The Penguin Speakers Bureau

In her own words…

When I was sixty years old, I wrote a book for my children. I have five children. They never thought I had a life before I was their mother. Sometimes even I wondered.

I didn’t know it but a friend sent a copy of my book to a publisher. The publisher called me and said she wanted to publish my book and would give me an advance that had a comma in it. I think I fainted.

The book was Love, Loss, and What I Wore. It was a memoir that told about growing up in Manhattan in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s through the clothes I wore. It sold over 100,000 copies.

At sixty-two, my second book, What We Do for Love, was published. It’s about having the expectation of finding Prince Charming when you’re young (after all, in the movies when I was growing up everybody found true love—Minnie Mouse found Mickey, Ginger Rogers found Fred Astaire, Lauren Bacall found Bogey, and one enchanted evening Mary Martin found Enzo Pinza across a crowded room).

At sixty-five, my third book, Mother of the Bride: The Dream, the Reality, the Search for a Perfect Dress, was published. It’s about a year of planning a daughter’s wedding, and the mother-daughter relationship. Childbirth is a lot easier than being mother-of-the-bride.

At seventy, my fourth book, Makeovers at the Beauty Counter of Happiness, was published, which included letters (unsent) to Gwyneth Paltrow, Sarah Jessica Parker, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Mother Teresa, and to my eleven-year-old granddaughter.

Algonquin Books has published all of my books. Staying with one publisher and one editor is unusual these days. I’ve been lucky.

I have had a major review in The New York Times, and have received very positive reviews on everything from MTV to Modern Maturity. I’ve been on Oprah, and my books have been translated into French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, and other languages I can’t speak.

I have written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Ladies’ Home Journal, Victoria magazine, Weight Watchers magazine, and many others. I have contributed essays to Crown Books for young girls, and taught seminars at the Teen Arts Festival at the College of New Jersey.

I‘ve gone on four national book tours and spoken to hundreds of women’s groups throughout the country. I have been the keynote speaker at fundraisers for as many as 1,000 people, though I am just as happy speaking to women’s book clubs with ten members.

I illustrate all of my books and show women how to write their own visual-verbal memoirs.

If somebody had told me all these things would happen to me after sixty, I would have told them to stop smoking whatever they were smoking.

Check out Ilene Beckerman’s website here.