BOSS INSIDE:
A RECLAMATION OF THE FEMININE

Ruby Roth has been a renowned author-illustrator and revered speaker known by an international niche for her leading children’s books. But her path was also acutely defined by her private life and an identity-defining relationship with her first art mentor, who became her life partner for more than a decade. Then, at age 34, Roth pulled the rug out from under her familial life and left the 14-year relationship that had defined 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 artist Ruby Roth’s deeply private journal entries, artwork, and photographs from 2016 to 2020 as she left a 14-year identity-defining relationship that had shaped her adulthood. 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.”

180 pp
8.5 x 11 inches//hardcover