Deborah Copaken Kogan has a new novel – “The Red Book” – about four midlife women

Harvard magazine writes about the photographer and author’s novelistic venture.

As Nell Porter Brown writes:

“Reading The Red Book, an often funny and entertaining Harvard-inspired confection, is a bit like watching the women of Sex and The City return for their twentieth college reunion. Except we don’t get to see their splashy designer outfits. The new novel by Deborah Copaken Kogan ’88 chronicles the midlife stories of four fictitious friends from the class of 1989 as problems in their messy lives of privilege come to a head during a long weekend in Cambridge. (The title comes from the nickname for the anniversary books put out by the Class Report Office—part of the Harvard Alumni Association —every five years, in conjunction with class reunions.)

One unhappily married character, a dabbling artist questioning her sexual identity, is arrested for a mountain of unpaid parking tickets from her undergraduate years. A Vietnamese adoptee and international journalist mourns the death of her mother, while grappling with a partner’s infidelity. A third roommate tends perfectly to four children in place of her once-promising acting career. And their biracial friend, raised in a hippie commune in California, hopes to solve her infertility problems with the unwitting aid of her once Adonis-like freshman-year boyfriend (whose WASP parents rejected her so long ago). Oh, and she was also recently laid off from Lehman Brothers.”