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Katie Roiphe (born July 13, 1968) is an American author and journalist. She is best known as the author of the non-fiction book (1993). She is also the author of Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End (1997), and the 2007 study of writers and marriage, Uncommon Arrangements. Her 2001 novel Still She Haunts Me is an imagining of the relationship between Charles Dodgson (known as Lewis Carroll) and Alice Liddell, the real-life model for Dodgson's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She is also known for allegedly planning to name the creator of the Shitty Media Men list in an article for Harper's Magazine.
In 2001, Roiphe married attorney Harry Chernoff in a Judaism ceremony in Amagansett, New York. They had one daughter, Violet; they separated in 2005 (the year Roiphe's father died), and later divorced.
She subsequently had a son, and has defended being a single mother.
In the review for The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt praised the book, calling it a "Book of the Times" and stating, "It is courageous of Ms. Roiphe to speak out against the herd ideas that campus life typically encourages." Writing for The New Yorker, Katha Pollitt gave the book a negative review, calling it "a careless and irresponsible performance, poorly argued and full of misrepresentations, slapdash research, and gossip." Pollitt's review was in turn criticized by Christina Hoff Sommers in Who Stole Feminism? (1994). The Morning After received a positive response from Camille Paglia, who called it "an eloquent, thoughtful, finely argued book that was savaged from coast to coast by shallow, dishonest feminist book reviewers".
In 2007, Roiphe published Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939. Donna Seaman, in the trade publication Booklist, gave the book a starred review, writing, "Roiphe, inspired aesthetically and philosophically by the writings and lives of these social and artistic pioneers, offers sophisticated psychological, sexual, and social analysis, fashioning uncommonly affecting portraits of uncommon men and women." In The New York Times, the editor and critic Tina Brown called it "the perfect bedside book for an age like our own, when everything is known and nothing is understood." In The New York Observer, Alexandra Jacobs conceded "Katie haters will be sorry to hear that it’s very absorbing. The author has done something constructive, for a change, with her contempt for the contemporary age’s lily-livered female psyche..."Alexandra Jacobs, Roiphe Escapes From Herself, Delves Into Edwardian Marriages , The New York Observer, June 26, 2007. Roiphe responded to some of her critics in an essay in Slate including Gawker.
In 2012, Roiphe published the essay collection In Praise of Messy Lives. In The New York Times, critic Dwight Garner praised the book, writing, "I’ve begun recommending it to people, particularly to would-be writers, explaining that Ms. Roiphe’s are how you want your essays to sound: lean and literate, not unlike Orwell’s, with a frightening ratio of velocity to torque.... Among Ms. Roiphe’s gifts is one for brevity. She lingers long enough to make her points, and no longer. If I could condense my opinion of her new book onto a T-shirt, that Beefy-T would read: 'Team Roiphe.'"
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