Robin Marantz Henig

I wrote an article that went viral in 2010, "What Is It About 20-Somethings?" for The New York Times Magazine, where I'm a contributing writer. It was so popular I was asked to write a book on the topic, to be out in late 2012. This time, happily, I've been writing with my younger daughter Samantha Henig, a twenty-something herself, who is now a web editor for... that very same publication, The New York Times Magazine. How's that for kismet?

The book is called TWENTYSOMETHING: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck? If you'd like to be kept abreast of the book's progress (it's due out in November 2012), check out our blog or drop us a note.

This will be my ninth book. My last book before this was Pandora’s Baby, about the early days of in vitro fertilization research, the controversy surrounding the creation of the world's first test tube baby, and the ways in which that controversy sounds a lot like the debates now taking place about reproductive options like designer babies and human cloning. The book was the focus of a television documentary that aired on American Experience on PBS in the fall of 2006. The book before that, The Monk in the Garden, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. I've won some other nice awards, too: a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, two Science in Society awards from the National Association of Science Writers, and a career achievement award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. I have also done a lot of lecturing and some teaching.

As challenging as it is, freelance writing makes for a lonely life. Luckily, I live in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York, an odd blend of quiet and lively, college town and gigantic city. In a place like this, other people, including other writers, are always right outside the door.

Now that my nest is empty, my non-writing diversions can’t focus on my two girls anymore the way it did when they were growing up and we lived in Takoma Park, a terrific, funky suburb of Washington, DC. So I walk in Riverside Park every morning for exercise, walk all over the city with my husband Jeff for fun, go to the theatre when we can afford it, read novels, go to museums, and host meetings of my writers salon, which has become my favorite part of living in New York.