I definitely didn’t end up writing as much about Marjorie’s parents as I could have - as the book took shape, it became more of a story about her books and their wider cultural impact than about her personal life. The biggest surprise along the way was finding out that after making her name as the most famous single woman on the planet, while she was in her late forties, Marjorie Hillis got married, in 1939, and the snarky headlines were just what you’d expect to see today.Ī related question: was there anything along the way that got left out of the final book? Something you found that you might come back to in future writing?
They gave me a research grant and I remember sitting in a hotel room in Bloomington - this was long before I had a book deal or even an agent, I think - and thinking, “what on earth am I doing here?” But somehow I was compelled to keep digging in these places for anything I could find. My main source, though, was Marjorie Hillis’s publisher’s archive, at the University of Indiana library. I found out that Marjorie HIllis’s father was a prominent preacher in Brooklyn around the turn of the century, so I used archives at the Brooklyn Historical Society to research his life. It was very haphazard! I’m not trained as a historian, and I’d only done a little archival work during my graduate studies in literature. How did you go about researching the book? Where did the research take you? What did you find along the way that surprised you? The other thing at play was that I was deep into my dissertation research, so this was light relief, or perhaps just an elaborate form of procrastination.Īs historians, we're keen on process questions (which also appear, delightfully, in your introduction). And that absence sparked my curiosity all over again. But not only was there no biography, there wasn’t even a Wikipedia page, so I had very little to go on.
An old friend gave me a copy of Marjorie Hillis’s first book, Live Alone and Like It, several years ago - it was just after my father had died suddenly, so partly for that reason, and partly for the book’s own sake, I responded really powerfully to it, and wanted to find out whatever I could about the author. The answer to that is really one of those writerly clichés - I wrote the book I wanted to read.
The first and most obvious question we ask is always "how did you come to write this book?" You discuss this in the text, of course, so feel free to recap, re-hash, or re-word however you like! (Joanna recently moderated a panel at the New-York Historical Society with Lauren Elkin about her book on the history of female walkers in the city our Tuesday interview.) Today on Gotham, editor Nick Juravich sits down with Joanna Scutts to discuss her new book, The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like it.
0 kommentar(er)
