhood, which eventually worsens into acute sexual harassment. She channeled her experiences into this book, a feminist outcry exposing experiences and erasure of women in the corporate, journalism, and medical worlds. By reconstructing the story of each of her ailing body parts, she reconstructs her life and career, with each part serving as a metaphor for survival of traumas unique to women. At times darkly humorous, at times despondent, Copaken's very relatable memoir is a strong act of self-assertion.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
July 1, 2021
In her newest work, Copaken (The Red Book; Between Here and April) recounts key moments from her battles with multiple illnesses and their treatments. The narrative picks up just after the publication of Copaken's 2001 memoir Shutterbabe, after which she starts a writing career that becomes more precarious when journalism jobs begin to vanish in the 2010s. When Copaken becomes ill, she needs treatment that forces her to navigate the United States health care system, with inadequate insurance coverage and unstable finances. Then her marriage begins to crumble, and she must figure out divorce, dating, and raising children as a single mother. Copaken's strain is palpable as setbacks pile up; she's constantly having to hustle to the next job, doctor's appointment, or freelance gig. She also struggles with career disillusionment and is sexually harassed at one of her workplaces. Copaken manages to overcome the obstacles and achieve her own success; she lands TV writing opportunities and spends meaningful time with her friends and children. Copaken's memoir ends with her experience during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Written in a diary-like format, her memoir includes the occasional photograph. VERDICT A searing indictment of capitalism, the gig economy, and the U.S. medical system--all recounted with a sense of dark humor. Copaken's latest will engage readers of feminist memoirs.--Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.