Rachel Kauder Nalebuff: On Creating Community Through Shared Experiences

Rachel Kauder Nalebuff is the editor of the forthcoming Our Red Book (Simon & Schuster, 2022) and of the New York Times best-selling My Little Red Book (Hachette, 2009). She co-edited The Feminist Utopia Project (Feminist Press, 2015) with Alexandra Brodsky.

Her book Stages (Thick Press, 2020) is a hybrid collection of writing and interviews with end-of-life care workers that “feels truly revolutionary, in both form and in content” (Elif Batuman). She teaches drama at senior centers and nonfiction writing at Yale University. Find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

In this post, Rachel discusses the lifelong passion and process of editing the new nonfiction book, Our Red Book, her hope for readers, and more!

Name: Rachel Kauder Nalebuff
Literary agent: Susan Ginsburg
Book title: Our Red Book
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Release date: November 1, 2022
Genre/category: Nonfiction
Previous titles: Stages: on Working, Dying, and Feeling, The Feminist Utopia Project (co-edited with Alexandra Brodsky), My Little Red Book (editor)
Elevator pitch for the book: Our Red Book takes us through stories of first periods, last periods, missing periods, and everything about menstruation that you wish you’d been told. Weaving together over 80 powerful voices—from teenagers, midwives, Indigenous scholars, Olympic athletes, incarcerated writers, disoriented fathers, elected leaders who fought to make period products free, friends transitioning genders together, grandmothers, and lovers—the book invites us on a collective journey of growth and change, with Rachel’s own voice as a guide.

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As a teenager, I collected stories of people’s first periods in my community as a way to create a resource that I wish I’d had. That became a book called My Little Red Book. It offered young readers a sense of being encircled by loved ones and older generations who had gone through the same coming-of-age experience (though of course, everyone’s experience was very different!).

Since finishing that book 15 years ago, I’ve become an adult and started hearing more complex kinds of stories. I started seeing how the silence that begins when we learn (or don’t learn) about menstruation floods into the rest of our lives and grows into deeper shames, misinformation, and fear. Stories about menstruation are often tangled up with life’s stickiest, richest subjects— cultural inheritance, intimacy, family, aging, illness, gender, parenthood, trauma as it lives in the body, redefining oneself and the world we want to live in. By talking about menstruation, you pull at other threads. And yet, most of these profound stories remain untold.

With this collection, I also wanted to reach across the aisle and invite men and folks across the gender spectrum to feel welcomed into the conversation, since we are all intimately affected and connected to this aspect of the human experience.

And then, in a bigger sense, in the past decade, we’ve moved from a culture in which talking about periods felt fringe to one where the MTA features cheeky ads for menstrual care products. At the same time, reproductive rights have progressively been eroded. It was against this dizzying backdrop that I wanted to go back to the basics: Listening to human accounts that reveal the wonder, the sublimity, and the pains associated with bleeding and the complete unknowability of anyone else’s body.

In one sense, I’ve been working on this book since I got my first period, so, for 20 years. In another sense, it’s been three generations in the making since my great aunt got her first period while fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland. Hers was the first story I heard that I knew needed to be written down and shared. In another sense, I’ve been working on it intensively as an editor for three years.

I learned to surrender. When I was putting the book together, I had thought about trying to fill gaps in terms of what stories around menstruation have yet to be widely shared. And yet, there is no way you can hear everything! And there is no straightforward way to ask strangers to share their most intimate testimonies.

I often wrote personal letters and thanked writers and artists for what their work opened up in me. Many of those letters, even unanswered, were an important part of the process that have no trace in the book, yet feel important, in some karmic way.

I tried many other ways to create Our Red Book before I found its form. At first I thought it would be a collection of essays. Then I thought it should be oral histories gathered through word of mouth. But I had little control over how, often astounding, stories came my way.

A teacher pointed me to her student who then pointed me to their best friend, who they had transitioned genders alongside, and wanted to interview. An artist I admire wanted to interview her partner about the way he raised his teenage daughter with a culture of open dialogue. I was just along for the ride and eventually realized I needed to tell the story of how stories came my way.

I have an almost theatrical narratorial presence throughout the book now, which I hadn’t originally envisioned, but that serves as a kind of backing for a quilt of stories. Ultimately, I found this to be the best way to speak to the reader from a human place. I hope it feels like we are in the kitchen together late at night.

I hope readers find themselves in one of the book’s many stories, and I hope they also feel expanded. I hope it invites us to speak with more intimacy and vulnerability.

I am saying this as much for myself as for anyone else:

How boring it would be if, as we were writing, we understood exactly what we were doing and what it would turn into!

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