Pamela Haag

Pamela Haag

Essayist

Pamela Haag’s work spans a wide, and unusual, spectrum, all the way from academic scholarship to memoir. Thematically, it has consistently focused on women's issues, feminism, and American culture, but she’s also written on topics as eclectic as the effort to rebuild the lower Manhattan subway lines after 9/11, 24-hour sports radio talk shows, and the experience of class mobility.

Haag earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 1995, after graduating with Highest Honors from Swarthmore College. She’s held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and post-doctoral fellowships at both Brown and Rutgers University. As an academic she published scholarly articles and a first book, based on dissertation work, with Cornell University Press in 1999.

She became the Director of Research for the AAUW Educational Foundation, a nationalnonprofit based in Washington, DC, that advocates for girls and women. In that capacity she wrote and edited several pieces of research and was the media spokesperson for the research.
In 2002, Haag became a speechwriter on issues of public transit and transit-oriented development for the secretary of the Federal Transit Administration and, occasionally, the Secretary of Transportation.

Since 2004, she has been publishing personal and opinion essays in a variety of venues, including National Public Radio, the American Scholar, the Christian Science Monitor, Ms. magazine, the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Michigan Quarterly Review, New Haven Review, the Antioch Review and carte blanche. Haag earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in 2008, where she won the Chris White award for best essay, and was also a prizewinner in the Atlantic’s 2008 national nonfiction contest.

Haag's latest book, Marriage Confidential: The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules, released by HarperCollins in May of 2011, draws on all of these strands of Haag’s unique professional biography to create almost a new genre, a weave of academic expertise, cultural history, creativenonfiction, memoir, storytelling, interviews, and commentary.

I was reading a trade publication about industry forecasts for bathroom fixture trends some time ago (don’t ask). “Large bathrooms are in,” the experts said. It’s true. American bathrooms have […]
“Why do men marry mean girls?” Rebecca asks me. She’s almost in tears, and my heart aches for her. Rebecca’s a beautiful, talented single New Yorker in her mid-30s who, […]
The most sterling truth standard in marriage is that you’re both monogamous for life, if you vowed that you would be. You don’t flirt with intent; you don’t have boozy […]
I’m not a big science fiction reader, but I admire how the genre has just enough of a toehold in reality that it feels plausibly weird. It stakes out the […]
Love is an epiphany. Maybe that’s the sweetest romantic dream of all. By the big bang theory of mate selection, our soul mate is out there somewhere, and they’re going […]
I just learned that our neighbors are moving, to another state. My heart broke a little when I heard this. They’re moving so that the mom can take a better […]
One of the themes in my book that elicited attention was my “new monogamy” section, where I explore ethically non-monogamous marriages, and the gray zone of don’t ask, don’t tell […]