I left my hometown of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, at age 18 to attend university in Manhattan, where I started my career in journalism and the media. Since then, I’ve lived in Berlin, Germany; Hong Kong; and now Copenhagen, Denmark, generally moving to advance my career and explore new worlds. Whenever you move to a new place and establish yourself in a new culture, there’s always a learning curve. Helping other women (and men!) adapt to their new environment is why I started the “How to Live in Denmark” podcast, which has now been running for more than 10 years.
I wrote
How to Work in Denmark: Tips on Finding a Job, Succeeding at Work, and Understanding your Danish boss
This trilogy about a girl who leaves a small New England town to work at a glossy magazine in Manhattan in the 1950s helped me understand the roots of the 1960s feminist culture. Men, including the man she ultimately marries, are simply seen as the authority based on their gender.
I’ll never forget the scene where the protagonist is trying desperately to have a baby, goes to a replacement doctor during summer vacation, and finds out that her primary doctor has been giving her birth control pills disguised as other prescription medicine. “I didn’t think you were ready to be a mother,” the primary doctor tells her later.
The New York Times said that Mary Cantwell, in telling the story of her life, "Makes you discover yourself." Now, gathered in a single volume, are her three beautifully etched, unflinchingly honest memoirs. Cantwell's first book, American Girl, evoked the delights of her youth in a small New England town; her second, Manhattan, When I Was Young, told of her blossoming career in New York, her marriage and her children, and that marriage's decline. Speaking with Strangers finds Cantwell alone, a single mother struggling in the big city, bereft of her husband but bolstered by friends, thriving in her career…
This rare novel by the TV writer Gail Parent is a broad, almost slapstick comedy about a proudly Jewish girl in the 1970s who moves from Long Island in Manhattan in her bid to find Mr. Right.
“As a graduation present, I was offered either a nose job or a fur coat. I took the fur coat with a high collar.” Mr. Right proves elusive as Sheila makes her way through the swinging singles scene of the time, and she ends up finding a different kind of success as a teacher.
I’ve probably read this book a dozen times and still find it very funny – although, trigger warning, it’s written in the form of an extended suicide note. (She changes her mind.)
A series of amusing events occurs when a thirty-year-old Jewish woman tries to fulfill her parents' wishes and find a husband, in a new edition of the best-selling novel from the 1970s. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
This book is so light-as-air that I’ve read it several times and forgotten it entirely in between readings, so it’s always new again. Two 21-year-old friends from Iowa travel to New York City for a summer working at Tiffany’s in 1945, just as World War II is ending. It’s a summer of jewelry, dating, Broadway shows, riding on open-top buses, and a plane that crashes into the Empire State Building.
It’s the perfect beach read; you can probably polish it off in one sun-drenched afternoon.
New York City, 1945. Marjorie Jacobson and her best friend, Marty Garrett, arrive fresh from the Kappa house at the University of Iowa hoping to find summer positions as shopgirls. Turned away from the top department stores, they miraculously find jobs as pages at Tiffany & Co., becoming the first women to ever work on the sales floor, a diamond-filled day job replete with Tiffany-blue shirtwaist dresses from Bonwit Teller's—and the envy of all their friends.
Looking back on that magical time in her life, Marjorie takes us back to when she and Marty rubbed elbows with the rich and…
One of the reasons I like this book is because the author is a man writing about a woman’s inner thoughts and, unusually, doing a very good job.
The time and place: London, the 1890s. Single women are known as “the odd women,” the leftovers. Dr. Rhoda Nunn starts a school to train these women in secretarial skills (back then, most secretaries were men) so that they won’t be dependent on relatives or forced into unhappy marriages. Rhoda herself is proudly unmarried and independent – until she meets an absolutely wonderful man. Will she give up her advocacy for “odd women” and marry the man she loves?
(Warning: this book is out of copyright, so shoddy rip-offs are being sold on Amazon. Make sure you get a legit copy.)
`there are half a million more women than men in this unhappy country of ours . . . So many odd women - no making a pair with them.'
The idea of the superfluity of unmarried women was one the `New Woman' novels of the 1890s sought to challenge. But in The Odd Women (1893) Gissing satirizes the prevailing literary image of the `New Woman' and makes the point that unmarried women were generally viewed less as noble and romantic figures than as `odd' and marginal in relation to the ideal of womanhood itself. Set in grimy, fog-ridden London, these…
Set in the 1980s and 1990s, this memoir reminded me of the Manhattan media world I grew up in – before social media when glossy magazines and music videos were all-powerful.
The author is a suburban Jersey girl who stumbles into a job at Rolling Stone magazine back when it was able to make or break careers. She interviews celebrities, becomes a TV host, dates and breaks up with various 80s and 90s guys, and briefly loses herself in the New York City nightlife before figuring out that, hey, she really is just a Jersey girl who loves her mom and enjoys decorating for Thanksgiving with paper turkeys from Hallmark.
The author has a gentle sense of humor about herself, which is something I think characterizes my work as well.
New Jersey in the 1980s had everything Jancee Dunn wanted: trips down the shore, Bruce Springsteen, a tantalizing array of malls. To music lover Jancee, New York City was a foreign country. So it was with bleak expectations that she submitted her résumé to Rolling Stone magazine. And before she knew it, she was backstage and behind the scenes with the most famous people in the world—hiking in Canada with Brad Pitt, snacking on Velveeta with Dolly Parton, dancing drunkenly onstage with the Beastie Boys—trading her good-girl suburban past for late nights, hipster guys, and the booze-soaked rock 'n' roll…
Working in Denmark offers a lot of advantages: excellent work-life balance, a year of parental leave for each newborn, publicly funded health care, and publicly funded university tuition. And yet there are challenges, starting with Denmark’s merciless immigration system, which can seem befuddling and cruel to anyone without an EU passport, and the Danish language, with a spoken form that is so slurred and swallowed that even people from Norway and Sweden have trouble decoding it.
My book explains how to find a job in Denmark, why it’s important to join a union even as a keyboard worker, and how to understand the “flat structure” of Danish working culture, in which even very junior employees challenge their managers.
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
Locked In Locked Out: Surviving a Brainstem Stroke
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
