“Cervix” explores the removal of her lower uterus as she is dating again, while trying to decipher the new rules (and language) of Tinder. “Heart” describes the palpitations that occur as she struggles to support her family financially. In “Breast,” she discovers a lump as she is driving her son to college, the day her now ex-husband has moved out of the family home and at a time when she did not have health insurance. In a section titled “Uterus,” she describes having hers removed within days of losing a mentor and “surrogate mother,” the writer Nora Ephron, and at the “precise hour” her teenage daughter got her period for the first time. But to corral all the aspects of a life into anatomical categories can feel jolting, as Copaken veers among catastrophic ailments, the “death spiral” of her marriage, freelance writing, an imploding media landscape, the inadequacies of health insurance, sexual harassment, Eastern wellness, her father’s death, Black Lives Matter protests and, eventually, Covid. “By objectifying my own body into its various parts - minus the misogyny - I could provide a useful microscope through which to contemplate the vastness of a whole life,” she writes. Which might feel as retro as the title in the post-gender world we are supposedly living in, but as Copaken describes it, it is an effort to turn that old patriarchal framework on its head. “Ladyparts” uses the female anatomy as a vehicle to detail the way the author’s body has failed her, and society has objectified it, throughout the course of her life. But one senses that the shock effect of this first scene is part of the point - and that, perhaps, Copaken is waiting to call you out for being unable to stomach it. We endure gory descriptions of men dying in war. Is it sexist of me to be grossed out by such an image? Maybe. (Copaken was a photographer before she was a writer should the description not do it for you, she also includes a photo.) Don’t bother googling that, but let’s just say it was a near-death experience that involved kidney-size blood clots splattering on the floor, which, in a state of shock, she collected in a Tupperware container.

If you are squeamish, you might consider skipping the first section of Deborah Copaken’s “Ladyparts,” which describes the bleeding out of her vagina due to a cuff dehiscence.

The body keeps the score author