Deborah Copaken Knihy

The memoirs of a photojournalist finding and fighting her way through the war zones of the world experiencing the danger, pain, truths and even love on the way.

Breasts. Uterus. Cervix. Heart. Vagina. These are often seen as the sources of life, but for writer and photographer Deborah Copaken, they became symbols of struggle. After escaping an abusive marriage and navigating single parenthood, she faced the daunting task of rebuilding her life. A Fourth of July health scare brought new meaning to “rocket's red glare,” while wearing a heart monitor on dates illustrated her journey to heal both her heart and spirit. Copaken's narrative is an irreverent exploration of the female body and its ailments, revealing the irony of bodily breakdown amid profound personal upheaval. With black humor and raw honesty, she portrays a woman in revolt, confronting blood clots, breast exams, heart palpitations, and heartbreaks. Her experiences highlight the terror, loneliness, and empowerment of a woman fighting for her life. By intertwining her harrowing story with medical and historical insights, Copaken sheds light on common health issues that amplify the everyday challenges women face, such as distorted beauty standards, workplace sexism, romantic insecurities, and distrust of their own bodies.

Clover, Addison, Mia, and Jane were roommates at Harvard until their graduation in 1989. Twenty years later, their lives are in free fall. Clover, once a securities broker, is out of a job and struggling to reproduce before her fertility window shuts. Addison's marriage to a writer's-blocked novelist is as stale as her so-called career as a painter. Hollywood closed its gold-plated gates to Mia, who now stays home with her children, renovating and acquiring faster than her 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 alumni autobiographical essays. 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, a relationship-changing, score-settling, unforgettable weekend.

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 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.

Die junge Journalistin berichtet über ihre Arbeit als Fotojournalistin in den Krisengebieten der Welt.