Deborah

Copaken

Bestselling Memoirist & Journalist

Award Winning TV Writer & Photographer

Travels from: New York, NY

“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”—Lori Gottlieb, bestselling author

Deborah Copaken is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including Shutterbabe, The Red Book, Between Here and April, and Ladyparts, her most recent memoir of bodily destruction and resurrection during marital rupture (Random House, 2021). A contributing writer at The Atlantic, she was also a writer on the Emmy/Golden Globe-nominated Netflix hit, Emily in Paris, a performer (The Moth, etc.), and an Emmy Award–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, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Observer, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, Slate, O, the Oprah Magazine, and Paris Match, among others. Her column “When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist” was adapted for the Modern Love streaming series. She is the writer, producer, CEO, and publisher of the Substack Ladyparts, and she is currently adapting Ladyparts the book into a series.

Deborah 's Featured Titles

Ladyparts: A Memoir

Random House |

August 3, 2021

Memoir

A frank, witty, and dazzlingly written memoir of one woman trying to keep it together while her body falls apart—from the “brilliant mind” (Michaela Coel, creator of I May Destroy You) behind Shutterbabe

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY REAL SIMPLE • “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.”—Lori Gottlieb, bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

I’m crawling around on the bathroom floor, picking up pieces of myself. These pieces are not a metaphor. They are actual pieces.

Twenty years after her iconic memoir Shutterbabe, Deborah Copaken is at her darkly comedic nadir: battered, broke, divorcing, dissected, and dying—literally—on sexism’s battlefield as she scoops up what she believes to be her internal organs into a glass container before heading off to the hospital . . . in an UberPool.

Ladyparts is Copaken’s irreverent inventory of both the female body and the body politic of womanhood in America, the story of one woman brought to her knees by the one-two-twelve punch of divorce, solo motherhood, healthcare Frogger, unaffordable childcare, shady landlords, her father’s death, college tuitions, sexual harassment, corporate indifference, ageism, sexism, and plain old bad luck. Plus seven serious illnesses, one atop the other, which provide the book’s narrative skeleton: vagina, uterus, breast, heart, cervix, brain, and lungs. Copaken bounces back from each bum body part, finds workarounds for every setback—she transforms her home into a commune to pay rent, sells her soul for health insurance, turns FBI informant when her sexual harasser gets a presidential appointment—but in her slippery struggle to survive a steep plunge off the middle-class ladder, she is suddenly awoken to what it means to have no safety net.

Side-splittingly funny one minute, a freak horror show the next, quintessentially American throughout, Ladyparts is an era-defining memoir.

Civil Discourse & Social Justice, Comedy & Humor, Disability Awareness, Grief & Loss, Health & Wellness

The ABCs of Parenthood: An Alphabet of Parenting Advice (Parenthood Book, Advice for New Parents)

Chronicle Books |

August 29, 2017

Nonfiction

A wise, warm, and witty gift for new (and gently used) parents seeking to raise positive, thoughtful children, this alphabet book brims with the advice only those who’ve been there can give. From “D is for Dog” (get one) to “P is for Praise” (do it often but appropriately) to “R is for Romance” (keep it alive after the kids come), each mini essay is coupled with a smart, letter-appropriate full-color photograph in these delightfully grown-up ABCs.

Health & Wellness, Youth Advocacy

The Red Book

Hachette Books |

May 7, 2013

Novel

The Big Chill meets The Group in Deborah Copaken Kogan’s wry, lively, and irresistible new novel about a once-close circle of friends at their twentieth college reunion.

Clover, Addison, Mia, and Jane were roommates at Harvard until their graduation in 1989. Clover, homeschooled on a commune by mixed-race parents, felt woefully out of place. Addison yearned to shed the burden of her Mayflower heritage. Mia mined the depths of her suburban ennui to enact brilliant performances on the Harvard stage. Jane, an adopted Vietnamese war orphan, made sense of her fractured world through words.

Twenty years later, their lives are in free fall. Clover, once a securities broker with Lehman, is out of a job and struggling to reproduce before her fertility window slams shut. Addison’s marriage to a writer’s-blocked novelist is as stale as her so-called career as a painter. Hollywood shut its gold-plated gates to Mia, who now stays home with her four children, renovating and acquiring faster than her director husband can pay the bills. Jane, the Paris bureau chief for a newspaper whose foreign bureaus are now shuttered, is caught in a vortex of loss.

Like all Harvard grads, they’ve kept abreast of one another via the red book, a class report published every five years, containing brief autobiographical essays by fellow alumni. But there’s the story we tell the world, and then there’s the real story, as these former classmates will learn during their twentieth reunion weekend, when they arrive with their families, their histories, their dashed dreams, and their secret yearnings to a relationship-changing, score-settling, unforgettable weekend.

Fiction, Grief & Loss, Mental Health & Overcoming Trauma

Hell Is Other Parents: And Other Tales of Maternal Combustion

Hachette Books |

August 18, 2009

Nonfiction

I read No Exit in my early twenties, and I remember thinking hell might very well be other people, okay, sure, but under what far-fetched conditions would anyone ever actually be trapped forever in the company of strangers with no sleep or means of escape?

Then I became a parent.

From Deborah Copaken Kogan, the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Shutterbabe, comes this edgy, insightful, and sidesplitting memoir about surviving in the trenches of modern parenting.

Kogan writes situation comedy in the style of David Sedaris and Spalding Gray with a dash of Erma-Bombeck-on-a-Vespa: wry, acutely observed, and often hilarious true tales, in which the narrator is as culpable as any character. In these eleven linked pieces, Kogan and her husband are almost always broke while working full-time and raising three children in New York City, one of the most expensive and competitive cities in the world.

In one episode, exhausted from a particularly difficult childbirth, Kogan finds herself sharing a hospital room with a foul-mouthed teen mother and her partying posse. In another, Kogan manages to crawl her way to her own emergency appendectomy, which inconveniently strikes the same week her infant’s babysitter is away on vacation, her adolescents are off from school, her New York Times editor needs his edit, and the whole family catches the flu. And in the book’s capper essay, she drives twelve hours, solo, with a screaming toddler in a rent-a-car in a futile effort to catch a glimpse of her eldest child in his summer camp play.

Yes, Shutterbabe is all grown up and slightly worse for the wear, but her clear-eyed vision while under fire has remained intact: You’ve never read funnier war stories.

Nonfiction, Youth Advocacy

Between Here and April

Algonquin Books |

October 7, 2008

Novel

When a deep-seated memory suddenly surfaces, Elizabeth Burns becomes obsessed with the long-ago disappearance of her childhood friend April Cassidy. Driven to investigate, Elizabeth discovers a thirty-five-year-old newspaper article revealing the details that had been hidden from her as a child—shocking revelations about April’s mother, Adele.

Elizabeth, now herself a mother, seeks out anyone who might help piece together the final months, days, and hours of this troubled woman’s life, but the answers yield only more questions. And those questions lead back to Elizabeth’s own life: her own compromised marriage, her increasing self-doubt and dissatisfaction, and finally, a fearsome reckoning with what it means to be a wife and mother.

Disability Awareness, Fiction, Grief & Loss, Mental Health & Overcoming Trauma

Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War

Random House |

January 8, 2002

Memoir

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The remarkable memoir of an ambitious young photojournalist who went off to war as a twenty-two-year-old girl—and came back, four years and many adventures later, a woman

“Eloquent and well observed, not only about the memoirist, but about the world: war, death, photojournalism and, of course, the worldwide battle between the sexes.” —The Washington Post Book World

In 1988, fresh out of Harvard, Deborah Copaken Kogan moved to Paris with a small backpack, a couple of cameras, the hubris of a superhero, and a strong thirst for danger. She wanted to see what a war would look like when seen from up close. Naïvely, she figured it would be easy to filter death through the prism of her wide-angle lens.

She was dead wrong.

Within weeks of arriving in Paris, after begging to be sent where the action was, Kogan found herself on the back of a truck in Afghanistan, her tiny frame veiled from head to toe, the only woman—and the only journalist—in a convoy of rebel freedom fighters. Kogan had not actually planned on shooting the Afghan war alone. However, the beguiling French photographer she’d entrusted with both her itinerary and her heart turned out to be as dangerously unpredictable as, well, a war.

Kogan found herself running from one corner of the globe to another, each linked to the man she was involved with at the time. From Zimbabwe to Romania, from Russia to Haiti, Kogan takes her readers on a heartbreaking yet surprisingly hilarious journey through a mine-strewn decade, her personal battles against sexism, battery, and even rape blending seamlessly with the historical struggles of war, revolution, and unfathomable abuse it was her job to record.

In the end, what was once adventurous to the girl began to weigh heavily on the woman. Though she had finally been accepted into photojournalism’s macho fraternity, her photographs splashed across the front pages of international newspapers and magazines, Kogan began to feel there was something more she was after. Ultimately, what she discovered in herself was a person—a woman—for whom life, not death, is the one true adventure to be cherished above all.

Banned Books, Censorship & Free Speech, Civil Discourse & Social Justice, Illustration & Graphic Storytelling, Journalism, Memoir & Personal Journeys

American Healthcare is Failing Women. And it Nearly Killed Me

Delivered straight from the podium into the audience like an arrow, Deborah’s harrowing if humorous tale of healthcare discrimination will resonate with every woman who’s every been told, “It’s all in your head.” And she has the statistics and receipts to prove it.

How Failure Fueled My Career

Each and every one of us, at some point, will fail. It’s built into every life path. It’s what we do with that failure that either leads to throwing in the towel or using that failure as rocket fuel for success. This is a multi-media presentation, including photos and video, showing how each setback in Deborah’s career became the stepping stone to future change and success.

https://youtu.be/t18HMWEEqHg

“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

“She’s got a brilliant mind and she’s got a really brilliant impressive and quite shocking life.’”—Michaela Coel, creator of I May Destroy You, as quoted in Variety

“Eye-opening, breathtaking, terrifying, enraging, but most of all 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, NYT bestselling 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, NYT 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, award-winning author of The Ice Storm and The Long Accomplishment

“Every now and then you read a book that you know is destined to define a moment in time. Ladyparts is an instant classic. In the tradition of Nora Ephron, Lena Dunham, and Tina Fey, Deborah Copaken combines passion and courage with humor and wickedness into a modern parable that will soon be talked about in every book group in the land. Read this book quickly before everyone else insists that you must.”—Bruce Feiler, NYT bestselling author of Life is in the Transitions and Council of Dads

“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.”—Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises and What We’ve Lost is Nothing

“Reading this terrific book makes you feel like you’re Deb 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 zig-zags through middle age in the general direction of wisdom and contentment.”—Kurt Andersen, NYT 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, NYT bestselling author of Girls & Sex

“On every vivid page, through every jaw-dropping, anatomically outrageous chapter, Ladyparts showcases Deborah Copaken’s scintillating ability to hold rage and humor together in one fist, alchemizing them into a literary force greater than either single emotion. The result is a memoir that is both weapon and balm, a courageous call to arms and a moving, hilarious deep dive into the pain and joy of a woman’s life in these early years of the 21st Century.”—John Burnham Schwartz, bestselling author of The Red Daughter and The Commoner

“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, NYT bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk To Someone

“Deborah Copaken has written an amazing book. She uses her own body as a framing device. But through that lens, she’s able to write movingly about everything you can imagine: love, divorce, war, parenting, cancer, gender inequality, dating apps, gourmet pie, you name it. I’m sorry that Deborah has had to battle so many Job-like challenges — but I’m delighted she is the heroine, not the victim, of her life. We need her to keep writing. We need this book, and many more, from her.”—A.J. Jacobs, NYT bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically and Thanks A Thousand

“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.”—Semi Chellas, award-wining writer/producer, Mad Men and The Romanoffs

“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.—Maile Meloy, award-winning author of Do Not Become Alarmed

“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.”—Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Treasure and A Really Good Day

“Ladyparts is in equal measure raw, unshrinking, hilarious, and heartbreaking. Deborah Copaken has been both a war photographer in Afghanistan and a single working mother in America, but take a quick guess as to which experience has been more dangerous. Lucky for her, she lived through both to tell the tale. Lucky for us, she has transformed her unique traumas into wholly relatable gold. Few people write like Deb: her ability to translate the workings of her dazzling mind into prose is without parallel.”—Donal Logue, actor and author of Trejo

“Filled with stories of what it’s like to be a woman and a writer in America today, and heart-wrenching moments of injustice and redemption, this page-turner of a memoir is harrowing, hopeful and urgent. If you are a woman, it will change the way you look at the parts that make you and the parts that you play. If you are a man, it will illuminate you. And if you are either, or neither, it will move you and transform you. This memoir is visceral and beautiful. Thank you Deborah Copaken for writing this brave and brilliant book. Ladyparts is an absolute must-read.”—Ariana Neumann, NYT bestselling author of When Time Stopped

“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.”- Dr. Lisa Mosconi, NYT bestselling author of The XX Brain

“Highly informative. 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. Sharp and funny and always extremely candid.”—Kirkus

“In a candid, confessional voice, photojournalist and writer Copaken 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.”—Booklist

“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.”—Library Journal

“Ladyparts weaves an enlightening, blistering critique of gender bias and misogyny in the workplace and in medicine; income inequality; internalized hatred and intrasexual competition between women; and how they all coalesce to literally kill those of us with ladyparts. It perfectly telegraphs the way that even— especially—at their most vulnerable, Copaken and her ladyparts have priceless lessons to impart.”—The Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy

“Ladyparts, Copaken’s seventh and most ambitious book, is a characteristically incisive takedown of the impact of misogyny on health care, divorce, solo motherhood, middle-aged dating, housing and employment.”—Washington Post

“Pick up ‘Ladyparts: A Memoir,’ by New York Times best-selling author Deborah Copaken, and you won’t put it down. The former Emmy Award-winning news producer and photojournalist will hook you from page one.”—Colorado Springs Gazette

“The body part that anchors Ladyparts, however, is Copaken’s mouth. It’s a memoir about the struggle to be heard, and the constant internal negotiations that those with female bodies perform in weighing the costs of speaking up and those of remaining silent. But what will likely linger for readers—particularly those inhabiting female bodies—is its stark illustration of sickness and disease that, when up against American systems of healthcare, insurance, and employment, compound the pain and prolong the suffering.”—Bitch

“Engrossing. Notwithstanding the impressive tale of how Copaken managed to keep it all together while her body fell apart, Ladyparts is crucially about the larger picture of how American society fails women in myriad ways.”—The Times of Israel

“Copaken inserts humor into all of these stories, but she is detailing a reality that millions of Americans understand all too well: What do you do if you need help but you can’t afford it, and you have no one to help you?”—Jewish Insider

“Refreshing honesty.”—New York Times Book Review

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Honors, Awards & Recognition

NYT Bestseller
IndieNext Pick
Women’s Prize for Fiction
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick
Golden Globe nomination (for “Emily in Paris”)
Emmy nomination (for “Emily in Paris”)
Emmy winner (news journalism, ABC News)
Elle Readers Prize (for Between Here and April)
Kodak Déclic du mois (x2)
W. Eugene Smith Award finalist
Hoopes Prize
David McCord Prize