Hello and welcome.
I have the great fortune to sit on both sides of the desk as writer and editor/publisher. This website focuses on my work as an author. My next book concerns my preoccupation with Jean Cocteau. Ever since I stumbled across his work in 1983, at the impressionable age of twenty-two, he has accompanied me on this jagged journey through life. The gist of the book is this:
By looking at the life of the poet, novelist, artist, filmmaker, choreographer, enfant terrible, Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), his profound and lasting influence on modern art in many of its forms, his difficult but lived-out-loud relationship with his sexuality and the paradox of his public persona, I’m exploring how lives past create a palimpsest over which we layer our own. Rather than effacing these past lives, we build upon them. The result is an enrichment of both ours and theirs, an incarnate memorial planted in our hearts and minds, and one that animates our lived experience. This celebration of someone whose life crosses the time-space continuum to touch our own can be as powerful as those we live among. In my adult lifelong experience, Cocteau has been my intimate. Born of another time, place, and milieu entirely, he lives in my heart alongside my closest friends and family and is cherished as intensely. He doesn’t have a clue about my life and that’s okay. Cocteau, however, was prescient—or perhaps just cosmically dogged—as his parting words, engraved on his stone crypt in a restored 12thcentury basilica outside of Paris in Milly-la-forêt: Je reste avec vous, or “I stay with you.” His words, for me, are truer than true.
This new book is a hybrid memoir/bio—I’m not really sure what to call it—about Cocteau, about some crazy shit in my own life and about the ways in which Cocteau has been my longest-lasting love affair.
I’ll update news on the book as I go along, but in the meantime, here’s an official author bio:
Karen Rinaldi is the author of two published books, the non-fiction, It’s Great to Suck at Something: The Unexpected Joy of Wiping Out and What It Can Teach Us About Patience, Resilience, and the Stuff That Really Matters (Atria, May 2019) and the novel The End of Men, (Perennial, April 2017.) The feature film Maggie’s Plan, directed by Rebecca Miller and starring Julianne Moore, Greta Gerwig, and Ethan Hawke is based on her original story, borne out of that novel. Maggie’s Plan is now being adapted for the London stage. Rinaldi’s essays have appeared in the New York Times, Time, Oprah.com, Glamour, Parents Magazine, LitHub, among others. Her piece on Hawaiian surfing legend Rell Sunn is featured in the anthology Surfer Stories (Regalo Press, 2025). Rinaldi’s work has been covered in the media by the Wall Street Journal, CNN, The Globe and Mail, NYC Public Radio, to name a few, and on various podcasts and radio shows. Her books have been translated into Italian, Spanish, German, Korean, Portuguese, Taiwanese Mandarin, and Indonesian.
Rinaldi has also been a publishing executive for over three decades. Currently SVP, Executive Editor in the Harper Division at HarperCollins, Rinaldi joined the company in 2012 as founder and publisher of the Harper Wave imprint. Prior to her tenure at HarperCollins, Rinaldi was Managing Director and Publisher of BloomsburyUS, which she joined at its inception in 1999 and served on the Bloomsbury PLC Group Operating Board from 2004 to 2008. From 2008 to 2011, Rinaldi was Publisher and General Manager of Rodale Books. Rinaldi has edited and published across a wide range of categories, from the literary to the prescriptive. She lives in Brooklyn and in the Hudson River Valley.
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