Boss Inside
Soft-touch “snakeskin” hardcover / 180 pages
Proudly manufactured in Los Angeles, CA
Hand-signed; free personalization available upon Add to Cart
ISBN: 979-8-218-30910-7
“Powerful, well-written, and singular. It’s rare to read such candid revelations on womanhood in such a self-assured voice.”
—Julie Gueraseva, Founder of Laika Magazine
Since 2009, Ruby Roth has been a renowned author-illustrator and revered speaker known by an international niche for her leading children’s books. But beginning at age 20, her path was also acutely defined by her private life and a 14-year identity-defining relationship. At age 34, Roth pulled the rug out from under her familial life and left the relationship that had shaped her entire adulthood. The shift was a personal apocalypse and required a profound turn in focus, from utter matrimonial dependence to self-determined autonomy. “I superbombed my life,” she wrote, “and created a body of work in the void of the detonation. What came out were girl gods, wild women, wise women; and an understanding, that in all dimensions—personal, familial, social, political, environmental, and cosmic—ashes are always the ingredients for new forms.”
Boss Inside is a revealing collection of Roth’s deeply private journal entries, artwork, and photographs from 2016 to 2020. It chronicles the evolution and disintegration of a first love and Roth’s fierce, sacred, and often broiling path toward the reclamation of her femininity, sexuality, and creativity, as she navigates jelling independence, a diverging career, and new relationships to men and masculinity itself. Free will makes her body a new home, the locus through which she begins drawing subject matter and a redefinition of self as she depicts a manifested relationship with a “cowboy from Texas,” an introduction to rage, her brutal realizations of loss, and the healing processes that ushered her along, determined to let everything she felt be the muse of transformation.
“Cycles of life forces and death forces,” she writes, “and us, the vessels.”