alix kates shulman

To Love What Is
Everyone over a certain age fears that one day a momentous event outside one's control may occur that will change one's life forever. It happened to Alix and her beloved husband when he fell from a sleeping loft, permanently injuring his brain. This memoir explores life on the other side, with all its anxieties, risks--and surprising rewards.

"An extraordinary and important book...moves with elegance and deep insight between the past and the present, and magically unites them. TO LOVE WHAT IS celebrates the deep resilience of self, and the power of a loving relationship." Oliver Sacks, MD

"Hope, fear, rage, guilt, the powerful endurance of love--it's all laid naked on the page, and every word rings true." Martha Weinman Lear, Heartsounds

"This is the story of great love forged when death almost parts you and then doesn't, a book that will take its place next to those slender volumes that become tattered and torn as I read and reread and reread, as if my own life depended on it...Shulman's masterpiece." Honor Moore, The Bishop's Daughter

"This remarkable book speaks openly and honestly and with exquisite poignancy about the durability of love." Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Lover

A Good Enough Daughter
At age twenty, Alix wrenched herself from her middle-class Ohio family to lead a fiercely independent life in New York. In this intimate memoir, she explores what it means to do what's expected of a daughter, and discovers in the process the unexpected, complicated joys of going home. She navigates the emotional and practical difficulties of caring for the aging parents from whom she had once tried so hard to separate, weaving together the parallel stories of their growing old and her growing up.

Drinking the Rain
Winner of the Body Mind Spirit Award of Excellence
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

At fifty, Alix left a city life dense with political activism, family, and literary community, and went to live alone on an island off the coast of Maine. Without plumbing, power, or phone, foraging for wild greens and shellfish, she faced challenges that helped redefine her notions of independence and courage, confidence and creativity. Among the hidden treasures of nature, she discovered sensual delights she had never before experienced.

"A magical book.... The writing is supple, precise, rippling with grace; the ideas are provocative." Houston Chronicle

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
35th anniversary edition, with a new introduction.

Thirty-five years after it first shocked readers nationwide, this bestselling novel of one woman's intellectual and sexual awakening continues to hit home with its comic portrayal of growing up female in middle-class America.

"A vicious little gem of a novel." Cosmopolitan

"Told with astringent wit... a challenging and bitter brew of a novel." San Francisco Chronicle

"A vivid reminder of just how much--and sometimes, how little--has changed for women in the last 35 years." Andi Zeisler of Bitch magazine

Burning Questions
Portrait of a woman caught up in the ferment of the 1960s and 1970s. It "brought back to me in a rush of emotion the electric sense of discovery which really was how the women's movement began for all of us." Betty Friedan

On the Stroll
Robin, a runaway teenager, arrives in New York's main bus terminal where Prince, a pimp, marks her as his next meal ticket, and Owl, a bag lady, mistakes her for her long lost daughter. Their lives become inextricably enmeshed against a seething urban backdrop in this novel about New York street life.

"A selfless, careful and satisfying book." NY Times

In Every Woman's Life
In Every Woman's Life . . . a time must come to think about marriage. Three women, three lives, linked together by bonds of family and friendship, passion and deceit.

"An adroit, witty, and all too accurate portrait of an era." Margaret Atwood

"Fierce, funny, touching." NY Times Book Review

Red Emma Speaks: an Emma Goldman Reader
Collection of the writings and speeches of Emma Goldman (1869-1939), anarchist agitator, feminist activist, free-love advocate, labor champion, writer, and first political deportee from the United States, compiled and edited, with introducion, headnotes, and new foreword to the Third Edition (Prometheus Books, 1996), by Alix Kates Shulman.

"A Marriage Disagreement"
Shulman's controversial essay "A Marriage Agreement," proposing that spouses share childcare and housework equally, was so explosive in 1969 that it was reprinted as a Life Magazine cover story and attacked by Norman Mailer and Russell Baker, and again in a 2006 book by Caitlin Flanagan. Shulman's own expose and reevaluation of "A Marriage Agreement" was published as "A Marriage Disagreement" in the Winter 1998 Dissent and anthologized in The Feminist Memoir Project.