cathi hanauer
Cathi Hanauer is the author of two novels, Sweet Ruin (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2006), a Book Sense “Notable Book” about marriage, adultery, and motherhood, and My Sister’s Bones (Delacorte, 1996), an ALA “Best Book” about two teenage sisters in suburban New Jersey, one of whom develops anorexia. She is also the editor of the New York Times bestselling essay anthology The Bitch in the House: 26 Women Tell the Truth about Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood and Marriage (William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2002), which has so far been published in fourteen countries and has been compared to the work of Betty Friedan. The Bitch in the House is a collection wherein women ages 24 to 67—single, married and divorced, mothers and non-—talk about the choices they’ve made, what’s working, and what, in this “post-feminist,” supposedly egalitarian society, is still not.
Hanauer and her work have been featured or profiled, sometimes along with that of her husband, Daniel Jones (who edited the “companion volume” to The Bitch in the House, titled The Bastard on the Couch), in The New York Times Styles section, The New York Observer, People, The Times Magazine (U.K.), The Guardian, Elle, Huffingtonpost.com, Alternet.org, and many other publications and websites. She has appeared on The Today Show, CNN’s Morning Edition, NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered, Canada AM, Boston ABC-TV’s Chronicle, the BBC’s Outlook, and numerous other television and radio shows. She has spoken nationwide from Barnard College to the Marin County Day School Book Fair to the Time Warner Women’s Network about “work-life balance,” marriage, monogamy, and infidelity, the trials and joys of being a working mother, and other similar issues. Perhaps gratuitously, she can’t help adding that USA Today recently called her 6-year-old character from Sweet Ruin “one of the best-written children in recent fiction.”
The success of The Bitch in the House and The Bastard on the Couch led the New York Times Styles Section editor to ask Hanauer and Jones to launch a weekly essay column in Sunday Styles, the now popular column, “Modern Love.” Hanauer has written articles, essays, fiction, and/or reviews for magazines including Elle, O—The Oprah Magazine, Parenting, Glamour, Child, Mirabella, Mademoiselle, Seventeen, and others. She was the monthly books columnist for both Glamour and Mademoiselle and was the monthly relationships advice columnist for Seventeen for seven years. She and her husband currently write the “Double Edge” column in Tango and serve as relationship consultants for iVillage.
Hanauer is currently at work on several projects in between carting her children to kung fu and ballet.
