MY LITTLE RED BOOK is a hardback anthology of first menstruation stories from women and girls of all ages, races, faiths and cultural backgrounds. Collected over four years the diverse stories range from the light-hearted to the heart-stopping and is the first book to use women's own words to both demystify and celebrate this universal female rite of passgae at the same. Contributors include Gloria Steinem (her classic essay 'If Men Could Menstruate'), Joyce Maynard, Maxine Kumin, Tonya Hurley, Patty Marx, Megan McCafferty, Tamora Pearce, Cecily von Ziegesar, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Jennifer Baumgardner and Sara Hickman, among others.
Support, entertainment, and a starting point for discussion for mothers and daughters everywhere. It is a book every girl should have. Period.
Reviews
'Original yet universal, artistic yet practical, and likely to sell briskly for centuries to come…it is hard to imagine any woman, from the most straitlaced and body-denying to the most uninhibited and body-embracing, who will not read right through it with pure enjoyment, small flashes of recognition and the urge to buy it for every female pre-teen in sight' - NEW YORK TIMES
'The authors’ candor and accessibility and the extensive appended resource sections make this an obvious choice for teens, while parents dreaming of nurturing, celebratory discussions will be reminded to respect their daughters’ responses, even if, as reported in one essay, the response is: “Promise you won’t tell Dad, and, geez, no Rite of Passage party, ok?” A rich, welcome collection for readers of various ages and, perhaps surprisingly, more than one gender.' --Gillian Engberg, Booklist
'After finishing these recollections by women of their first menstrual period, readers cannot help but be struck by three things: what a defining moment it was, how far society has come, and how often Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (Yearling, 1970) is mentioned as a source of information and comfort. The 18-year-old editor recounts her story of her 12-year-old self caught unaware while waterskiing and dropped off, by her embarrassed grandfather, at a pharmacy where she found herself searching for sanitary products in an aisle featuring incontinence supplies. The women queried are as well known as Erika Jong and as little known as Nalebuff's younger sister. The earliest recollection is Henrietta Wittenberg's, remembering in her 100th year, of her worry in 1916 about sitting on a man's lap. The most recent story, from 2008, is Jacquelyn Mitchard's memory of getting the "curse" and her contrastingly comforting words to her sixth-grade daughter. Some memories are magical (snorkeling with a dolphin in the Caribbean Sea); some are heart wrenching (a Holocaust survivor's escape from a Nazi strip search); others embarrassing at the time but humorous in retrospect. For most female readers, the stories will be poignantly familiar. The subject index is particularly informative and includes YA authors and "Unusual Customs." A glossary of euphemisms is fun and enlightening, and the bibliography contains health resources, fiction and nonfiction, and informative Web sites.-Jackie Gropmann' - School Library Journal
About the Author
RACHEL KAUDER-NALEBUFF is a recent graduate of Choate Rosemary Hall, and will soon attend Yale University. In Choate's annual Pratt-Packard oratory contest, she adapted her own first-period experience and other stories from MY LITTLE RED BOOK to an audience of 1,000 classmates. The inspiration to begin collecting first period stories arose out of a conversation with her mother.
