ERICA ABEEL, AUTHOR of THE COMMUNE

Adelaide Books will publish THE COMMUNE, a new novel by bestselling author Erica Abeel on July 4, 2021.

Erica Abeel is a novelist, journalist, film critic, and academic.  She has published six books.  They include

-- Wild Girls, a novel

-- Conscience Point, a novel

-- Women Like Us, a novel, Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

-- Only When I Laugh, auto-fiction

Her current novel The Commune is a comic satire and roman a clef that takes us inside the Hamptons commune populated by the newly liberated women present at the creation of the seminal 1970 Women's March for Equality.  The Commune’s pioneering feminists can talk the talk, but find themselves whipsawed between the bold new ideals of the women’s movement and the powerful tug of the past – and therein lies drama.

Based in New York and East Hampton, Erica frequently writes about women rebels of the 50s who defy their repressive period to chart their own course – a good decade before the upheavals of the 60s and second-wave feminism.  This makes them, in her view, true heroines.  Wild Girls, her most recent novel, was featured in Oprah magazine’s January 2017 “10 Titles to Pick Up Now,” and touted as a “libidinous period novel [that] follows three budding feminists through an elite women’s college, the New York art scene, and Allen Ginsberg’s bed, as they redefine womanhood for themselves and future generations.”

Erica’s journalism serves as vehicle for her wide-ranging interests.  She wrote the "Hers" column for the New York Times, personal essays which subsequently appeared in her collection I’ll Call you Tomorrow and Other Lies Between Men and Women.  Her book reviews and articles on “the sexes” have appeared in major national publications, including the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Esquire, and Ms.

Abeel is also a film critic.  Her entertainment pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Indiewire, and Huffington Post.  She was thrilled to participate in the great sprocket-fest that is the Cannes Film Festival and feels privileged to have interviewed some of the great auteurs of contemporary cinema.  She has also covered the Toronto and New York film festivals for Indiewire and the Huffington Post, zeroing in on the evolving portrayal of women in cinema.   

A former dancer, Abeel majored in dance at Sarah Lawrence College at a time when few colleges credited the performing arts as serious subjects of study.  In the early 60s she lived in Paris, studied at the Sorbonne, became fluent in French.  Her novel Wild Girls recreates “the scene” with Allen Ginsberg and others of the Beat Generation who lived in Paris at the infamous “Beat Hotel.”  Wild Girls explores the joys and trials of rooming with Yoko Ono in New York, as Yoko was beginning her ascent in the avant-garde. 

Erica holds a Ph.D in 19th-century French literature from Columbia University.  After teaching at Barnard College, she joined the faculty of the City University of New York where she is Professor Emeritus of French.  Both her fiction and journalism are suffused with her appreciation and love of France.  She feels that her training as a dancer and a scholar has given her the discipline needed for the long slog of writing a novel.  Erica is a decades-long devotee of Pilates, and likes to hit “the zone” on swims in the bays around East Hampton.  Most of all she cherishes time with her family.

Erica is active on social media.  She keeps a website at ericaabeel.com, and frequently posts on Twitter, Facebook, and her Facebook Author site.

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1 comments

  • Patricia Chute 01:05 PM

    I am eager to read “The Commune”

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