Pamela Paul Books in Order

Pamela Paul grew up on Long Island, New York, and books became an early private space for curiosity and escape. She has described reading as a refuge, a place to test ideas and imagine a bigger world. That attachment led to a career in journalism, editing, and writing about the habits that shape everyday life.

Before joining The New York Times, Paul worked as a contributor to Time and a correspondent for The Economist. Her journalism has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Vogue. That reporting background shows in her nonfiction: she follows a social trend, listens to people living with it, and asks what is being sold as normal.

Her path to a first book began with a difficult personal change.

The end of her first marriage gave her the starting point for The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony. Published in 2002, it looks at first marriages that end quickly and without children, using interviews and research to examine why marriage can feel urgent even as many young couples are unsure how to make it last. It was cultural reporting, but it also came from a subject she knew firsthand.

Her next books widen the lens. In Pornified, Paul uses interviews and survey data to make an argument about pornography's growing presence and its effects on relationships, families, and young people's understanding of sex. Parenting, Inc. turns to another pressure point, the large market that tells parents they need costly products, coaching, and constant optimization to raise a child well.

The questions are personal, but the reporting looks outward.

Paul joined The New York Times in 2011 as its children's books editor. She later spent nine years as editor of The New York Times Book Review, overseeing broader books coverage as well, and hosted the weekly Book Review podcast. The job kept her close to the arguments, pleasures, and practical business of reading.

Her own books about reading are warmer and more directly personal. In My Life with Bob, she returns to the “Book of Books” she kept from high school onward, a worn journal that logged every title she read. The entries become a way to revisit travel, work, relationships, family life, hopes, and wrong turns, while also making a case for reading as companionship and a form of self-knowledge.

With Maria Russo, she wrote How to Raise a Reader, a guide for families from babyhood through the teen years. It mixes practical suggestions, age-based reading lists, and a calm reminder that reading works best when it feels like pleasure rather than another assignment. For younger readers, Rectangle Time follows a cat trying to hold onto a family read-aloud ritual as a boy begins to read independently.

Her 2021 book 100 Things We've Lost to the Internet gathers short reflections on everyday things altered or displaced by digital life, from postcards and privacy to boredom and chance encounters. Paul now works as a writer at large for The Wall Street Journal. Across her books, she keeps returning to the ordinary habits that quietly tell us how we live.