Patty Nasey is an essayist, humorist, memoirist, and emerging novelist based in New York City. Originally from California, she moved to Manhattan in 1989 to work for Spy Magazine, the iconic satirical publication founded by Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter. While at SPY, Patty moonlighted as a freelance contributor to New York and PAPER Magazines, offering her an all-access pass to downtown New York’s cultural scene. Her bylined work ranged from a PAPER cover story on the self-described “Jewish Lesbian Folk Singer” Phranc to a “Dream Date” interview with ‘70s teen idol David Cassidy and on-the-scene reporting from an Elvis impersonator convention; Q&As with Sir Bob Geldof, the B-52s’ Fred Schneider and NYC “It Girl” Diane Brill, and a New York Magazine profile of celebrity fashion designer Richard Tyler, among others.
Over the next 25 years, Patty juggled her writing with roles on the business side of numerous Condé Nast publications including Mademoiselle, Teen Vogue, and LUCKY and served on the management teams for two successful magazine launches – Time Out New York and JANE. A brief detour took Patty out of print and onto the screen where she worked as an on-air home shopping hostess and segment producer at OnQ, a spinoff of QVC created for a younger, more upscale audience by then-owner Barry Diller. Patty chronicled her unexpected and oftentimes hilarious home shopping experience in a first-person essay for PAPER Magazine.
For two decades, Patty has honed her craft within the New York Writers Workshop’s Advanced Nonfiction group under Charles Salzberg. In addition to her blog, “Coming of Middle Age,” her essays have appeared in Thrive Global, Better After 50, The Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, and the anthology It’s All About Shoes (Plain View Press). She lives in New York with her husband of 30 years and is the mother of two adult daughters.