Our Red Book: Intimate Histories of Periods, Growing, and Changing

A collection of essays, oral histories, and artworks about periods across all stages of life, gathered by the editor of the New York Times bestselling anthology My Little Red Book.

After hearing a harrowing coming-of-age story from her great aunt, Rachel Kauder Nalebuff started gathering stories about menstruation in her family that had never been told. What began as an oral history project quickly snowballed: Rachel heard from family and friends, and then from strangers—writers, experts, community leaders, activists, young people, and other visionaries—about the most intimate physical transformations in their lives.

Our Red Book takes us through stories of first periods, last periods, missing periods, and everything about bleeding that people wish they had been told. Weaving together 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, grandmothers, and lovers—the book invites us on a collective journey of growth and change, with Rachel’s own voice as a guide.

The result is a people’s history of menstruation, told through an array of perspectives and identities that span the globe. Gathered over twenty years, the collection takes stock of our shifting relationships to family, cultural inheritance, gender, aging, and liberation.

Rachel Kauder Nalebuff is a writer working at the intersection of oral history, performance, and public health. Her newest book is Our Red Book: Intimate Histories of Periods, Growing, and Changing. She is the author of Stages: on Dying, Working, and Feeling; coeditor of The Feminist Utopia Project; and the editor of the New York Times bestselling My Little Red Book. She teaches nonfiction writing at Yale University.