Katie Roiphe

essays

In praise of messy lives

Katie Roiphe, culture writer and author of The Morning After, shares a timely blend of memoir, feminist investigation, and exploration of famous female writers’ lives, in a bold, essential discussion of how strong women experience their power. Told in a series of notebook entries, Roiphe weaves her often fraught personal experiences with divorce, single motherhood, and relationships with insights into the lives and loves of famous writers such as Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir. She dissects the way she and other ordinary, powerful women have subjugated their own power time and time again, and she probes brilliantly at the tricky, uncomfortable question of why. In these informal musings and notes, Roiphe delves into treacherous, largely untalked about, contradictions of contemporary womanhood, going where few writers dare. The Power Notebooks is Roiphe’s most vital, thought provoking, and emotionally intimate work yet.

The Power Notebooks

Is there some adventure out there that we are not having, some vividness, some wild pleasure, that we are not experiencing in our responsible, productive days? ... We are bequeathed on earth one very short life, and it might be good, one of these days, to make sure that we are living it.' As steely eyed in examining her own life as she is in skewering our cultural pitfalls, Roiphe gives us autobiographical pieces that are by turns, deeply moving, self-critical, razor-sharp, entertaining and unapologetic in their defence of 'messy lives'. In Praise of Messy Lives is powerfully unified, vital work from one of our most astute and essayists writing today.

In Praise of Messy Lives

"In this category-defying book, Katie Roiphe takes an unexpected and liberating approach to the most unavoidable of subjects: death. She examines the final days of five great writers and artists--Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, and Maurice Sendak." --

Great Writers at the End

The Violet Hour

A richly textured fictional portrait of the relationship between Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, and Alice Liddell, the young daughter of the dean of his Oxford college, ranges their first meeting in 1856, when Alice was nearly four years old, to the Liddell family's abrupt severing of the relationship when Alice was eleven. Reprint.

A Novel

Still She Haunts Me

Drawing on the memoirs, letters and diaries of a group of British intellectuals writing between 1910 and the Second World War, UNCOMMON ARRANGEMENTS paints a witty and insightful portrait of seven 'marriages a la mode', each triumphantly casting off Victorian inhibitions and pursuing bohemian ideals of freedom and equality. But as well as love and passion, there were tolerance, denial, anger, jealousy and drama. The Bloomsbury group's Clive and Vanessa Bell opened up their marriage to accommodate Vanessa's live-in lovers, and Clive's obsession with his sister-in-law, Virginia Woolf. H.G. Well's steadfast wife sent her love to his mistress Rebecca West when their son was born. And Vera Brittain and Katherine Mansfield, more devoted to their work than to their husbands, wrestled with unfulfilled desires. This is both a fascinating exploration of love, affection and friendship in marriage, and a brilliantly entertaining account of a dazzling era of high-society high living.

Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles, 1910-1939

Uncommon Arrangements

Examines seven unconventional marriages among members of England's literary circles between 1910 and 1939, examining crises that occurred in each marriage and how they were or were not resolved.

Traces the changing attitudes of today's younger generation toward sex, showing how morality has given way to a utilitarianism based on the threat of AIDS. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

Sex and Morals at the Century's End

Last Night in Paradise

Katie Roiphe, culture writer and author of The Morning After, shares a “beautifully written” (The New York Times Book Review) “astute memoir [that] reverberates with rich prose, crisp pacing, and self-compassion” (Publishers Weekly) and an essential discussion of how strong women experience their power. Told in a series of notebook entries, Roiphe weaves her often fraught personal experiences with divorce, single motherhood, and relationships with insights into the lives and loves of famous writers such as Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir. She dissects the way she and other ordinary, powerful women have subjugated their own power time and time again, and she probes brilliantly at the tricky, uncomfortable question of why. “Although Ms. Roiphe seems to be exposing her vulnerabilities here, she is actually, once again, demonstrating her unique brand of fearlessness” (The Wall Street Journal). The Power Notebooks is Roiphe’s most vital, thought-provoking, and emotionally intimate work yet.

Katie Roiphe’s stimulating work has made her one of the most talked about cultural critics of her generation. Now this bracing young writer delves deeply into one of the most layered of subjects: marriage. Drawn in part from the private memoirs, personal correspondence, and long-forgotten journals of the British literary community from 1910 to the Second World War, here are seven “marriages à la mode”—each rising to the challenge of intimate relations in more or less creative ways. Jane Wells, the wife of H.G., remained his rock, despite his decade-long relationship with Rebecca West (among others). Katherine Mansfield had an irresponsible, childlike romance with her husband, John Middleton Murry, that collapsed under the strain of real-life problems. Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin spent years in a “semidetached” marriage (he in America, she in England). Vanessa Bell maintained a complicated harmony with the painter Duncan Grant, whom she loved, and her husband, Clive. And her sister Virginia Woolf, herself no stranger to marital particularities, sustained a brilliant running commentary on the most intimate details of those around her. Every chapter revolves around a crisis that occurred in each of these marriages—as serious as life-threatening illness or as seemingly innocuous as a slightly tipsy dinner table conversation—and how it was resolved…or not resolved. In these portraits, Roiphe brilliantly evokes what are, as she says, “the fluctuations and shifts in attraction, the mysteries of lasting affection, the endurance and changes in love, and the role of friendship in marriage.” The deeper mysteries at stake in all relationships.

Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939

Sue Scott

Meghan Boody

The publication takes the reader on a fantastical journey through the strange and beautiful worlds of artist, Meghan Boody. Her pictures, dioramas and photo-vitrines tell stories of young women entangled in difficult adventures . Female versions of the male heroic quest, these image-based novellas unfold in a unique brew of fairy tale, myth and personal memory. Considered a pioneer of digital imaging, Boody composites hundreds of Photoshop layers to make her heroic tableaux. Equal parts Dr Freud and Dr Frankenstein, the resulting magical environments transport the viewer into another time and place.

We are Gods in the Chrysalis

When Katie Roiphe arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1986, she found that the feminism she had been raised to believe in had been radically transformed. The women's movement, which had once signaled such strength and courage, now seemed lodged in a foundation of weakness and fear. At Harvard, and later as a graduate student at Princeton, Roiphe saw a thoroughly new phenomenon taking shape on campus: the emergence of a culture captivated by victimization, and of a new bedroom politics in the university, cloaked in outdated assumptions about the way men and women experience sex. Men were the silencers and women the silenced, and if anyone thought differently no one was saying so. Twenty-four-year-old Katie Roiphe is the first of her generation to speak out publicly against the intolerant turn the women's movement has taken, and in The Morning After she casts a critical eye on what she calls the mating rituals of a rape-sensitive community. From Take Back the Night marches (which Roiphe terms "march as therapy",and "rhapsodies of self-affirmation") to rape-crisis feminists and the growing campus concern with sexual harassment, Roiphe shows us a generation of women whose values are strikingly similar to those their mothers and grandmothers fought so hard to escape from - a generation yearning for regulation, fearful of its sexuality, and animated by a nostalgia for days of greater social control. At once a fierce excoriation of establishment feminism and a passionate call to our best instincts, The Morning After sounds a necessary alarm and entreats women of all ages to take stock of where they came from and where they want to go.

Sex, Fear, and Feminism

The Morning After

In deze geestige lofzang op het chaotische dagelijkse leven schrijft Katie Roiphe met verve over onze hedendaagse mores: de verbazingwekkend geborneerde moderne conventies die nu gelden, de eis gezond te leven, de morele afwijzing van mensen die zich niet aan die regel houden. Ze beschrijft scherp de subtiele kwaadaardigheid waar alleenstaande moeders mee te maken krijgen, de deprimerende tirannie van Facebook, maar ook hoe op de bevrijding van de seksuele revolutie de eigentijdse preutsheid volgde. De bundel bevat ook buitengewoon openhartige autobiografische verhalen. Katie Roiphes blik op zichzelf is even genadeloos als die op een ander. Haar getuigenissen van echtscheiding, moederschap of het einde van een vriendschap zijn ontroerend, vol zelfkritiek, en messcherp.

Lof van het rommelige leven

In Het uur van het violet en de dood kiest Katie Roiphe voor een onverwachte en bevrijdende benadering van een onderwerp waar niemand omheen kan. Ze gaat na hoe de laatste levensdagen waren van zes grote denkers, schrijvers en kunstenaars en hoe zij omgingen met de realiteit van de naderende dood, of, zoals T.S. Eliot het noemde: 'het avondlijk uur dat Huiswaarts gericht is en de zeeman thuisbrengt.' Roiphe baseert zich hierbij op haar eigen uitzonderlijke onderzoek en de contacten met familieleden, vrienden en verzorgers van haar personages. We maken kennis met Susan Sontag, die wanneer ze voor de derde keer de strijd tegen kanker aangaat, worstelt met haar engagement met het rationele denken. Roiphe neemt ons mee naar de kamer in het ziekenhuis waar de 76-jarige John Updike, nadat hem de slechtst mogelijke diagnose is meegedeeld, een gedicht begint te schrijven. Ze schept een levendig beeld van de twee weken durende, bijna suïcidaal overmatige inspanning die culmineerde in de totale instorting van Dylan Thomas in het Chelsea Hotel. Ze schetst voor ons een moedgevend portret van Sigmund Freud die, nadat hij het door de nazi's bezette Wenen is ontvlucht, in zijn Londense ballingschap het dwangmatige roken van sigaren voortzet waarvan hij weet dat het zijn aftakeling zal verhaasten. En ze toont ons dat Maurice Sendaks geliefde kinderboeken doordesemd zijn van het feit dat hij zijn leven lang geobsedeerd was door de dood, al was dat niet altijd evident. Het uur van het violet en de dood staat vol met intieme en verrassende onthullingen. In de laatste daden van al deze creatieve genieën worden we geconfronteerd met moed, passie, zelfbedrog, zinloos lijden en onovertroffen toewijding. Er zijn ook momenten van ongelooflijk diep inzicht en begrip, waarin de geest zelf zijn troost creëert. Zoals de auteur schrijft: 'Als het een bijna ondoenlijke opgave lijkt om het naderen van de dood te verwoorden, wie zou daar dan toch misschien het beste toe in staat zijn?' Door de laatste levensdagen van deze grote auteurs te beschrijven in indrukwekkende, niet-sentimentele termen helpt Katie Roiphe ons om de dood moedig onder ogen te zien en er minder bang voor te zijn.

Katie Roiphe

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