Ladyparts: A Memoir

Praise for Ladyparts: A Memoir

“The most laugh-out-loud story of resilience you’ll ever read and 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.”—Lori Gottlieb, bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

“A brilliant mind and a really brilliant impressive and quite shocking life.”—Michaela Coel, creator of I May Destroy You

“Terrifying, enraging, heartbreakingly funny—I recommend it for everyone I know, but most of all to the men. We know almost nothing about the women we love, their bodies, and their struggles. Don’t look away. Read this book.”—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less

“Ladyparts is, quite simply, a beautiful book. Equal part harrowing and hilarious, enraging and heartwarming, it’s a memoir unlike any other. It will open your eyes to what it means to be female in a male world, older in a society built around youth worship—or just on the wrong side of variance when the lottery of genes and life doesn’t turn in your favor. And it will do it all while making you laugh, cry, and scream in turn. I couldn’t put it down.”—Maria Konnikova, The New York Times bestselling author of The Biggest Bluff and The Confidence Game
 
“Ladyparts is a first-rate example of the contemporary memoir: harrowing, sad, funny, revelatory, true. Were you to misconstrue the title, you might think this was all simply anatomy, which would be fine, but as with all the best memoirs what this work really anatomizes is how it all feels—in the mind, in the soul, and in the nick of time. Copaken’s memoir is poignant, necessary, and very rewarding.”—Rick Moody, author of The Long Accomplishment: A Memoir of Hope and Struggle in Matrimony
 
“Reading this terrific book makes you feel like you’re Deborah Copaken’s pal, and lucky that you’re getting to hang out. She lives life with gusto and resilience, appreciates her good luck, learns from her rotten luck, nails the villains along the way––and chronicles it all with breathtaking honesty and screwball good humor as she zigzags through middle age in the general direction of wisdom and contentment.”—Kurt Andersen, The New York Times bestselling author of Evil Geniuses and Fantasyland

“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.”—Peggy Orenstein, author of Girls & Sex

“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.”—Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

“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.This book howls for women in a world that too often only allows us a whisper.”—Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises and What We’ve Lost Is Nothing

“This book is a must-read for anyone who knows a woman, loves a woman, or is a woman.”—Katherine Schwarzenegger, New York Times bestselling author of The Gift of Forgiveness: Inspiring Stories from Those Who Have Overcome the Unforgivable