Caitlin Flanagan
Caitlin Flanagan began her
magazine-writing career, in 2001, with a series of extended book reviews
about the conflicts at the very heart of modern life�specifically,
modern domestic life as it is lived by professional-class women. Flanagan
has quickly established herself as a highly entertaining social critic unafraid
to take on self-indulgence and political correctness, and her reviews provide
penetrating and witheringly funny observations about the sexes and their
discontents.
Flanagan's Atlantic articles have been named as finalists for the National Magazine Award five times, and her essay "Confessions of a Prep School College Counselor," which ran in September 2001, was included in the 2002 compilation of Best American Magazine Writing. Her work has also been included in Best American Essays 2003 and Best American Magazine Writing 2003. She is the author of the book To Hell with All That—an exploration, based on her Atlantic articles, of the lives of modern women.
Born and raised in Berkeley, California, Flanagan earned a B.A. and an M.A. in Art History from the University of Virginia. She now lives in California, where she spends her time writing and raising twins.
Recent articles by Caitlin Flanagan
Cultivating Failure
How school gardens are cheating our most vulnerable students.
Sex and the Married Man
How Helen Gurley Brown inspired a generation of home-wreckers, and brought down John Edwards.
The Passion of Alec Baldwin
The blustering actor’s memoir of divorce is really a love letter to his daughter.
What Girls Want
A series of vampire novels illuminates the complexities of female adolescent desire. [Web only: Video: "Twilight—a Review"]
Girl, Interrupted
How Patty Hearst’s kidnapping reflected and ravaged American culture in the 1970s.
The Uses of Enchantment
Barbara Walters got the story by giving her subjects what they wanted.
A Woman’s Place
Katie Couric’s long day’s journey into evening.
No Girlfriend of Mine
One woman’s estrangement from Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Babes in the Woods
Anybody could be tracking your children online. Even me.
The Sanguine Sex
Abortion and the bloodiness of being female.
The Age of Innocence
When girls leave home for college, it affects them far more deeply than it does boys—and there’s no way parents can protect them once they go.
How To Treat the Help?
The age-old problem of the rich has become the brand-new problem of the middle class.
Are You There God? It's Me, Monica
How nice girls got so casual about oral sex.
Boys Will Be Boys
The latest in the ever growing field of "You go, girl!" studies.
How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement
Dispatches from the nanny wars.
Do as I Say
Dr. Laura's counsel is caustic and oftentimes hypocritical, but it is also persuasive.
The Lonely Passion
A Sex and the City writer looks for love.
Sticking Together
Coming (slowly) of age in the Big City.
Housewife Confidential
A tribute to the old-fashioned housewife, and to Erma Bombeck, her champion and guide.
The Wifely Duty
Marriage used to provide access to sex. Now it provides access to celibacy.
The Mother Load
Many of today's working mothers have upper-middle class lifestyles but middle-class aspirations.
Home Alone
It's all too easy to deride Martha Stewart, but the attacks on her often point up how much there is to admire.
What Price Valor?
Bravura displays of reproductive technology may shortchange the children.
Leaving It to the Professionals
Clearing away clutter is no substitute for keeping house
Costumes from Camelot
Jacqueline Kennedy's true style lay in the ways she allied her femininity with her tremendous strength.
Confessions of a Prep School College Counselor
Our author looks at books about college admissions—and at the unexamined prejudices fueling the "elite" college admissions frenzy.
The Tabloid Habit
Relentless celebrity coverage is a phenomenon as old as the movies.
The Wedding Merchants
Marriage is in Chapter Eleven, but the white wedding is in the black.