Kim Chernin (May 7, 1940 – December 17, 2020), writer, editor and spiritual counselor, published numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry centered on women's search for self.

In the early eighties, The Obsession and the national bestseller The Hungry Self were among the first popular books addressing women's eating disorders.

Her memoir was nominated for a Chronicle Critics Award and chosen as Alice Walker’s Favorite Book of the Year in the New York Times, 1983.

Her father, Paul Kusnitz (1900-1967), was the first Jewish graduate from MIT and, in the thirties, briefly returned to Russia to work as an engineer on the Moscow subway.

After her graduation from Susan Dorsey Miller High School in 1957, she was invited to Moscow for the World Festival of Youth and Students (1957) and went from there to China.

She joined Kibbutz Adamitat at the Lebanon border, but her stay was cut short after eight months when her attraction to a married woman caused a scandal.

[11] The third book of the trilogy, Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself (1987) talked about women’s creativity through the sense of a feminist reinterpretation of the Garden of Eden.

Chernin came out as a lesbian in 1978, after attending the Santa Cruz Women’s Conference “The Great Goddess Reemerging.”[12] The same year, she divorced her second husband, Robert Cantor, whom she had married in 1972.

She began a relationship with feminist author Susan Griffin who encouraged her to publish her writing and start working as an editor, which she did for the next forty years.

In 1982, she met German writer and journalist Renate Stendhal in Paris, shortly before her relationship with Griffin ended.

They invited a collective of local writers and initiated monthly salons at the Montclair Women’s Culture Club.

In response to numerous letters from readers asking advice for their struggles with food and body image, Chernin became a counselor, initially based on her own experience with eating disorders and her extensive psychoanalysis.

[14] She guest-taught a class at the San Francisco Analytic Institute with faculty member Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer in 2003.

Kim Chernin's work spans a number of different genres: memoir, fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and psychological study, centered around women's search for self.

In 2017, she suffered her first-ever writing block, but a year later, started a diary about “having nothing more to say.” This ultimately led to her final novel, At Midnight God Enters the Garden of Eden, which picked up on the “feminist science-fiction”* elements of her first novel, The Flame Bearers.

The unpublished novel recalled her major themes – mysticism, psychoanalysis, childhood trauma and healing —in a story of time-travel to the Holy Land.