Young writer Abraham Josephine Riesman is having a Renaissance

“Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America” is not your typical biography.

Yes, the subject is the cheesy, soap opera-like world of professional wrestling, but the book is a serious investigation into the WWE showman’s dubious business practices, gothic family roots and covert political influence.

This is a style that the author, Abraham Josephine Riesman, 37, has cultivated over the course of a decade-plus career in journalism. Riesman, who now lives in the East Side of Providence, has experienced a personal renaissance in the past few years, with a young marriage, the publication of two bestselling books, a reevaluation of her gender identity and a growing relationship with her Jewish background.

In person, she is Josey, and she sports curly hair and an arm tattoo reading, “Idea #101: Solve Everything,” an obscure comic-book reference that echoes Riesman’s quixotic ambition. She speaks in robust pronouncements and biting quips, and she credits ADHD for her hairpin turns from topic to topic.

Riesman specializes in complex biographies, including “True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee,” about comic-book legend Lee, and the forthcoming “Hollywood Freaks,” about the band Beck. But despite her youth, mapping Riesman’s own life is nearly as difficult. Here are a few little-known highlights:

Raised in the Midwest, with deep New England roots

Riesman grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, but her family history is deeply embedded in the Northeast. Her great-great-grandfather, Philip Riesman, founded an electric company in Boston called Riesman & Sons, which was later the Pawtucket-based Royal Electric Company.

“Our family was a big presence in New England,” says Riesman. “What [Royal Electric] was most notable for – and this is the most Jewish-American thing you can possibly imagine – they made most of their money by selling Christmas lights.”

Her father, Robert Riesman, Jr., chose to forge his own path, and moved to the Chicago area two years before Riesman was born.

She’s a trans woman

“Abraham Josephine Riesman” is a nod to both her first few decades as a biological male and her more recent transition into “she/her” pronouns.

“I never liked being a man,” says Riesman, who now wears more traditionally feminine outfits.

She describes her childhood in the 1990s as a zeitgeist of vicious homophobia, when an “effeminate boy” suffered almost constant hostility.

Riesman has a lifelong affection for women’s fashion, and by 2016 she identified as bisexual. Over the past few years, Riesman has embraced her identity as a woman and is outspoken about the trans experience.

“I want to answer questions,” Riesman says. “It’s very hard to make me uncomfortable with a question about transition. The goal is to save you or others the trouble of asking your coworker, cousin, whatever, a question that might make them uncomfortable. I will take the hit.”

She comes from a long line of Harvard grads

“I am the vector of a bunch of Harvard legacy,” Riesman quips, a legacy that dates back to her great-grandfather, Sylvester Robert Stone, who enrolled in 1920, when Harvard was “really antisemitic.”

Generations of Riesman’s family attended the Ivy League bastion, including Riesman’s own parents, who met on Harvard’s campus. Riesman herself finished her bachelor’s degree at Harvard in 2008.

She originally intended to be an actor

Yes, a teenaged Abraham Riesman was bitten by the acting bug, largely thanks to theater summer camps.

“I intended to get a history degree, and I wanted to act extra-curricularly,” she says of her college days.  But then came an exhaustive, two-week audition process for the semester’s plays.

“I remember reaching the end of that week and thinking, ‘I hate this. The people here suck.’ [The scene] was not that roundly different from the theater people in my high school.”

So instead, Riesman followed in the footsteps of her favorite movie critic, Roger Ebert, and signed up to become an arts writer for the century-old school paper, The Harvard Crimson. This was the start of her career in journalism.

“I quickly just fell in love with it,” she says. “It was so much fun.”

South Korea was a turning point

Riesman didn’t know much about Korea, but a Korean-American roommate in college introduced her to this complex diaspora. Riesman was majoring in social anthropology at the time, and she needed to compose a senior thesis.

She won a grant and spent several months in Seoul, researching the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, which had aggressively cultivated a new brand of “hyper-nationalism.”

Despite her enthusiasm for the project, Riesman’s completed thesis earned a disappointing “cum laude,” with the comment: “This is less a work of academia than it is a work of journalism.”

The condescension hurt, but helped Riesman come to a realization: “I was a journalist trying to do academic stuff.”

Writing about Stan Lee was kind of an accident

In New York City, Riesman wrote for newspapers and eventually landed a position at New York Magazine. In 2015, two years into the magazine job, she volunteered to cover “Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible,” Stan Lee’s autobiography.

Riesman had been a comic-book enthusiast since the sixth grade, and what started as a capsule review quickly evolved into a larger, more critical profile about Lee. Her editor, the acclaimed journalist David Wallace-Wells, encouraged her to “have an opinion.”

“For a long time, I was very afraid of saying anything that might be controversial,” Reisman recalls. “It just wasn’t in my nature. I didn’t want to be principled to take a risk. I just wanted to be right.”

The mammoth, 10,000-word feature was a watershed experience for Riesman, and it would lay the groundwork for her myth-busting first book, “True Believer.”

Israel helped her reconnect with Judaism

Riesman has written eloquently about her grandfather’s Zionism, graphic novelist Art Spiegelman and a controversial rabbi in the West Bank – but she has spent much of her life ambivalent to Jewish themes. Sure, she had attended Hebrew school, celebrated a Bar Mitzvah, and joined a Birthright-like trip in college, but none of these events had really stirred her.

A second trip to Israel, in 2017, changed all that.

“I had this totally life-altering experience,” she says. “I thought, ‘If I’m going to have a positive impact on this place, I have to own my Jewishness.’ After I came back, I was like, ‘I want to write about Jew stuff now.’ ”

Writing biographies has become a kind of catharsis

What do comic books, pro wrestling and Beck all have in common? They were all major passions for a teenaged Riesman, and she has taken great pleasure in dissecting these subjects as an adult writer.

“It’s really gratifying to be able to research something I already like on some level, but can then be critical about, and analytical and investigative about,” she says.

Still, Riesman doesn’t consider her portraits damning: “If you’re reading my books right – and far be it for me to tell anybody how they should read my books – you should have a lot more empathy for the figures after you’re done with them,” she said.

Working on the books has also been a way to bond with her spouse, S.I. Rosenbaum, who is a longtime writer and editor and helped Riesman refine her drafts. Rosenbaum is also a pro wrestling enthusiast and has published articles about these niche athletes.

“She became my frontline editor,” Riesman says of her spouse, before quipping: “She gets 50% of the proceeds anyway, so why not?”

She met her spouse on Twitter and got married on Zoom

Riesman has a storied history of tweeting, and she originally met writer and artist Rosenbaum, 44, on the platform then known as Twitter.

“We were pals online,” Riesman remembers, before they met in real life.

Rosenbaum is a Boston native and former reporter for the Providence Journal. In early 2019, their friendship became a courtship. When COVID descended, they moved into Riesman’s small apartment in Brooklyn, New York, and decided to marry in a virtual ceremony in May 2020.

Coming to Providence was a COVID move

Riesman and Rosenbaum had both lived in New York City for years, but between the pandemic and ever-more-violent street protests, they decided to resettle somewhere calmer. They considered Boston, but it was too expensive, and Chicago, which would require COVID-risky flights.

“We have to go somewhere we can drive, and that’s somewhere affordable, and has family,” Riesman recalls thinking in 2020. “Providence was the only candidate that made sense.”

She won’t write a book about herself – yet

“Autobiography is fiction,” she says. “It would have to be a novel. I would want to do it late in life, because I know way too many people who have written memoirs in their thirties or forties and don’t have perspective on their lives yet. But I do think about it a lot.”

ROBERT ISENBERG (risenberg@jewishallianceri.org) is the multimedia producer for the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island and a writer for Jewish Rhode Island.