Sob Sisters is the casual, word-of-mouth, off-the-record women-in-nonfiction club founded in 2018 by the authors Abbott Kahler (Eden Undone), Susannah Cahalan (The Acid Queen), and Ada Calhoun (Also a Poet). The club name is a reclamation of the dismissive "sob sister," used in the early twentieth century to minimize the work of female journalists who found the human element in news stories. Early meetings featured a reading from the 1931 novel Sob Sister by Mildred Evans Gilman, which inspired a 1931 movie of the same name.  

The group meets four times a year at the great 11th Street Bar's cozy back room for short readings or presentations (an author with a new book out, an editor with a call for submissions, a publicist sharing trade secrets, a fact-checker on best practices...), followed by a cheerful, informal hangout. The list is about 400 women reporters and authors strong, with about 50 showing up to each meeting, some with many books to their credit and others just getting started and looking for advice. 

The vibe: validating the living shit out of each other. 

"I thought it was a cult, because when I walked in everyone started smiling at me," says one recent attendee. "But it's just the nicest group of people in publishing. When I said I was working on a proposal everyone in earshot offered to give me samples to use as a template." 

Email one of us to get on the invite list.