Loose Woman: my odyssey from lost to found

Written by Beth Kaplan

Narrated by Beth Kaplan

Loose Woman tells of the life-changing year, 1979, when Beth Kaplan, a successful young actress, surprised herself by agreeing to live and work with a group of intellectually disabled men in a community in France. In this candid, sometimes hilarious memoir, she leaves behind a theatre scene that’s rife with drugs, sex, and unsuitable men to embark on an extraordinary odyssey of self-discovery and redemption. 

Kaplan brings to life the late seventies, when feminism and sexual liberation were ascendant, and a single woman had to come to terms with what this new kind of freedom meant. Long before the #MeToo movement, she offers an intimate view of the triumphs and miseries of a woman in the acting profession and her struggle to emerge from the shadow of a controlling and abusive director and a domineering father.

Loose Woman illuminates how, with the help of her intellectually disabled French housemates, a gifted, damaged young woman begins, at last, to trust and forgive herself, to live loosely, and to set off in a surprising new direction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Iguana Books
• Release date: Dec 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781662289514

Beth Kaplan

Beth Kaplan began her work as a professional actress and left the stage at thirty to earn an MFA in creative writing at University of British Columbia. She has been teaching memoir and personal essay writing at Ryerson University since 1994 and since 2007 also at the University of Toronto, where recently she was given the Excellence in Teaching award. Her personal essays have appeared in newspapers and magazines and on CBC Radio. She is the author of Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin (University of Syracuse Press), a biography of her great-grandfather, and the Sixties memoir All My Loving: Coming of Age with Paul McCartney in Paris (BPS Books).