Lovingkindness

Anne Richardson Roiphe (born Anne Roth, December 25, 1935) is an American novelist, memoirist, essayist, and journalist. She was born and raised in New York City, and she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1957.

Her first novel, Digging Out (1967), was followed by Up the Sandbox! (1970), her best-known work. The satirical novel follows a college-educated young mother who is stuck in domestic routine and escapes into elaborate fantasies. It became a bestseller and was adapted into a 1972 film starring Barbra Streisand. Her later novels, including Lovingkindness (1987) and The Pursuit of Happiness (1991), continued to explore the tension between feminism, motherhood, and the wish for an independent identity.

Roiphe's writing took a more explicitly Jewish turn in the 1980s, beginning with her first nonfiction book, Generation Without Memory (1981), which reflects on Jewish identity and assimilation. Her other nonfiction includes Fruitful: A Real Mother in the Modern World (1996), and her memoirs include Epilogue (2008), about widowhood after the death of her husband, psychoanalyst Herman Roiphe, and Art and Madness, about her twenties. She also wrote for magazines such as Vogue and Redbook and had a longtime column in the New York Observer.

She lives in New York City. Her daughters Katie Roiphe and Rebecca Roiphe are also writers, and her daughter Emily Carter is a writer as well.