A frank, wit­ty, and daz­zling­ly writ­ten mem­oir of one Jew­ish woman try­ing to keep it togeth­er while her body falls apart.

Part cri de coeur cau­tion­ary tale, part dystopi­an tragi­com­e­dy, Lady­parts is Copak­en’s irrev­er­ent and Borscht-belt humor-infused inven­to­ry of both the female body and the body politic of wom­an­hood in Amer­i­ca. With her jour­nal­ist’s eye, her nov­el­ist’s heart, and her per­former’s sense of tim­ing, she pro­vides a front­line account of one woman brought to her knees by the one-two-twelve punch of divorce, solo moth­er­hood, lack of health­care, unaf­ford­able child­care, shady land­lords, her father’s death, col­lege tuitions, sex­u­al harass­ment, cor­po­rate indif­fer­ence, ageism, sex­ism, and just plain old bad luck. Plus sev­en seri­ous ill­ness­es, one on top of the oth­er, which pro­vide the book’s nar­ra­tive skele­ton: vagi­na, uterus, breast, heart, cervix, brain, and lungs. She keeps bounc­ing back from each bum body part and find­ing the black humor in every set­back, but in her strug­gle to sur­vive a steep plunge off the mid­dle-class lad­der, she is sud­den­ly awok­en to what it means to have no safe­ty net.