Fern Kupfer is a memoirist, columnist, novelist and popular speaker. Her latest book, Leaving Long Island, is 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), and Love Lies (Simon and Schuster).
Fern lives and works in Ames, Iowa. For other books by Fern, please go to her books page.
For speaking engagements and book readings please use the contact page.
To keep up with news by and about Fern go to her Facebook page.