GO ARBOREAL Portland Monthly features upcoming novel To Catch What Falls and Duff Dinners in cover story 63 Things Every Portlander Must Do.
IRON MAIDENS named as finalist for 2006 Oregon Book Awards. Judge Jonathan Yardley writes “Not long out of college and trying to figure out what to do with her life, Kristin Kaye found herself writing and directing a Broadway show about female bodybuilders. In telling the tale of this show and the women who were in its cast, she persuades us of their humanity while at the same time showing the less appealing aspects of women’s bodybuilding. In Iron Maidens, Kaye tells her own story honestly and amusingly, but always keeps the bodybuilders at the center of the stage.”
The New Yorker’s review of the original Celebration
Utne magazine named IRON MAIDENS one of “five new titles for women who resist easy definition” in Feb. 2006. (575 KB)
Author’s experiences give her first book some muscle
by Jeff Baker for The Oregonian
In 1993, Kristin Kaye was a drama-school graduate and “self-proclaimed performance artist” who needed a job. She saw an ad in The Village Voice for an administrative assistant on an “exciting women’s project.” She answered the ad and found the subject for her first book…
When Portland-based author and performer Kristin Kaye got the opportunity to direct a one-night-only New York theater extravaganza featuring a cadre of professional female bodybuilders, she knew she was in for a wild ride. But Kaye had no idea that her Broadway debut would turn into the muscle- and hairspray-filled drama she chronicled in her new book, Iron Maidens: The Celebration of the Most Awesome Female Muscle in the World…
Iron Maidens Makes Weight by Kat Ricker
First-rate author Kristin Kaye deserves admiration for her immense, unflinching bravery in writing Iron Maidens: The Celebration of the Most Awesome Female Muscle in the World. With deft writing skill and gripping momentum, she bared her evolving personal and professional raw self, exposing every hope, every delusion, misjudgment, rationalization and grief in the rarified experience of her first big break – writing and directing a Broadway show. The pain of her tough and bizarre journey is exquisite, and yet she unfolds the tale in such an engaging way that she allows you to laugh at it all, even eggs you on with her wounds gaping open…On top of this steady, jading, black humorist perspective is an equally naked stare into the wild world of professional female bodybuilding…
Kristin Kaye was a wide-eyed 23 year-old fresh out of drama school in 1993 when she responded to a classified ad that read: “administrative assistant wanted for exciting women’s project.” What she didn’t know at the time was that the project was a Broadway show entitled “The Celebration of the Most Awesome Female Muscle in the World,” the brainchild of bodybuilder and writer Laurie Fierstein. Kaye ended up getting hired as the show’s director and had just six weeks to put it together. Iron Maidens is her funny, readable account of what followed: a regular girl’s journey into the world of women’s bodybuilding…
