Leaving Long Island is the story of a woman whose life experience includes the loss of a child, the end of a long marriage, and the discovery of a genetic inheritance endemic to the Ashkenazi Jewish population. This is a second-half-of-life memoir without a sensational theme of surviving molestation, substance abusive or captivity, but a dead-true depiction of an ordinary life of both pain and happy second chances.
About the Author: Fern Kupfer is a memoirist, columnist, novelist and popular speaker. She is currently completing a new book, Leaving Long Island, a memoir about being a woman of a certain age (born in 1946) and surviving the loss of a child, the explosive end of a long marriage, and the discovery of a genetic inheritance (the BRCA 1 gene) endemic to the Ashkenazi Jewish population. It is a second half of life story, without any sensational theme of surviving molestation, substance abusive or captivity, but a dead-true depiction of an ordinary life of pain and happy second chances. Fern Kupfer's work has appeared in Newsweek, Newsday, Redbook, Family Circle, American Way, Woman's Day, The Women's Review of Books, Writer's Digest, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Parents magazine, Moment, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan and The Des Moines Register; her essays have been widely anthologized in college texts and popular collections including Nice Jewish Girls (Plume/Penguin), The Secret Lives of Lawfully Wedded Wives and Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers on Fairytales(Anchor/Doubleday) Her columns "Mothering " and "A Certain Age" appeared every three weeks in Newsday from 1993 - 2005. Her novels' include Surviving the Seasons (Delacorte) No Regrets (Viking) Love Lies (Simon and Schuster). A memoir, the best selling Before and After Zachariah, a story about family life with a severely disabled child is in its third edition (Academy Chicago). All of her books have been published internationally. Surviving the Seasons was nominated for the Jewish Book Award. Fern Kupfer has been a public speaker for family advocacy and special needs children, lecturing all over the United States at conferences, hospitals and schools. She has appeared on Good Morning America and has been interviewed by Oprah Winfry. Until her retirement from the creative writing program at Iowa State in 2011, she was a tenured professor, teaching creative writing and magazine writing at Iowa State University. She is married to the Lebanese-American writer Joseph Geha. Their family combines step-children and grandchildren, middle-easterners, mid-westerners, gentiles and Jews. They live in the middle of the country - Iowa - where the corn is high, the political caucus begins, families grow hearty and the people are almost always nice.