Ladyparts by Deborah Copaken

In this space, I aim to share the honest and raw experiences of living, working, loving, and navigating life in a woman's body, while also including perspectives from all human bodies, including male and nonbinary. Here, you'll find stories that mainstream publications often overlook, deeming them unimportant, trivial, or unsuitable for their pages.

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Absentee Mothers

3 weeks ago | deborahcopaken.substack.com | Deborah Copaken

Absentee fathers: two words that get thrown together so often we simply take them for granted as normal or, better put, unremarkable. When relationships with children go south, men leave, women stay. Happens all the time. To me. To many women I know. To the 8.72 million mothers in the U.S.—that’s 80% of all the single-parent households—currently bearing the sole weight of their children’s care and needs.
Andrea Blaugrund Nevins, 1962-2025

1 month ago | deborahcopaken.substack.com | Deborah Copaken

It’s been a little over a month since my friend Andrea Blaugrund Nevins—documentary filmmaker, feminist, mother, wife, poet, writer, community creator, optimist, and unfailingly kind human being—died too young of metastatic breast cancer.
The path to success is paved with... siblings?

1 month ago | deborahcopaken.substack.com | Deborah Copaken

When she was in high school, Susan Dominus’ brother Andrew “bullied” her—her choice of verb—into starting a school newspaper. Today she is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the New York Times. In her spare time, she teaches journalism at Yale. You know, no biggie.
Moving vans and thwarted plans

2 months ago | deborahcopaken.substack.com | Deborah Copaken

It has been said—note the passive voice—that the five biggest stressors in life are 1) the death of a family member; 2) divorce or relational rupture; 3) major illness or injury; 4) losing one’s job; and 5) moving. Like some of you, I’ve experienced all of these, sometimes a couple of them simultaneously. In fact, a few times these adverse life events fell one on top of the other in groups of threes or fours: a veritable stress cascade which, in turn, put my body at greater risk for disease.
A Webby for Debbie?

2 months ago | deborahcopaken.substack.com | Deborah Copaken

I’ve spent the past two weeks packing up my apartment into boxes for a big move—more on that in my next missive—but in the meantime, I have some wild and wholly unexpected news. I am as surprised as you are to announce that this publication—which I write on my couch, in my bed, and in my favorite IKEA chair—was just nominated for a ! I first learned of this honor in the bowels of Kleinfeld’s, where I was accompanying my daughter for her final wedding dress fitting before she graduates med school.
Planning a wedding during the apocalypse

Mar 24, 2025 | deborahcopaken.substack.com | Deborah Copaken

If I told you how many hours my daughter and I each spent searching every corner of the internet for the right “vibe” of tablecloth over these past several months, you might wonder, as she recently did, why bother? Why bother to care about whether or not we add a runner to a tablescape in a hellscape?
Probiotics and UTI prevention

Mar 20, 2025 | deborahcopaken.substack.com | Deborah Copaken

Two years ago, a male urologist told me to take a weekly bleach bath to prevent recurring UTIs, plus a daily Macrobid. Then he slut shamed me. My new urologist, Dr. Alexa Meyer, winced when I told her this story. “Yeah, no. Bleach and the vulva, just no.” Never mind that I’d already built up antibiotic resistance to Macrobid. “I’m really sorry you were treated that way.” (Caring female urologists like Dr. Meyer, I should note, are hard to find. Even in New York. Especially considering only are female.
12 life lessons from 59 years of mistakes

Mar 11, 2025 | deborahcopaken.substack.com | Deborah Copaken

Today is my 59th birthday. In honor of making it this far—and given my vast experience with wrong turns, health challenges, plain old stupidity, and bad luck—here are a few lessons I’ve finally learned. The hard way. So you don’t have to:Your gut knows, even if you don’t. When a longterm partner was cheating, my gut could feel it deep inside, even if my rational brain had no evidence of infidelity or reason to believe anything was amiss.
Married women: now they're going after your right to vote

Mar 10, 2025 | deborahcopaken.substack.com | Deborah Copaken

Back in 2017, I wrote an Op-Ed for The Washington Post about the humiliations and absurdity of having to acquire my ex-husband’s signed and notarized permission to reclaim my birth name in the middle of our extended divorce. If you, like me, cancelled your subscription to the Post when Bezos stuck his nose up our president’s ass1, here is the key paragraph from that essay, and I’ll reprint it in full at the end of this story, should you be in the mood to read the whole thing.
Psst: Gen-X and young Boomers, go get your measles booster ASAP

Mar 5, 2025 | deborahcopaken.substack.com | Deborah Copaken

Welcome to America, circa 2025, where up is down, a dozen eggs cost $10 (well, okay, $9.99 yesterday at the store near me), and a measles outbreak is in full swing thanks to the ignorance, ineptitude, and science denial of our current administration.