Elissa Schappell

Elissa Schappell, “a diva of the encapsulating phrase, capable of conveying a Pandora’s box of feeling in a single line” ( The New York Times Book Review ) delivers eight provocative, darkly funny linked stories that map America’s shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day.Blueprints for Building Better Girls delves into the lives of an eclectic cast of archetypal female characters—from the high school slut to the good girl, the struggling artist to the college party girl, the wife who yearns for a child to the reluctant mother—mapping America’s shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day. Its interconnected stories explore the commonly shared but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers. In revealing all their vulnerabilities and twisting our preconceived notions of who they are, Elissa Schappell alters how we think about the nature of female identity and how it evolves.

As she grows from rebellious adolescent in preppy suburbs of Delaware to sexually-fraught adult in New York City, Evie Wakefield struggles to connect with the men in her life: Chas Wakefield, her larger-than-life father, who has cheated cancer for years; Billy, her sexy, responsibility-shy musician husband; and Charlie her needy young son.

It's an elemental, almost animalistic urge—the expectant mother's hunger for birth narratives. We are inundated with how-to guides and month-by-month pregnancy manuals when what we truly crave are artful, entertaining, unvarnished accounts of labor and delivery. We want to know what really happens—the good, the bad, and the ugly. In anticipation of the publication of Labor True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers , celebrated author Elissa Schappell brings us "What We Talk About When We Talk About Birth." In this frank, funny, and bittersweet essay she explores the phenomenon of sharing birth stories, reveals her reluctance to tell her own, and discovers that talking about childbirth—the joy, the fear, the pain —is as instinctual as the act itself.And if you love birth stories as much as we do, read thirty more essays like this one in Labor True Birth Stories By Today's Best Women Writers , including Lan Samantha Chang, Julia Glass, Lauren Groff, Ann Hood, Danzy Senna, Dani Shapiro, and Cheryl Strayed.

Elissa Schappell has led a life sculpted by books and the famous--and infamous--people who wrote them. A founding editor of Spy magazine, she is the book columnist at Vanity Fair, which reaches nearly a million readers each month.Between the Covers is Schappell's tour-de-force memoir of her life at the heart of New York's literary circle--a life informed and challenged by her favorite books and authors. Perfect for fans of How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen and Love, Loss, and What I Wore by Lois Wyse, this original new release will get national word-of-mouth.

Evie - Zehn Strophen eines Lebens - bk204; Europa Verlag; Elissa Schappell; Paperback; 2001

Elissa Schappell’s Use Me introduced us to a writer of extraordinary talent, whose “sharp, beautiful, and off-kilter debut” (Jennifer Egan) garnered critical acclaim and captivated readers. In Blueprints for Building Better Girls, her highly anticipated follow-up, she has crafted another provocative, keenly observed, and wickedly smart work of fiction that maps America’s shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day. In these eight darkly funny linked stories, Schappell delves into the lives of an eclectic cast of archetypal female characters—from the high school slut to the good girl, the struggling artist to the college party girl, the wife who yearns for a child to the reluctant mother— to explore the commonly shared but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers. In “Monsters of the Deep,” teenage Heather struggles to balance intimacy with a bad reputation; years later in “I’m Only Going to Tell You This Once,” she must reconcile her memories of the past with her role as the mother of an adolescent son. In “The Joy of Cooking,” a phone conversation between Emily, a recovering anorexic, and her mother explores a complex bond; in “Elephant” we see Emily’s sister, Paige, finally able to voice her ambivalent feelings about motherhood to her new best friend, Charlotte. And in “Are You Comfortable?” we meet a twenty-one-year-old Charlotte cracking under the burden of a dark secret, the effects of which push Bender, a troubled college girl, to the edge in “Out of the Blue into the Black.” Weaving in and out of one another’s lives, whether connected by blood, or friendship, or necessity, these women create deep and lasting impressions. In revealing all their vulnerabilities and twisting our preconceived notions of who they are, Elissa Schappell, with dazzling wit and poignant prose, has forever altered how we think about the nature of female identity and how it evolves.