Ladyparts Read online

  “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 A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life

  “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. Deborah Copaken’s book is an important addition to the field of women’s health from the lens of a patient.”

  —Lisa Mosconi, PhD, New York Times bestselling author of The XX Brain

  “Ladyparts is an unmanicured middle finger to an archaic culture that shames women into suffering in silence. It is a bold love letter to ‘women warriors,’ championing self-reliance while tackling the societal obstacles unrelentingly thrown in that path. Deborah Copaken shines a light on her scars, bravely helping those who cover their own feel less alone.”

  —AJ Mendez, New York Times bestselling author of Crazy Is My Superpower

  “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 Copaken: her ability to translate the workings of her dazzling mind into prose is without parallel.”

  —Donal Logue, actor and co-author of Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood

  “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 Copaken 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, New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically and Thanks A Thousand

  “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, author of When Time Stopped

  “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

  “This book is a must-read for anyone who knows a woman, loves a woman, or is a woman. Copaken’s sharp wit, heartfelt humor, and unabashed honesty turn what could be a tragic tale into a heroic journey of perseverance. Anyone who reads it will walk away feeling inspired.”

  —Katherine Schwarzenegger, New York Times bestselling author of The Gift of Forgiveness: Inspiring Stories from Those Who Have Overcome the Unforgivable

  “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, author of Do Not Become Alarmed

  “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 catalogs 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

  Copyright © 2021 by Deborah Copaken

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Copaken, Deborah, author.

  Title: Ladyparts: a memoir / by Deborah Copaken.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020055455 (print) | LCCN 2020055456 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984855473 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984855480 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Copaken, Deborah. | Copaken, Deborah—Health. | Authors, American—21st century—Biography. | Women authors—Biography. | Photojournalists—United States—Biography. | Women photographers—United States—Biography. | Women—Health and hygiene. Body image in women.

  Classification: LCC PS3611.O3654 Z46 2020 (print) | LCC PS3611.O3654 (ebook) | DDC 818/.5403 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020055455

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020055456

  Ebook ISBN 9781984855480

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Jo Anne Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design and illustration: Ella Laytham

  Cover image (texture): Harry Adam/Getty Images

  ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Preface

  Part I: Vagina

  Chapter One: Fireworks

  Part II: Uterus

  Chapter Two: Lunch with Nora, Freds

  Chapter Three: That Clear Blue Morning

  Chapter Four: Lunch with Nora, East Hampton

  Chapter Five: Empathy

  Chapter Six: Escape

  Chapter Seven: Lunch with Nora, E.A.T.

  Chapter Eight: Where’s the Husband?

  Part III: Breast

  Chapter Nine: Landslide

  Chapter Ten: Chiaroscuro

  Chapter Eleven: Yes, And…

  Chapter Twelve: Health Today

  Chapter Thirteen: In Flagrante Delicto

&nb
sp; Chapter Fourteen: You Won the Lottery!

  Part IV: Heart

  Chapter Fifteen: Inwood

  Chapter Sixteen: Money

  Chapter Seventeen: At the Still Point of the Turning World

  Chapter Eighteen: Bad Judgment

  Chapter Nineteen: Unrequited

  Chapter Twenty: The Church for Wayward Hearts

  Chapter Twenty-one: Lunch with Ken

  Part V: Cervix

  Chapter Twenty-two: Kind of a Tinder Date and Kind of Not

  Chapter Twenty-three: Durkheim

  Chapter Twenty-four: Public Relations

  Chapter Twenty-five: Private Relations

  Chapter Twenty-six: On-ramp

  Chapter Twenty-seven: Younger

  Chapter Twenty-eight: ENFP

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Little Buddha

  Chapter Thirty: Bloody Mother’s Day

  Chapter Thirty-one: Hospitals Are Not My Thing

  Chapter Thirty-two: My Day in Court (My Afternoon in Hospital)

  Part VI: Brain

  Chapter Thirty-three: Empty Brain

  Chapter Thirty-four: #MeToo

  Chapter Thirty-five: Cognitive Health

  Chapter Thirty-six: Fuck Your Dumb Fire

  Part VII: Lungs

  Chapter Thirty-seven: Make a Wish

  Chapter Thirty-eight: The Cost of Oxygen

  Chapter Thirty-nine: Fireworks Redux

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Also by Deborah Copaken

  About the Author

  “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”

  —Nora Ephron

  “They were trying to save their souls—and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?”

  —Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

  Author’s Note

  The human brain is not a tape recorder. Which makes memoir-writing tricky. Have I transcribed every word of dialogue in these pages verbatim? No. Impossible. With the exception of emails, which leave an immutable record, and direct quotes from studies, all dialogue has been filtered through the distortion field of memory or, in some cases, trauma, leaving an ingrained if imperfect imprint. Have I nonetheless done my best to make sure all sentences placed between quotation marks, including my own, have been rendered as close to the essential truth of what was spoken? Yes. Absolutely.

  Also, many names have been changed or in some cases completely omitted (e.g. “my ex,” “my son,” “my daughter,” “the actor,” “the PR firm”), and a few identifying characteristics have been deliberately left out for the sake of privacy, but both the people and the corporations inside here are real, not composites. Each scene in this book unfolds as it did in real life, without compression of events, flipping the timeline, or alteration of the narrative arc. But every scene, except where noted—for example, when I was unconscious—has been reconstructed solely from my perspective. I am the person on the gurney, not the one pushing it or watching it enter the operating room. That is to say: This is my bloodbath. My story. The stains on the floor are real, but their interpretations, as of any Rorschach blot, are mine alone.

  Preface

  The idea for this book came to me in the shower in the summer of 2018, a year after my near-death from vaginal cuff dehiscence.*1 Gazing down at my scar-covered torso, mentally dissecting each body part—the way a butcher approaches a cow or an advertiser a barely legal female—I realized that each excised or broken body part represented not only the chapter in time during which they failed me, they also, when strung together, served as a weirdly apt organizing principle around which to construct a narrative: organ by organ, nick by cut, each a useful metaphor for their parallel autobiographical upheavals.

  To wit: My uterus was removed within hours of losing my mentor and surrogate mother to cancer as well as at the precise hour my daughter’s body grabbed the reproductive baton. My breast grew a lump the same month I became a solo mother to my children and the den mother to a raucous commune of misfits in Harlem. My heart went on the fritz just as I was re-dipping a toe in love’s lake. My cervix hung a closed-for-business sign on its door, right when new customers were finally showing up. My vagina tried to kill me as I was attempting a midlife act of rebirth. My brain had to escape halfway around the globe to learn how to turn down the volume after its scaffolding’s near collapse. Finally lungs—which was not in my original book proposal—reminded us all that the right to a deep breath, particularly in America, is not a given.

  The scars covering my female body, in other words, felt like the vague outline of a story begging to be fleshed out, body part by body part, like those connect-the-dots kindergarten worksheets that, when joined with a pencil in the correct numerical order, reveal an elephant, a snowman, a waggy-tailed puppy. Only this time it would be me, reconstructed. In fact, I realized, toweling off and getting dressed that morning, by objectifying my own body into its various parts—minus the misogyny—I could provide a useful microscope through which to contemplate the vastness of a whole life. Not only its nicks, cuts, and frequent slips on life’s banana peels, but also its joys, triumphs, and belly laughs evoked not despite its seemingly unrelenting trips to the human body shop but because of them. Indeed, what had once felt like a constant ducking from turds in an endless shitstorm suddenly seemed not only like a cosmic gift from an overly generous muse—Here, Deb, have another turd! And another! Whee!—the mere act of reframing it thus suddenly gave me an umbrella. And the skeleton to describe it.

  This same flash of insight had occurred once prior, in a now-defunct coffee shop called Xando on Broadway and West 76th Street in New York. It was May of 1998, around 7:30 a.m. I was clutching a double-wide stroller with my then one- and two-year-olds in it when I suddenly understood exactly how to organize the trauma and chaos of my early years as a war photographer into something resembling order. Each memory frame of that visual tale, I realized, depicted not only a specific war in a specific setting—Afghanistan, Israel, Romania, Zimbabwe, the USSR, etc.—it also contained a male figure lurking just off-screen: an abuser, a casual fling, a good Samaritan, a troubled lover, a husband, my firstborn son. I fished a pen from my purse. Found a napkin. I will flip Mulvey’s male gaze, I thought, scribbling the names of these men onto that coffee shop napkin, by ironically naming each chapter of my life as an independent woman out in the world, at war, after the man (or, in one case, little boy) standing outside the frame. I, the female, would be the seer. They, the males, would be the objects, whether of my affection, scorn, lust, gratitude, or love. The female gaze, I wrote underneath the names, underlining it twice: a daily reminder to myself of how to frame the story.

  Ladyparts is both an obvious bookend to that format as well as a continuation of the female gaze, only this time I’m objectifying my own body. Not to erase my personhood, as a man would, but to reclaim it.

  That being said, yes: Over the past twenty years since Shutterbabe’s*2 publication, both my body and I have driven over what some might consider an unusual number of narrative potholes: medical, marital, financial, professional, personal, emotional, and holy shit, who could have seen that one coming? There’s the FBI knocking at my door. I’ve also frequently and sometimes at great personal cost felt compelled to use my mouth and firmly planted feet to fight back, while simultaneously managing four free falls at once: the media industry, a marriage, my health, and the American middle class.

  Does my voice, from all that shouting, have an edge to it? Fuck yes. I know I speak for many women in America when I say we are tir
ed of this. We are tired of being the default caretakers. We are tired of corporate malfeasance and government indifference to the needs of working families. We are tired of modulating our “tone” when that word gets used as a weapon against us. We are tired of being paid less than men, interrupted when we speak, fired at will, and tossed aside the minute we hit our perimenopausal stride. We are tired of doing all the work and getting none of the credit. We are tired of being told to lean in while being forced out. We are tired of required NDAs; of rapists in robes; of data gaps, healthcare traps, and scientific neglect.

  We are tired of headlines such as this one, from the first week following that annus horribilis, 2020, when the massive holes in the fabric of our country’s safety net were finally revealed by the black light of a novel virus: “The US economy lost 140,000 jobs in December. All of them were held by women.” And we’re tired of how all of this has affected not only our psyches, our professional choices, our quality of life, and our bottom lines, but also our bodies.

  Because yes, my body is covered by an unusual number of surgical scars. No doubt. But aside from the pace and extent of their etchings, are my dings unusual? Do they make me distinctive? No. In fact, what they make me is everywoman, born with female organs into a gutting world that, by dint of those organs, refuses to see her or hear her or pay her or study her or support her or treat her as equal.