Nationality American Name Katie Roiphe Parents Anne Roiphe | Period 1994 — present Role Author | |
Occupation Non-fiction writer, critic Notable works The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism (1994), Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939 (2007) Books The Morning After, Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Po, Still she haunts me, Last Night in Paradise, In Praise of Messy Lives Similar People Anne Roiphe, Emily Carter, Jack Richardson | ||
Alison bechdel talks with katie roiphe
Katie Roiphe is an American author and journalist. She is best known as the author of the non-fiction examination The Morning After: Fear, Sex and Feminism (1994). She is also the author of Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End (1997), and the 2007 study of writers and marriage, Uncommon Arrangements. Her 2001 novel Still She Haunts Me is an empathetic imagining of the relationship between Charles Dodgson (known as Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the real-life model for Dodgson's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Contents
- Alison bechdel talks with katie roiphe
- Katie roiphe why do we have fantasies of surrender
- Background and education
- The Morning After
- Cultural criticism
- Academic work
- Books
- References
Katie roiphe why do we have fantasies of surrender
Background and education
Roiphe grew up in New York City, daughter of psychoanalyst Herman Roiphe and noted feminist Anne Roiphe. She attended the all-female Brearley School, received a B.A. from Harvard University/Radcliffe College in 1990, and received a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University in 1996.
Roiphe married attorney Harry Chernoff in 2001. They had one daughter, Violet; they separated in 2005 (the year Roiphe's father died), and later divorced.
She has subsequently had a son, Leo, and has defended being a single mother.
The Morning After
In her first book, The Morning After, Roiphe argues that in many instances of supposed campus date rape, women are at least partly responsible for their actions. "One of the questions used to define rape was: 'Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?' The phrasing raises the issue of agency. Why aren't college women responsible for their own intake of alcohol or drugs? A man may give her drugs, but she herself decides to take them. If we assume that women are not all helpless and naive, then they should be responsible for their choice to drink or take drugs. If a woman's 'judgment is impaired' and she has sex, it isn't always the man's fault; it isn't necessarily always rape."
Writing for The New Yorker, Katha Pollitt gave the book a negative review. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing for The New York Times, called The Morning After a "Book of the Times" and said "it is courageous of Ms. Roiphe to speak out against the herd ideas that campus life typically encourages."
Cultural criticism
Roiphe's second book was 1997's Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End. She also began to contribute reviews and essays to Vogue, Harper's, Slate, The Washington Post, Dissent, and The New York Times. More recently, she had an essay featured in the anthology Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers. In her essay, entitled "Elect Sister Frigidaire", Roiphe writes that Hillary Clinton is “in many ways the feminist dream incarnate, the opportunity made flesh, the words we whisper to little girls: ‘You can be president. You can do anything you want.’” Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani noted that some of Roiphe's observations were in "stark contrast" to what Kakutani considered some of the "antifeminist" pieces in the collection. She has also written a novel based on the life of Lewis Carroll and his relationship with the real Alice, called Still She Haunts Me, which was published in 2001.
In 2007, Roiphe published Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939. Donna Seaman, in the trade publication Booklist, gave the book a starred review, writing, "Roiphe, inspired aesthetically and philosophically by the writings and lives of these social and artistic pioneers, offers sophisticated psychological, sexual, and social analysis, fashioning uncommonly affecting portraits of uncommon men and women." In The New York Times, the editor and critic Tina Brown called it "the perfect bedside book for an age like our own, when everything is known and nothing is understood." In The New York Observer, Alexandra Jacobs conceded "Katie haters will be sorry to hear that it’s very absorbing. The author has done something constructive, for a change, with her contempt for the contemporary age’s lily-livered female psyche..." Roiphe responded to some of her critics in an essay in Slate including Gawker.
In 2012, Roiphe published the essay collection In Praise of Messy Lives. In The New York Times, critic Dwight Garner praised the book, writing, "I’ve begun recommending it to people, particularly to would-be writers, explaining that Ms. Roiphe’s are how you want your essays to sound: lean and literate, not unlike Orwell’s, with a frightening ratio of velocity to torque....Among Ms. Roiphe’s gifts is one for brevity. She lingers long enough to make her points, and no longer. If I could condense my opinion of her new book onto a T-shirt, that Beefy-T would read: 'Team Roiphe.'"
Academic work
Roiphe is an associate professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.