DEBORAH COPAKEN KOGAN

Hell is Other Parents
I read No Exit in my early twenties, and I remember thinking hell might very well be other people, okay, sure, but under what far-fetched conditions would anyone ever actually be trapped forever in the company of strangers with no sleep or means of escape?

Then I became a parent.

From Deborah Copaken Kogan, the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Shutterbabe, comes this edgy, insightful, and sidesplitting memoir about surviving in the trenches of modern parenting.

Kogan writes situation comedy in the style of David Sedaris and Spalding Gray with a dash of Erma-Bombeck-on-a-Vespa: wry, acutely observed, and often hilarious true tales, in which the narrator is as culpable as any character. In these eleven linked pieces, Kogan and her husband are almost always broke while working full-time and raising three children in New York City, one of the most expensive and competitive cities in the world.

In one episode, exhausted from a particularly difficult childbirth, Kogan finds herself sharing a hospital room with a foul-mouthed teen mother and her partying posse. In another, Kogan manages to crawl her way to her own emergency appendectomy, which inconveniently strikes the same week her infant's babysitter is away on vacation, her adolescents are off from school, her New York Times editor needs his edit, and the whole family catches the flu. And in the book's capper essay, she drives twelve hours, solo, with a screaming toddler in a rent-a-car in a futile effort to catch a glimpse of her eldest child in his summer camp play.

Yes, Shutterbabe is all grown up and slightly worse for the wear, but her clear-eyed vision while under fire has remained intact: You've never read funnier war stories.

Between Here and April
When a deep-rooted 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 nespaper article revealing the details that had been hidden from her as a child--shocking revelations about April's mother, Adele.

Elizabeth, now heself a mother, tracks down the people who knew Adele Cassidy and who thought that they knew what was going through her mind before she committed that most incomprehensible of crimes. She seeks out anyone who might help piece together the final months, days, and hours of this troubled womans life--from Adele's former neighbor to her psychiatrist to her sister.

But the answers are more elusive than any normal investigation can yield, the questions raised difficult to contemplate. In fact, the further into the story Elizabeth digs, the more she is forced to accept that she and Adele might not be so different.

Elizabeth's exploration thus leads her ultimately back to herself: her compromised marriage, her increasing self-doubt, her desire for more out of her career and her life, and finallly to a fearsome reckoning with what it means to be a wife and mother.

Shutterbabe
Fresh out of college and passionate about photography, Deborah Copaken Kogan moved to Paris in 1988 and began knocking on photo agency doors, begging to be given a photojournalism assignment. Within weeks she was on the back of a truck in Afghanistan, the only woman--and the only journalist--in a convoy of mujahideen, the rebel "freedom fighters" at the time. She had traveled there with a handsome but dangerously unpredictable Frenchman, and the interwoven stories of their relationship and the assignment set the pace for Shutterbabe's six chapters, each covering a different corner of the globe, each linked to a man in Kogan's life at the time.

From Zimbabwe to Romania, from Russia to Haiti, Kogan takes her readers on a hearbreaking yet surprisingly hilarious journey through a mine-strewn decade, seamlessly blending her personal battles--sexims, batter, life-threating danger--with the historical ones--wars, revolution, unfathomable suffering--it was her job to record.