BIO

1966-1966: Born in Boston, MA; moved to Adelphi, MD six months later. Allegedly.

1966-1970: The preschool years; fuzzy memories of hippies, astronauts.

1970-1978: Moved from Adelphi to Potomac, MD. Attended flower-shaped elementary school that had no walls; first writing award; weird obsession with Jonestown massacre.

1978-1981: Hormones.

1981-1984: Gigantic public high school; reams of angsty poetry; first pieces published in Seventeen.

1984-1988: The college years, which coincided with the crack/AIDS years: mugged at gunpoint unrelentingly, mated cautiously; made films, shot photos, dropped acid, wrote articles for the school paper, performed in school plays and one film, Key Exchange; rejected by the one fiction writing course in the Harvard catalogue.

1988-1992: The war photography years; stored clothes, personal items in Paris, France, while parachuting in from conflict to conflict (Afghanistan, Israel, Romania, Zimbabwe, the USSR, etc.) Won awards, had exhibitions; images published in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, L’Express, Libération, Géo, Stern, etc.

1992-1998: Moved from Moscow to New York; produced TV for ABC then NBC News; got married, had a couple of babies, won an Emmy, inexpertly juggled work and kids; loudly whined for subsidized daycare, secretly pined to be a writer.

1998-2013: Wrote bestselling Shutterbabe, followed by unpublishable drivel, followed by Between Here and April, Hell is Other Parents, and the New York Times bestselling The Red Book, which was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize); published essays in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, Elle, More, Slate, Paris Match, O, and others; shot photo assignments; produced and shot a documentary in Pakistan for CNN in the wake of 9/11; became a columnist for The Financial Times; performed live on stage with The Moth, Afterbirth, Six Word Memoir, and Eve Ensler’s tribute to Anita Hill; adapted Hell is Other Parents for the stage; wrote several screenplays and a TV pilot that were never produced; watched Shutterbabe (the big and small-screen versions) languish in development hell; had another baby; lost appendix, uterus, father, Upper West Side home, bearings, socks, sanity, and several nouns; found Harlem, yoga, and occasional serenity. But not the socks. Or the whatchamacallit. Nouns.

2013-2015: The upheaval years; separated from husband and life partner of 23 years; sent the two eldest off to college; solo-parented the little one; underwent serious health issues; contemplated emigrating to Scandinavia; instead, moved across the street from the Inwood Hill Forest, the greatest city refuge no one in Manhattan has ever heard of; granted three miracles: 1) sold Shutterbabe as a TV series and was hired to co-write the pilot for NBC/Universal; 2) landed new full-time job plus three-book deal; 3) became a columnist at the Observer.

2015-2017: Ay carumba. Became a fancy VP in the health department at a PR firm to pay for kids’ (note: plural possessive) college and to have health insurance. Hated shilling for the pharmaceutical industry in order to have the kind of mediocre-ish insurance that doesn’t even pay for most of the drugs those greedy companies jack up in price because they invest hundreds of millions of lobbying dollars so no one will stop them (oh, the irony), but will later use this experience as fodder for the vaginal estrogen scene in Emily in Paris because tragedy plus time does, indeed, equal comedy. Went on more bad dates than you can possibly count on an abacus, but also some good ones, plus spent two weeks of vacation from the PR job as a consultant in the writers room on the TV show Younger so, you know: research. Newfound appreciation for the gifts of solitude. Thanks, Tinder! Published The ABC’s of Adulthood.

2017-2018: Proud pussy hat wearer, #MeToo-er, humanist during inhumane times. Left fancy VP job, liquidated 401K when health, once again, took a nosedive, twice. Lost cervix this time, then nearly life. Appreciate your health, healthy people reading all the way to this sentence! Represented self in family court. Yes, that’s actually a thing. Published The ABC’s of Parenthood. Finally made it to Nepal. Have you been? Go. Trust me. Just go. Landed a bunch of gig jobs that were actually kind of fun before being hired, full-time, as Head Writer at an Alzheimer’s prevention company and as a part-time columnist at The Atlantic. Learned how to surf! At 52. Turns out you actually can teach an old dog new tricks. Sold new memoir, Ladyparts, to Random House. Moved in with new partner of a year into new home in Williamsburg (Brooklyn). A gaslighting cad, as it will turn out, but who knew that then? It will take four years, in fact, to discover this.

2019-2020: Relocated to LA for three months to work on Emily in Paris. Plus this Modern Love, “When Cupid is a Prying Journalist,” was magically adapted and filmed as episode 2 of the 2019 Amazon series by the same name, with Catherine Keener in the role of “Julie,” who’s really a version of Deb, but without anyone having to pay for life rights. Then, uh oh (clap of thunder): March, 2020. This. Then this. Then this. Then this. Hello, tiny unemployment checks and gigantic COBRA bills once again! Healthcare frogger will be the death of us all. New and unexpected final chapter, “Lungs,” added to Ladyparts. Emily in Paris premiered, to mixed reviews, as the number one show on Netflix. Sold Ladyparts as a TV series. Like 99.99% of all deals in Hollywood, it won’t get made.

2021: Nominated, dubiously, for a Golden Globe. Spoke out and once again had to hide from the internet, after which the LA Times chimed in, then Netflix, then NBC cancelled the Golden Globes altogether because wtf: no Black members of the HFPA in 2021 is a travesty. Moved to Red Hook, Brooklyn, when landlord wanted his apartment back. In the middle of a pandemic. America: land of the free, home of the brave, crusher of tenants. But Red Hook smells like the ocean. And feels like a small fishing village in the middle of a large city. Sometimes what seems like bad luck can be a good place. Then, uh oh again (second clap of thunder): Summer, 2021. Secrets, lies, and betrayal: the holy trinity of melodrama. Partner of four years, his sociopathy now revealed, moved out the same week Ladyparts was published and then this. There’s a much longer story here, Shakespearean in scope, secondary characters, plot twists, gaslighting, and treachery. One day, it might be told.

[Addendum! It’s told.]

2021-2022: Mourns losses. Lets go. Finds renewal. Lots of important alone time to celebrate the here and now and to be grateful for what is and not stress over what is not. New publication, also called Ladyparts, takes off and becomes a fun new job. Becomes—belatedly, but better late than never—a red flag spotter extraordinaire. This one only wants contact on Thursdays? Goodbye. That one says he’s sober but is definitely not? So long. Self love, self-respect, and solitude beat codependency any day. Round two of Covid leads to deafness in both ears and a battle with United Healthcare to get needed surgery. Arguing about this leads to a loss of health insurance. Thank goodness for Obamacare and for hearing aids at Costco, never mind the uncovered $3K to acquire them. (This country, sheesh!) Then, in the fall of 2022, an angel, the novelist Christina Baker Kline, sweeps into this story with her fairy wand to forge a new chapter with an inspired set-up with a man whose wife has early onset Alzheimer’s. Whatever happens next, please know it will happen with a firm foundation of both reciprocal love and gratitude for its sudden appearance, fifty-six years into this writer’s life.

2023-24: Wins Deadline Club Award for this Op-Ed on the absurdity of healthcare in America. Related: survives a car crash. The other dude ran through a stop sign. Not a scratch on his car or him, while her car was totaled, as was she. Discovers what happens when cars are not tested with female crash test dummies. Did you know—fun fact—that an airbag shoots out of the steering wheel at a speed of approximately 100-200 mph? This is the equivalent of being hit in the face with a bullet. Wonders whether sexism will be ever eradicated in her lifetime, but also what that life might have looked like had her body been deemed as equally deserving of safety, autonomy, medical care, research dollars, product design, and data analysis as a man’s. And yet wait, wait, what’s that unusual feeling? Happiness. Despite everything. Starts writing new novel in an attempt to tap into the many facets of the love/loss duality. To be continued. Hopefully.

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For those of you who need the regular version of an author bio, here you go:

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, Air Mail, and Paris Match, among others. Her column “When Cupid Is a Prying Journalist” was adapted for the Modern Love streaming series. She is the founder, writer, producer, CEO, and publisher of the Substack Ladyparts.

For those of you who need the super short version of an author bio, here you go:

Deborah Copaken is the New York Times bestselling author of Shutterbabe, The Red Book, Between Here and April, among others. She’s also been a war photographer, TV producer, screenwriter, and performer. Her most recent book is Ladyparts, and she publishes a Substack by the same name.