Lynn Peril

Lynn Peril was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1985. She writes, edits and publishes Mystery Date: One Gal's Guide to Good Stuff, a zine devoted to her obsession with used books (particularly old sex and dating manuals, etiquette and self-help books and health, beauty and fashion guides) and other detritus of popular culture, especially that concerning gender-related behavioral prescriptions. Mystery Date is currently taking a well deserved hiatus, but will return some day (or so she hopes - in the meantime, visit the archives). She further explores these issues in her book, Pink Think: Becoming a Woman in Many Uneasy Lessons (W.W. Norton, 2002), a pop-culture history of the perilous path to achieving the feminine ideal.

A Pushcart-Prize-nominated writer, Ms. Peril's column, "The Museum of Femoribilia," appears in Bust magazine. Her essays and reviews have appeared in London's Guardian newspaper, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Hermenaut among other publications. Lynn Peril received her M.A. in History, with a concentration in Gender, from San Francisco State University, 1995. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, Johnny Bartlett, and two cats (well, eight if you count the ferals).