These twenty-seven "hair pieces" offer up reflections and revelations about family, race, religion, ritual, culture, motherhood, politics, celebrity, what goes on in African American kitchens and at Hindu Bengali weddings, alongside stories about the influence of Jackie Kennedy, Lena Horne, Farrah Fawcett, and the Grateful Dead. Layered into these essays you'll find surprises, insights, hilarity, and the resonance of common experience. Marita Golden writes about her grief over what so many African American women still endure to obtain "good hair." Patricia Volk itemizes her seventeen hair care products, each with a price tag. Myla Goldberg tells of how ill equipped she was to tend the hair of her adopted biracial daughter. And Suleika Jaouad describes the ravages of chemotherapy and the empowerment of shaving designs onto her head.

By turns somber and funny but above all provocative, Elizabeth Benedict’s Rewriting Illness: A View of My Own is a most unconventional memoir. With wisdom, self-effacing wit, and the story-telling skills of a seasoned novelist, she brings to life her cancer diagnosis and committed hypochondria. As she discovers multiplying lumps in her armpit, she describes her initial terror, interspersed with moments of self-mocking levity as she indulges in “natural remedies,� among them chanting Tibetan mantras, drinking shots of wheat grass, and finding medicinal properties in chocolate babka. She tracks the progression of her illness from muddled diagnosis to debilitating treatment as she gathers sustenance from her family and an assortment of urbane, ironic friends, including her fearless “cancer guru.�  In brief, explosive chapters with startling titles – “Was it the Krazy Glue?� and “Not Everything Scares the Shit out of Me� – Benedict investigates existential questions: Is there a cancer personality? Can trauma be passed on generationally? Can cancer be stripped of its warlike metaphors? How do doctors’ own fears influence their comments to patients? Is there a gendered response to illness? Why isn’t illness one of literature’s great subjects? And delving into her own history, she wonders if having had children would have changed her life as a writer and hypochondriac. Post diagnosis, Benedict asks, “Which fear is worse: the fear of knowing or the reality of knowing? (164)� Throughout, Benedict’s humor, wisdom, and warmth jacket her fears, which are personal, political, and ultimately global, when the world is pitched into a pandemic. Amid weighty concerns and her all-consuming obsession with illness, her story is filled with suspense, secrets, and even the unexpected solace of silence.   

In this razor-sharp novel of marriage and divorce gone awry, Elizabeth Benedict navigates the turbulent waters of love, power, and vengeance with biting wit and penetrating insight.
When the Manhattan psychotherapist Eric Lavender meets the sexy, stylish lawyer Colleen O'Brien Golden, his bachelor life suddenly loses its long-standing appeal. Soon he moves to Scarsdale to join Colleen and finds a life of domestic bliss as a husband and father with a new baby and an adorable stepdaughter. But Eric's suburban oasis is threatened when a legal conflict of interest with Colleen turns up disturbing evidence of a hidden past.

ALMOST, Elizabeth Benedict's fourth novel, is "her most spirited to date" (New York Times Book Review). Forty-something narrator Sophy Chase has just begun a lighthearted, romantically adventurous life in New York City when she learns that her almost ex-husband has been found dead on the New England resort island where she left him just months before. Lured back to the island by feelings she thought she had left behind, Sophy must navigate treacherous emotional terrain involving her grown stepdaughters, a former lover who is now a celebrity lawyer, the mystery of her husband's death -- and her own darkest impulses.

For the first time in trade paperback, the definitive book on writing sex in fiction that is a "wonderful and handy compendium of how to write-and have fun with-sex" (Carolyn See)

Five years after it was first published, The Joy of Writing Sex remains the classic guide to writing convincing sex scenes. Elizabeth Benedict covers all the issues, from the first time, to married sex and adultery, to sex in the age of AIDS.

Her instruction, supported with examples from the works of today's most respected writers-among them, Dorothy Allison, Russell Banks, Alan Hollinghurst, Joyce Carol Oates, Carol Shields, and John Updike-focuses on crafting believable sex scenes that hinge on freshness of character, dialogue, mood, and plot.

In this revised edition, Benedict addresses the latest sexual revolution, intimacy on the Internet; adds new interviews with Edmund White, Darren Strauss, Stephen McCauley, and other writers; and updates her selections to include examples from the best fiction of the past few years.