About
I'm the author of nine books, most recently the middle grade novel Fires Burning Underground (Regal House 2025), the comic novel The Pamela Papers: A Mostly E-pistolary Story of Academic Pandemic Pandemonium (Outpost 19 2024), the ya novel Vaulting through Time (CamCat 2023), and the memoir Can This Marriage Be Saved? (Missouri 2020). My work has appeared or is forthcoming in North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Salon, and Newsweek, received a Pushcart, and been listed ten times as notable in Best American anthologies. My craft book Creating Some Measure of Beauty: The Healing Power of the Artful Essay is under contract with the University of New Mexico Press.
Featured Work
Can This Marriage Be Saved? A Memoir
In this warm, deeply-personal, and often humorous book, Nancy McCabe re-examines and gains new understanding of her early life and her ill-advised marriage. Borrowing from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” how-to essays and before-and-after weight loss ads, a curriculum guide, Bible study notes, an obsession with Tom Swiftie jokes, and women’s magazine columns and quizzes that oversimplified women’s lives and choices, McCabe examines the many influences that led to her youthful marriage—and out of it, into finally taking control of her life.
