Ganahl, Jane

PERSONAL:

Divorced; children: one.

ADDRESSES:

Home—CA. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco, CA, journalist; San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco, journalist. Cofounder, Litquake Literary Festival, San Francisco, CA.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) Single Woman of a Certain Age: 29 Women Writers on the Unmarried Midlife—Romantic Escapades, Heavy Petting, Empty Nests, Shifting Shapes, and Serene Independence, Inner Ocean (Maui, HI), 2005.

Naked on the Page: The Misadventures of My Unmarried Midlife (memoir), Viking (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to Salon.com and Rolling Stone. Author of column "Single Minded" for the San Francisco Chronicle.

SIDELIGHTS:

When journalist Jane Ganahl reached her forties and found her love life at an impasse, the twice-divorced mother turned to writing as an outlet. She began contributing a regular column to a local newspaper and set to work collecting essays from middle-aged women experiencing both angst and fulfillment in their single lives. The result was the compilation Single Woman of a Certain Age: 29 Women Writers on the Unmarried Midlife—Romantic Escapades, Heavy Petting, Empty Nests, Shifting Shapes, and Serene Independence. Library Journal reviewer Audrey Snowden described the book as "uniformly well written" and "sure to appeal to its older female target audience." A critic for Small Press Bookwatch considered it a "thoughtful and thought-provoking reading."

Ganahl next produced the memoir Naked on the Page: The Misadventures of My Unmarried Midlife. The book includes her thoughts on casual dating, finding true love, coming to terms with her aging body, and her impending fiftieth birthday. Deirdre Donahue, reviewing the book for USA Today Online, remarked that "Ganahl refuses to let men and an age-obsessed culture define her sexuality." Although Seattle Post-Intelligencer critic John Marshall took exception to the author's use of creative license (she admits in the book's endnotes to some fictionalization of her story), he applauded her writing skills: "Ganahl captures so many of the conflicted feelings of being single at midlife, the yearning for a relationship versus the delights and solaces of being on one's own with few compromises required." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly described her writing as "sassy, fiery," and pointed in particular to the descriptions of her native San Francisco, "a character as alive and fully developed as any in the book."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Ganahl, Jane, Naked on the Page: The Misadventures of My Unmarried Midlife, Viking (New York, NY), 2007.

PERIODICALS

Library Journal, October 1, 2005, Audrey Snowden, review of Single Woman of a Certain Age: 29 Women Writers on the Unmarried Midlife—Romantic Escapades, Heavy Petting, Empty Nests, Shifting Shapes, and Serene Independence, p. 98.

Publishers Weekly, December 4, 2006, review of Naked on the Page, p. 45.

Small Press Bookwatch, February 1, 2006, review of Single Woman of a Certain Age.

ONLINE

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Online,http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/ (May 24, 2007), John Marshall, "Ganahl's Naked on the Page Memoir Is Anything but the Naked Truth."

USA Today Online,http://usatoday.com/ (March 1, 2007), Deirdre Donahue, "Naked on the Page Is Woman's Open Book," review of Naked on the Page.