Our Red Book

Book excerpt: A collection of essays, oral histories, and artworks about periods across all stages of life, compiled by the editor of the New York Times bestselling anthology My Little Red Book. Rachel Kauder Nalebuff was a shy teenager who was embarrassed to talk about anything relating to the body when she first heard her great aunt's harrowing story of getting her first period while on a train fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland. Rachel started wondering about other stories like this, other intimate histories that have never been told. She started asking people--friends, family members, and later, artists, writers, politicians, and public thinkers--about their own memories of menstruation and growing up. Stories poured out of people. And Rachel kept collecting these stories for more than twenty years. Our Red Book takes us through stories of first periods, last periods, missing periods, and everything about bleeding that you wish you'd been told. Weaving between eighty-three voices, including those of musician Madame Gandhi, feminist icon Gloria Steinem, graphic novelist Trinidad Escobar, Olympic skateboarder Alexis Sablone, high school students, and grandmothers, the book invites us on a collective journey of growth and change, with Rachel's own voice as a guide. Our Red Book shows us that menstruation is a lens, like birth and death, through which to understand what it means to be human. Everyone has a story. The result is a people's history of menstruation, told through an array of perspectives and identities that span the globe.