Nancy A. Nichols is a writer, editor and photographer.
A bit about me….
I’ve worked as a senior editor at The Harvard Business Review and as a reporter for The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. My writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Glamour, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Chicago Tribune.
My first book Lake Effect: Two Sisters and a Town’s Toxic Legacy, won high praise and a good deal of media attention. People Magazine called it: “A chilling indictment of how government and big business prized profits over health and a moving tale of one woman's struggle to understand why."
My new book, Women and Cars, was published by Pegasus Books in March 2024. The New York Times called it, “fascinating, funny, enraging and often very moving.” Read the review here. Listen to my interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross here.
A bit about my new book:
Women and Cars
The invention of the automobile a little more than a century ago created a new and movable arena in which women’s struggle for power and autonomy would play out in myriad and often unexpected ways. Cars shaped the way women live, the way women work and date and dress, the way they care for their families and the way they approach the elusive dream of work-life balance.
Yet despite it dramatic impact on the lives of women few have stopped the speeding automobile in its tracks to document the impact this technology has had on women. The car may have been “born in a masculine manger,” but beyond this persistent men-and-machine myth lies a different story: women, too, have always loved their cars and the exhilarating freedom of the open road.
Blending cultural analysis, biography, literary criticism, and memoir, WOMEN AND CARS reclaims a neglected history and reveals how the car—and all that surrounds it—has become our most gendered technology.
“We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images. By the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” Joan Didion
I use both my writing and my photography to bring meaning to the events of the past. To stop the speeding auto in its tracks so we can better understand its impact, to dig for the details on the health effects of toxic chemicals, and to let the light shine in unexpected places with my photography.
Photography
A 2020 Critical Mass 200 finalist, images from my photographic project Pretty Sick were shown at the 6th Annual International Photo Biennial in Barcelona in 2021. Images were also included in shows at The Griffin Museum in Winchester, MA., The Southeast Center for Photography in Greenville, SC. and at the Midwest Center for Photography in Wichita, KS.
