Rophie grew up in New York City, daughter of noted feminist Anne Roiphe. She attended the all-female Brearley School, received a B.A. from Harvard University in 1990, and received a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton University in 1996.

Roiphe's first book, The Morning After, argued that in many incidences of supposed campus date rape, women are at least partly responsible for their actions. "One of the questions used to define rape was: 'Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?' The phrasing raises the issue of agency. Why aren't college women responsible for their own intake of alcohol or drugs? A man may give her drugs, but she herself decides to take them. If we assume that women are not all helpless and naive, then they should be responsible for their choice to drink or take drugs. "If a woman's 'judgment is impaired' and she has sex, it isn't always the man's fault; it isn't necessarily always rape."

In a 1995 interview, Camille Paglia described her as "the first intellectual of her generation." Paglia has since revised her opinion of Roiphe: "When Katie Roiphe came up in the mid-’90s, I thought she was going to be the intellectual of her generation, but she just withdrew after the huge flap about her first book, The Morning After. She drifted off into writing memoirs and talking about her personal life, and now has come back with some book on marriage. She didn't step up and that position is still vacant, so we now have absent two generations of young intellectuals in America."

Writing for The New Yorker, Katha Pollitt delivered a scathing review of The Morning After, writing, "It is a careless and irresponsible performance, poorly argued and full of misrepresentations, slapdash research, and gossip. She may be, as she implies, the rare grad student who has actually read "Clarissa," but when it comes to rape and harassment she has not done her homework." But, the controversial book wasn't without its positive reviews. Declaring it a "Book of the Times," The New York Times said "it is courageous of Ms. Roiphe to speak out against the herd ideas that campus life typically encourages." Likewise, The Washington Post Book World described the book as "clearheaded, wry, disturbing," saying"Katie Roiphe writes from the trenches of gender warfare."

Roiphe's second book was 1997's Last Night in Paradise: Sex and Morals at the Century's End. She also began to contribute reviews and essays to Vogue, Harper's, Slate, The Washington Post, Dissent, and The New York Times. She has continued to serve as a sort of cultural lightning rod, for a persistent discomfort about a woman's proper role: In her 2007 review of the novel Slummy Mummy, Roiphe attracted criticism by posing the question, "But ladies, let's be honest, is it that hard? Aren't there some things on earth that are harder [than being a mother]?" More recently, she had an essay featured in the anthology Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers. In her essay, entitled "Elect Sister Frigidaire," Roiphe writes that Hillary Clinton is “in many ways the feminist dream incarnate, the opportunity made flesh, the words we whisper to little girls: ‘You can be president. You can do anything you want.’” Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani noted that some of Roiphe's observations were in "stark contrast" to what Kakutani considered some of the "antifeminist" pieces in the collection.

Roiphe's most recent book is Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939 (2007). Donna Seaman, in the trade publication Booklist, gave the book a starred review, writing, "Roiphe, inspired aesthetically and philosophically by the writings and lives of these social and artistic pioneers, offers sophisticated psychological, sexual, and social analysis, fashioning uncommonly affecting portraits of uncommon men and women." In The New York Times, the editor and critic Tina Brown called it "the perfect bedside book for an age like our own, when everything is known and nothing is understood." In The New York Observer, Alexandra Jacobs conceded "Katie haters will be sorry to hear that it’s very absorbing. The author has done something constructive, for a change, with her contempt for the contemporary age’s lily-livered female psyche..."

Roiphe teaches in the Department of Journalism as an Assistant Professor and is the Assistant Director of the Cultural Criticism and Reporting Program at New York University.