About
As an author and playwright, Paula Kamen, born in 1967, has been interested in how women’s ambitions, medical treatment, and control over their own bodies are dramatically impacted by whichever generation they happen to be born into.
She is most known for her darkly comedic memoir/journalistic report, All in My Head, which Salon.com said “connects the dots on this issue of women and chronic pain in a way nobody else has done.” She is also the author of what has been widely noted as the first Gen X feminist book, Feminist Fatale, from 1991, which provides a comprehensive field report on activism of that era, and, like the Jane play, serves as a feminist primer to the younger generations. Feminist scholar bell hooks called the book “one of the most well researched and thoughtful discussions of the factors that shape responses to feminist thinking among younger women.”
Her papers from her first three books and other writing are archived at Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture. That includes extensive files on post-boomer women and feminism, dating from the late 1980s to early 2000s.
Lately she has been focusing on theater work, including a new drama/comedy, Dionne’s House, which was recently named as a finalist to the 2022 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, a semifinalist in the Garry Marshall Theater New Works Festival, and a quarterfinalist in the ScreenCraft Stage Play Competition, ranking highly as a comedy.
Her part-documentary play, “Jane: Abortion and the Underground” — about the legendary pre-Roe feminist abortion service — had five productions in 2022, including at Temple University and UCLA. It has had dozens of productions and readings since its official opening in Chicago in 1999, mostly by fringe and college theaters, and has raised many thousands of dollars for pro-choice organizations. In January 2023, it had a reading by Village Rep in Charleston, South Carolina, (sadly) marking its first production post-Roe in a state where abortion has been basically outlawed. In fall 2023, it will have a full production with Idle Muse in Chicago at the Edge Off Broadway theater,
The play’s production highlight was an off-Broadway New York City celebrity reading, starring Cynthia Nixon (Jody), Kathy Najimy (Ruth), Ana Gasteyer (Heather), Monique Coleman (Micki) and others at Rattlestick Theater, benefiting the reproductive rights theater artists’ group, A is For, co-founded by Martha Plimpton and Kellie Overbey. Recently, it was also named in a list of recommended plays on reproductive rights on NPX, the National New Play Network and noted in American Theatre Magazine for its activism. Two scenes appear in the first anthology of abortion literature, Choice Words, edited by Annie Finch, released in 2020 with Haymarket Press. Transcripts of interviews with Jane members and women who used Jane are on file with the Special Collections Department of the Northwestern University Library, as well as at Duke. They have been cited in many books, including in Leslie Reagan’s When Abortion Was a Crime.
The play is based on her own original interviews. In 1991, after finding out about the service from a fellow activist in Chicago, she started tracking down Jane members and, as her greatest contribution, ordinary women who used the service. From that work, she contributed a source interviewed for the 2022 HBO/Max-produced documentary “The Janes”; That was Crystal, a Black woman from the West Side who went with her friend when they were teens for a Jane abortion. (Paula found her 30 years ago with an ad in the Chicago Defender.)
Her commentaries and book reviews have appeared most recently in the Chicago Reader, Chicago Magazine, and Mcsweeneys. In 2008, Paula was a guest blogger for the online New York Times, in a special feature on migraine, and then was an occasional guest blogger at Ms Magazine online. She has also been published in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Salon.com, In These Times, the Forward, the Women’s Review of Books, and more than a dozen anthologies.
Her most recent book is FINDING IRIS CHANG: AMBITION, FRIENDSHIP AND THE LOSS OF AN EXTRAORDINARY MIND (Da Capo, 2007). The book, a quest to understand the puzzling and tragic suicide of her longtime friend and personal role model Iris Chang, was released in paperback in 2008. Entertainment Weekly called it “a moving bio” (12/19/08), and in its fall/winter 2007 preview issue, Kirkus described this memoir/biography as “a rewardingly complex portrait of a driven and troubled woman.” The Chicago Tribune called it “engrossing” and “fascinating” and named it as one of its “favorite books of 2007.” It was also a 2007 independent-bookstore “Booksense” pick and the subject of a C-SPAN’s Booknotes program. The book also seeks to raise awareness about bipolar disorder, the possible risks of hormonal treatments for such patients, and stigmas about mental illness that exist in every culture. Meanwhile, it explores how journalists can protect themselves from the toxic effects of traumas they cover.
Her third book is ALL IN MY HEAD: AN EPIC QUEST TO CURE AN UNRELENTING, TOTALLY UNREASONABLE, AND ONLY SLIGHTLY ENLIGHTENING HEADACHE (Da Capo, 2005). In January 2005, Kirkus described this black comedy/memoir/feminist treatise/journalistic report as “sharp, entertaining, informative, and blessedly free of poor-me-see-how-I-suffered-ism.”
Paula is also the author of HER WAY: YOUNG WOMEN REMAKE THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION, (NYU Press, 2000, Broadway Books, 2002), which was noted as the first comprehensive “big picture” journalistic report of Generation X women’s evolving and enhanced sexual attitudes and choices. The online New York Times excerpted it and its print edition gave it a very racy review. In 2002, the book was also released in Japan by Kodansha.
Like HER WAY, FEMINIST FATALE, published in 1991, is also based on interviews with a diversity of young women. It explores a central conflict about feminism: resistance to the label of “feminist,” but then support of the ideals of the women’s movement. Praised by Susan Faludi, the book was widely covered and reviewed, in such publications as the Washington Post, Elle, and Time. The LA Times wrote: “Interesting, surprising…. a thoughtful book by a promising, provocative writer. Paula Kamen has done her homework and has had the courage to back up her point of view.” School Library Journal described it as “lively, well written and provocative.” Like HER WAY, FEMINIST FATALE has been used as a textbook at colleges.
Early in her career, she wrote regularly for Dave Eggers’s Might Magazine, and her satire, "Paradigm for Sale,” offering to sell out for cash to the Right, appeared in the publication’s post-humous “best of” anthology, SHINY ADIDAS TRACK SUITS AND THE DEATH OF CAMP (1998).
A priority has always been serious research, to back up observations about beginning social trends. You can find a just-reprinted excerpt of her essay defining chronic pain and fatigue as a feminist issue from 2005 in Bitch Magazine here, in a special series on women and chronic illness. In 2004, she was a guest editor for a new section of the online Our Bodies, Ourselves on women and chronic pain. Decades before #MeToo, her most reprinted essay, from a 1996 anthology, “Good Girls/"Bad Girls,” gives needed background about Gen X activism against sexual violence and abuse,
Her first satire published was "The Preppy Syndrome," in the Chicago Tribune in 1982 while she was a freshman at Homewood-Flossmoor High School, She had another big break getting a commentary about young women's views of feminism accepted in the New York Times in 1990, published months after acceptance on the slowest news day of the century, and perhaps of any century yet to come. Her first journalism job was as reporter for the Kenosha News in 1990.
Paula is a 1989 graduate in journalism from the University of Illinois, with her greatest honor being her induction into the Illini Media Hall of Fame in 2022. Born in Chicago and raised in the South Suburbs, she now lives with her husband and two teenage sons in the liberal paradise of Evanston, IL.
