In our November Nonfiction Top Pick, Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs, Einstein) reveals the life of one of history's greatest minds. We asked Isaacson about Leonardo's unique genius and wide-ranging interests (woodpecker tongues, anyone?).

Why did you choose to focus your new book on Leonardo da Vinci?
I've always felt that true creativity came from people who could stand at the intersection of the arts and sciences.  That was the secret of Steve Jobs' innovation. Leonardo is history's ultimate example, and his drawing of the man in the circle and square (which I think is a self-portrait) is the icon of that. We can learn so much from Leonardo, especially the value of curiosity for its own sake. He wanted to know everything. So he dissected humans, built flying machines and made the world's two most amazing paintings, “The Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper."

What does Leonardo have in common with Steve Jobs?
Steve Jobs knew that beauty mattered. Unlike other tech Innovators, he was passionate about connecting art to his engineering. That's why he admired Leonardo.

How did Leonardo's scientific studies inform his art?
He dissected human faces, drew every muscle and nerve that moved the lip, and then began his sketches for the world's most memorable smile, that of the Mona Lisa. He also showed how light strikes the retina, how details are sharper when you stare at something directly, and he used that knowledge to make Mona Lisa's smile seem to flicker on and off. More broadly, his science helped him see the patterns of natures, such as how water swirls. That  made his paintings into works of genius.

What was the weirdest of Leonardo's notebook scribbling that you read?
"Describe the tongue of the woodpecker."  Who on earth would wake up one morning and jot that on their to-do list??? How would you even find out? Catch a woodpecker and pry open its beak? Yet there it is, and as you will see in the last two paragraphs of my book, it's actually rather interesting. And it shows Leonardo's pure and passionate and playful curiosity.

What do you think motivated Leonardo?
He wanted to know everything that could possibly be known about our world, including how we fit into it.

Which is your favorite painting by Leonardo and why?
"The Mona Lisa." As the river in the picture flows from the ancient landscapes and seems to unite with the body of Lisa, it is the culmination of his science and his art. I also love a lesser-known work: "Lady with an Ermine." Both the lady and the ermine have a vivid expression of inner emotion.

What do you think was Leonardo's greatest personal flaw?
He didn't finish many things.

Was there a silver lining to this flaw?
Yes. It made him a true genius rather than a mere master craftsman.

What kinds of books did Leonardo like to read?
He read everything, from math texts to collections of bawdy poetry. He was fortunate to be born in the same year, 1452, in which Gutenberg began to sell printed books.

What's something about Leonardo that might surprise someone only familiar with his paintings?
His anatomy drawings are masterful, from his fetus in the womb to the ones showing how an aortic valve closes.  His ability to understand swirling water helped him to make a major discovery about heart valves.

What lessons does Leonardo offer the contemporary reader?
Leonardo offers us lessons for how to lead a meaningful and enriched life. He was not some genius like Einstein we could never hope to emulate. He was self-taught and willed his way to genius by being curious and observant.  My book ends with twenty lessons, such as valuing curiosity and learning to love both art and science. But here is a little one: keep a notebook. It's a delight that we have more than 7000 pages of his notebooks to delight us today. I used them as the basis for my book.

(Author photo by The Aspen Institute.)

Caroline Fraser’s endlessly fascinating biography, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, honors the 150th anniversary year of Wilder’s birth.

Fraser, who has written for publications including The New Yorker and The Atlantic, has been immersed in Wilder’s world for years, having edited the Library of America edition of the Little House books. On the desk of her home in Santa Fe, she keeps a program from the 1937 Detroit Book Fair, where Ingalls gave what Fraser calls “her most important statement about why she wrote the books.” Wilder said in her speech, “I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history,” specifically, the settling of the American frontier.

(Carrie, Mary and Laura Ingalls)

Fraser’s goal with Prairie Fires was to meld the “great story” of Wilder’s life with American history. “While there are good biographies of Wilder available,” she explains, “I felt that the history really merited a closer look.”

Like generations of young readers, Fraser was fascinated by the Little House books as a child, especially because her maternal grandmother’s family emigrated from Sweden to Duluth, Minnesota. But what ultimately drew her into years of research was an interview she heard with William Holtz about his 1995 biography of Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, whom he claims essentially ghostwrote her mother’s books.

“I just thought really,” she remembers. “That was such a surprise.”

Lane was a well-traveled reporter and celebrity biographer who had publishing connections that were vital to her mother’s success. “If she had not,” Fraser says, “I don’t know that [the books] would have ever seen the light of day.” However, Fraser’s research reveals a more balanced collaboration between mother and daughter, one that she says “brought out the best part of both of them.”

Wilder began writing about her childhood as early as her late teens, although those manuscripts haven’t survived. Over the years she wrote for newspapers and farming magazines, also penning a gritty manuscript titled Pioneer Girl, which remained unpublished until 2014, well after Wilder’s death in 1957.

Little House in the Big Woods was published in 1932, when Wilder was 65. After years of financial instability, her books about her poverty-stricken childhood finally brought her wealth. In the introduction to Prairie Fires, Fraser calls the feat “a profound act of American myth-making and self-transformation,” as she “reimagined her frontier childhood as epic and uplifting.”

The Little House series “has all of Laura’s stoicism and her grit and determination,” Fraser says. “I think Rose made it more accessible for children at times―to kind of gentle down some of the harsher realities of what her mother was writing. She polished some of that and brought out the high points, the cheerfulness, the love in the family.”

Still, questions linger. At the Detroit Book Fair, Wilder firmly stated, “All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth.” Not quite, as it turns out.

“Laura and Rose would take factual material and transform it into fiction,” Fraser asserts, “and then claim it was factual, and have no problem with that. Rose cut her teeth in yellow journalism. Insofar as she had any training, it was in the yellow press. It was the real fake news.”

Wilder aptly described her books as “a long story, filled with sunshine and shadow.” The privations she and her family suffered, however, were much harsher than what was described in the books. The family’s only son died at 9 months, and Wilder’s sister Mary went blind. Years later, Wilder’s husband, Almanzo, suffered a stroke early in their marriage, making farm work difficult, and their only son died as an infant. A short time later, their house burned down. Wilder, her husband and daughter finally left South Dakota in 1894 to settle in the Ozarks, on a farm they called Rocky Ridge.

After their departure, Wilder didn’t see her beloved father again until years later, when he was on his deathbed. After that, she didn’t see her mother or sisters for years and wasn’t able to attend her mother’s funeral. Fraser says Wilder’s “exile” from her family was critical to her writing, adding, “I think all those years added up to a very intense yearning and nostalgia for her family, which resulted in her wanting to recapture and revisit her childhood in these books.”

In recounting her pioneer childhood, Wilder and her daughter blurred the lines between fact and fiction.

Fraser notes that readers cherish the Little House books for their “incredible sense of the closeness of the family.” The paradox, she says, is that Wilder and her daughter never had that. Lane suffered from depression and described her childhood as a “nightmare.”

“It says something about the extraordinary nature of literature that a relationship as fraught as that between Laura and Rose was able to produce this amazing testament to the American family,” Fraser says.

In recent years, many have criticized the series for its racist attitudes toward Native Americans. For example, in Little House on the Prairie, Wilder begs her father to let her adopt a Native American baby whom she sees passing by. Fraser notes that while the young girl’s statement may seem “innocent on the surface,” it embodies “a perfect image in American literature of what white settlement was all about, and the acquisitive nature of the people who came to the West and wanted to take everything that belonged to somebody else.”

Nonetheless, in 1894 Wilder wrote in her diary, “If I had been the Indians I would have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left [the wilderness].”

“It’s a very bold statement,” Fraser says. “I really think it’s one of the most extraordinary statements that she ever made and a really astonishing one for a woman of her era to make. Many other people were just terrified or overwhelmed by the kinds of experiences she had. She remembered the terror, she remembered being overwhelmed, but it did not affect how she felt about the land, and that, to me, is extraordinary.”

Despite the controversies about the Little House books, Fraser believes they will have an enduring legacy. “I certainly hope that people continue to read them, because I do think that they are really important, not only as children’s literature, but as American history,” she says. “They deserve a place among the classics of American literature.”

This article was originally published in the December 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

(Author photo by Hal Espen.)

In her latest book, Off the Charts, Ann Hulbert explores the lives of 15 brilliant child prodigies and the lessons they can provide for parents in today’s hyper-competitive world. We asked Hulbert about the pitfalls of early genius, common mistakes made while parenting prodigies and more. 

Off the Charts seems to be about parents almost as much as children. What are the most common mistakes parents can make when confronted with genius?
In a nutshell: Parents are prone to butt in too much, and to forget that childhood happens only once and goes by very quickly. Remarkable talents in children usually emerge because they go hand-in-hand with unusually intense interests. A small boy notices numbers everywhere and loves doing complicated calculations in his head. A little girl is a total bookworm and gets hooked on typing, creating her own startling poems or stories. Kids who are so avid about their preoccupations, and who make such extraordinary progress, generally welcome adult interest and encouragement. They need it, too. But they also thrive with absorbing play, pursued for its own sake—not an adult specialty. What parents are all too tempted to do, especially when stunned by youthful genius and steeped in a rug-rat-race culture like ours, is to turn self-driven pursuits into a structured enterprise with milestones to meet in a hurry. When their zeal blinds them to children’s own perspective, beware.

Why is society so fascinated with child prodigies?
Seeing children do amazing, age-inappropriate feats is bound to be both thrilling and unsettling. As rarities who flout the natural order of development, prodigies have been greeted down the ages as wondrous anomalies. But they’ve also been scrutinized as auguries bearing messages—often conflicting ones—about change. Phenomenal children raise hopes that human potential may reach new heights; for example, when Harvard welcomed two very precocious boys, both great at math, in 1909, their fathers promised genius could be unleashed in others and social progress would accelerate. Seventy years later, computer prodigies challenged adult authority, stirring fears of grown-ups left in the dust—and of rising inequality in an ever faster-paced future. Excitement and apprehension greet prodigies again and again, guaranteeing lots of attention—and confusion, too. These days, as we worry over the excesses of a meritocracy that prizes early high achievement, burned-out prodigies confirm our worst fears, even as off-the-charts young marvels continue to inspire us.

Did your research shatter any preconceived notions you had about child prodigies?
I expected the trajectories of prodigies to be more streamlined than the meandering paths of ordinary children. The truth is, the lives of the children I explore—even the studiously choreographed existence of, say, Shirley Temple—contain lots of ups and downs, unforeseen obstacles, lucky breaks and unpredictable swerves. For the autistic prodigious savants I write about, that’s especially clear. But family situations and social contexts, not just the prodigies’ own rare talents, play a big part in the struggles and successes they all experience.

And so does adolescence. When I started out, I had no idea that adolescent crises would prove so important in the lives of those who perform at adult levels in childhood. You might think, as I did, that precocious accomplishment would help forge a child’s identity early. But for every prodigy in my book—from the headstrong Bobby Fischer to a dreamy young novelist named Barbara Follett—the quest for independence and autonomy turns out to be, if anything, unusually fraught. That became very obvious as I worked hard at providing what too often gets left out: the kid’s perspective.

Do brain scans offer any insight into child genius?
Brain scans haven’t yet revealed much about possible innate sources of prodigious achievement in childhood. Studies of brain abnormalities in autistic savants have seemed potentially promising, but have so far yielded only intriguing hypotheses (such as that left-brain injury may be associated with unusual musical and artistic skills). Signs that intensive nurture leaves a mark on brains hardly seem surprising. One imaging study of young musicians showed more growth in the corpus callosum (which enables communication between the brain’s hemispheres) in kids who practiced a lot over two and a half years than in kids who practiced less. So there’s neurological grist for the old how-to-get-to-Carnegie-Hall joke.

How would you describe yourself as a parent? Have the stories you’ve uncovered affected your parenting style, or made you rethink any approaches you might have used?
I routinely lamented the stress that my two kids (now young adults) experienced in their high-powered private school, once they moved on from the pretty relaxed lower school years. I also sighed over the many extracurricular advantages they had in their busy lives, feeling how unfair it was that they were so enriched and stimulated—and worrying that crammed schedules and résumé-padding could too easily kill genuine interests and commitments. And then when SAT-prep time came, I signed them up for it anyway. This close-to-home ambivalence about early super-performance was no small part of what inspired me to embark on the book.

In your opinion, what's the measure of success for a child prodigy?
I tell inspiring stories of youthful gifts that continued to thrive, and sadder stories of children who got derailed as they outgrew prodigyhood. I think Norbert Wiener, one of the Harvard boys who opens the book—who went on to become the founder of cybernetics—put it best: What every prodigy deserves to get, in the course of his inevitably unusual childhood, is the “chance to develop a reasonably thick skin against the pressures which will certainly be made on him and a confidence that somewhere in the world he has his own function which he may reasonably hope to fulfill.”

Would you like to have been a child prodigy (or perhaps you were!)? If so, what do you wish you were particularly gifted at?
I did have a brief phase of writing horse-related stories under a pen name, but I’m grateful to have been spared being a prodigy. I wish I’d learned how to play the piano well. But looking back, I’m glad that an utter lack of natural talent didn’t stop me from plugging away at the keys (for far fewer than 10,000 hours, but . . .). Among many rewards, I took real pleasure, in my teenage doldrums, from stumbling through pieces that I loved.

Do you have a favorite case history from the book? The story of Marc Yu and his “Tiger Mom” seemed to particularly fascinate you.
The bonus of spending as long as I did writing about prodigies was getting to meet Marc at age 6 and being able to keep checking in until he was on the brink of applying to college. I’d never heard such a young child play so well, or seen a mix of high spirits and unrelenting industriousness like his. I eagerly—and anxiously—followed his and his mother’s arduous quest to prepare him for a soloist’s career. And then their story converged with the storm over “Tiger Mother” tactics. I could not have predicted they would prove so articulate and so willing to talk openly about their struggles.

Piecing together the historical stories was a very different challenge, and I found myself especially curious about two remarkable girl writers of the 1920s, the poet Nathalia Crane and the novelist Barbara Follett. The idea of literary prodigies is likely to sound odd: Precocious super-achievement is most commonly found in rule-driven domains like math, chess, music and computers. The girls’ blend of innocence and mature insight entranced adults, yet also roused their suspicions: Who or where was their writing really coming from?

Did you find that the child prodigies you researched, from math and musical geniuses to writers and chess players, all had something (besides genius) in common?
They shared remarkable powers of focus, and they all worked extremely hard—and in just about every case, they were not kids who effortlessly got along with peers (or had time to spend getting better at mingling).

What’s next for you?
I’m not sure yet.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Off the Charts.

Author photo by Nina Subin.

A portion of this article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In Inseparable, Yunte Huang explores the lives of Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined twins who left their home in Siam as teenagers and traveled the world as “curious freaks.” They eventually settled in North Carolina, where they married a pair of sisters and fathered 21 children. We asked Huang to tell us more about the twins’ fascinating lives and what their experience says about America in the 19th century, as well as America today. 

In your previous book, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, you also wrote about the intersection of Asian and American culture. Did you find any similar threads when researching and writing Inseparable? Did your own background as a Chinese American come into play?
My own experience as a Chinese American certainly comes into play, not in any egocentric sense, but in the way that my understanding of American culture and history is filtered through the personal experience of someone who grew up in China and came to America after college—i.e. at an age of having formed a basic worldview and having reached a degree of intellectual and emotional maturity—and then, as a new immigrant, a FOB (fresh off the boat), if you will, I had to begin again, trying to find my way in the labyrinthine matrix of a new, at times hostile, social milieu. For me, Charlie Chan opened a window to American culture, helping me understand both the racist legacy and creative genius of this country. Inseparable continues and expands my interest in the Asian story in American history, in how ethnic minorities, against impossible odds, turn cultural margins into cutting edges.

What prompted you to write about this topic?
I don’t mean to trivialize motives for writing this or any book, but sometimes life turns on the slightest suggestion. Before deciding to work on this topic, I had been fully aware of the import and intrigue of Chang and Eng’s story, and that was why I had written a snippet about the twins in my Charlie Chan book, as an example of the American biases against Asians. In the editing process of that book, when I saw the marginal comments on the manuscript made by my editor, Bob Weil, I detected a keen interest in the Siamese Twins material. As a scholar, I’m always fascinated by marginalia and have, in fact, researched and written about the marginalia of Herman Melville, Ezra Pound and so on, because I believe those ephemeral words jotted down on the spur of the moment are the most revelatory. Therefore, Bob’s marginalia on my Charlie Chan manuscript, wittingly or unwittingly, encouraged me to pursue the topic further.

There have been several books written about these famous Siamese Twins. How did you go about setting your book apart from the others?
Those books can be roughly divided into three categories: novels that fictionalize the story; biographies whose perspectives need an update in relation to changing cultural sentiments and opinions; and academic monographs not intended for general readers. My intention is to write a highly readable biography based on rigorous research that leaves no stone unturned, to produce something akin to what Truman Capote would call “the nonfiction novel,” a work that has “the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose and the precision of poetry.” That’s the high bar I set for my writing, whether or not I can get there.

Your research is extremely thorough, with references to letters, business ledgers, newspaper articles and journals. What was the most important research element in writing this book? Were you able to unearth any new findings?
My task in writing this book was to tell the twins’ story against the large historical backdrop, detailing “their rendezvous with American history,” as the title suggests. To do that, I not only needed to research deep into the twins’ conjoined life itself, but also reveal their real connections with history, whether it is a cataclysmic event like the Civil War or a quotidian occurrence like an ocean voyage. For instance, I had learned from various sources that Chang and Eng played a chess game with a fellow passenger on their last trans-Atlantic journey in July 1870, but there was no consensus among my sources as to who their game opponent was. Some claimed it was President Joseph Roberts of Liberia, and others said it was Frederick Douglass. But I eventually found the answer among the records of the National Archives. Imagine the thrill that went down my spine when the names popped up on the ship manifest. Next to “Chang and Eng Bunker,” I saw the name “Edward Roye,” the son of a fugitive slave from Kentucky, a Midwestern small-town black barber turned president of Liberia. Finding that clue, I was later able to dig and expand Roye’s story in the prologue, which also contains a vignette on another ship passenger, Rosa Prang, wife of Louis Prang, known in history as the “Father of the American Christmas Card.”

But I count another discovery as the most satisfying and rewarding: a handwritten contract signed by the twins on the day of their departure from Siam on April 1, 1829. On that contract, we see for the first and only time their names scrawled in Chinese—they were in fact Chinese twins, the Siamese moniker notwithstanding. These clues, tiny or big, in English or Chinese, are what Ezra Pound would call “luminous details,” which can shed light on the ever-elusive real we all pursue.

If you could have met Chang and Eng, what one thing would you have asked them?
Given the curious nature of us as sentient beings, I know most people would have asked them, referring to the conjugal matter, “How did you do it with the two sisters?” I have tried to take care of that inquiry in my book. My own question for them would be, “Why did you never go back to Siam?” As an immigrant, I can feel in my bones the pang of nostalgia, memories of my old country running as deep as genetic coding. After leaving their family in Siam at the young age of 17, the twins never went back. I’m curious to know why.

What was the most surprising thing you learned when researching and writing this book?
That the twins’ adopted hometown, Mount Airy, North Carolina, where they lived and died, is also the birthplace of Andy Griffith and the inspiration for Mayberry, the fictional setting for the most popular 1960s American sitcom. As I describe it in the epilogue, it is fair to say that “The Andy Griffith Show” is supposedly about the “American normal,” Mayberry being a sleepy hamlet, an Arcadia where no trouble is too big for the amiable sheriff and his bungling deputy. In contrast, the Siamese Twins story is supposedly about the abnormal, or even freakish. The fortuitous coexistence of Andy Griffith and the Siamese Twins is a striking case of cultural symbiosis in America.

The fact that Chang and Eng were slave owners is controversial. Was it difficult to remain unbiased when writing this part of their story?
I did not try to remain unbiased on the issue of slavery—how can anyone? The fact that they became slaveholders after they had previously been sold and exploited virtually as slaves themselves is a powerful and sobering testament to what Primo Levi called the “gray zone” of humanity, a treacherously murky ground where the persecuted becomes the persecutor, the victim turns victimizer. To see them only as victims is to miss the larger theme of their extraordinary experience as a tragicomedy of errors, their human story.

Many of the book’s themes are in the news today, such as racial tensions and immigration. Did this have any impact when telling Chang and Eng’s story?
Absolutely. In addition to racial tensions and immigration, one very important issue is American democracy in the age of humbuggery. The fact that their remarkable story commenced in the age of Jacksonian democracy is not an insignificant aspect of my book. In tandem with the so-called rise of the common man during the Jacksonian Age, an era that many see as approximate to our own, there was also a boom of the freak show (or reality TV, if you will) and humbuggery. It was a time when everyone felt, rightly so, entitled to an opinion but could not, by virtue of ignorance or innocence, tell the difference between a gag and a gem, between what the showbiz calls “gaffed freaks” and “born freaks” (like the twins)—in other words, between the fake and the real. That gave con artists or carnival barkers like P.T. Barnum—whose spectacular career as the Prince of Humbugs is portrayed by Hugh Jackman in the recent blockbuster musical film—a golden opportunity to swoop in to make you feel better while they take your money or steal your soul or your vote. Being tricked by a con man, as Melville, a big fan of the Siamese Twins, reminded us long ago, is a price we pay or a risk we take in a confidence game called Democracy. Therefore, I felt an acute sense of urgency writing this book.

What is the one takeaway you hope to give readers of this book?
The Siamese Twins story reveals an America we know so well and yet hardly.

Did researching and writing this book spur additional book ideas? Are you working on another book project? If so, what is the topic?
Even though I have not settled on a specific topic, it will certainly be another Asian-American cultural icon, whose story I will, once again, try to reframe, elevate and humanize. Along with the Charlie Chan and the Siamese Twins books, my next book will complete a trilogy that may be entitled “A Rendezvous with American History.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Inseparable.

Maxwell King’s The Good Neighbor explores the life and enormously influential work of Fred Rogers, the creator and star of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

You clearly did a lot of research for The Good Neighbor. What’s a fact about Rogers that most people wouldn’t know?
Most people wouldn’t know that, when Fred was about 10 years old, his maternal grandmother bought him an extraordinarily expensive piano. He loved music, and often played for his grandmother on his toy piano, and she told him how very good he was. Finally, she told him she would buy him a piano, expecting it to be a small, modest instrument suitable for a little boy. She gave Fred a ticket for the trolley, and he traveled to the Steinway store in downtown Pittsburgh. Fred spent almost three hours there; when he left, the salesmen chuckled among themselves that the little boy had picked an ebonized Steinway Concert Grand that could have cost as much as $60,000 in today’s dollars—they assumed his family could never buy it for him. When he told Nancy McFeely, his grandmother, she was shocked. But she had made a promise, and she kept it, trusting the child to be worthy of this faith and this investment. The little boy traveled back down to the Steinway store with a check. Fred Rogers kept this piano for the rest of his life, took it with him to New York, to Toronto and back to Pittsburgh, composed 200 songs and a dozen operas on it and played it joyfully for decades. And he let his grandmother know that her trust had changed his life.

What made Rogers such a genius at working with children?
Two things: authenticity and high standards. Children can tell a phony a mile away, and Fred Rogers was the opposite: an utterly genuine person. Rogers’ training under Dr. Margaret McFarland at the University of Pittsburgh gave him the background in child development and early childhood education to set the very highest standards for his programming. And his fierce commitment to excellence enabled him to sustain those standards for decades.

Can you tell us more about Rogers’ foray into programming for adults? Why did he want to do it, and how long did it go on?
After years of programming television for children, Rogers decided in the mid-1970s that he needed a break and that he might like producing issues programming for grown-ups to watch on television. But he never fully engaged or felt comfortable with it, and his technique—so extraordinarily powerful for children—wasn’t as successful with adults. He was relieved in 1980 to get back to his true calling.

What did your research reveal about how Rogers conducted himself as a friend?
Rogers was always concerned about treating everyone with great respect and being a good friend to whomever he was dealing with. In fact, he got up in the early morning each day to pray that he would be as good to the people he would encounter that day as he possibly could. And he readily gave his respect and kindness to everyone, whether they were homeless or the president of a large bank.

Why were puppets a part of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”? When did Rogers start developing those characters?
Rogers began developing his puppet characters as a little boy, performing his puppet theater in the attic of his parents’ home in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. And it was pure serendipity that led to his use of the puppets much later when he began producing children’s television. The night before his first program—”The Children’s Corner”—started on WQED in Pittsburgh, the station manager, Dorothy Daniels, gave Fred a small puppet as a gift. That puppet got used on the spur of the moment on the first program and then became Daniel Tiger, the first of many puppets Rogers would use on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

How did Rogers’ childhood in Latrobe shape his television program?
Everything on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”—the trolleys, the streets, the houses, the shops, the companies—all sprang from Rogers’ recollections of his childhood in Latrobe.

What did the number 143 mean to Fred Rogers?
Two things: his weight, all his life, and the expression “I love you.”

What’s one story you learned about Rogers that surprised you?
Fred got mad—not often, but sometimes. Once, he was so frustrated with a tape recorder—which he thought was going to erase an important consulting session with Dr. Margaret McFarland—that he swore at it and threatened to smash it. His secretary, Elaine Lynch, gently took it from his hands and got it fixed.

Why is Rogers’ legacy particularly valuable in our current cultural moment?
Because of all the stresses in modern life—rapid change, greater and greater complexity to society, the growing presence of technology, globalization—we live in a very tense, sometimes angry and hateful environment. Fred’s messages—there is nothing as important as human kindness, and there is nothing we cannot deal with if we just slow way down and talk to each other—are the most important, enduring truths of our time.

In what ways did Rogers’ faith inform his television program?
Rogers was always guided by his Christianity, and his strong values—human kindness, respect, caring, integrity, duty—all derived from his faith. But he was very careful, while emphasizing those values, never to preach or proselytize on the children’s program. And he became, as an adult, a great student of many of the world’s religions and philosophies. He was very happy to find that the same humanistic values showed up in all faiths.

What do you think Rogers would want to communicate to children today?
Be yourself, be full of love, and be full of the joy of life and learning.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Good Neighbor.

Author photo by Joshua Franzos for The Pittsburgh Foundation.

With The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick, horror film producer Mallory O’Meara sets the record straight about the talented and glamorous Milicent Patrick, one of Disney’s first female animators and the only woman to have designed a classic movie monster—the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

When you first heard about Milicent Patrick at age 17, the discovery felt “like being struck by lightning.” How long did it take you to understand how important her inspiration would be?

It wasn’t until I started working in the film industry at age 23 that I understood the impact Milicent Patrick had on me. I was plunged into a male-dominated world, and suddenly the knowledge of her went from being inspirational to being crucial to my sanity. She was a constant reminder that I belonged in the world of monster movies.

Getting the tattoo of Milicent Patrick and the Creature from the Black Lagoon must have been one of the best decisions you ever made. Now that tattoo art is featured on the cover of your book. How’s that for a Hollywood ending?

Milicent was a metaphorical talisman during my first years as filmmaker, so it felt right to have her tattooed on my arm as a concrete reminder of everything she represents to me. No matter how far we advance in our chosen careers, we all still need reminders that we are capable and that what we do matters. Milicent Patrick is the embodiment of chasing your dreams in the face of hardship, even if—maybe especially if—your dreams are making strange things that the world has never seen before.

How would you spend a dream day with Milicent? 

One of the many things that Milicent and I have in common is our love of cocktails. My dream day with her would be the two of us at a bar—hopefully a tiki bar—talking over drinks.

Writing this story must have been a research nightmare. Your book contains 177 footnotes, which are informative and often hilarious. How did you decide on your footnote style? And when did you decide to include both your own story and the story of your investigative digging?

[At the time I was writing the book,] I was talking with a friend, and she wanted to know why someone who isn’t a fan of monster movies should read The Lady from the Black Lagoon. Immediately I said, “Because every day I, and thousands of other female filmmakers, go through what Milicent went through.” That was when I realized that including my own story and my own struggles against sexism would help illustrate how important both Milicent and her legacy are. The footnotes came along because that is my voice. I’m nerdy and sarcastic, so including footnotes with extra facts and bad jokes reflected how I actually talk. I’ve worked hard not to swear or say anything silly in this interview!

Milicent’s life and art have influenced countless artists like yourself. What was your experience of seeing the Oscar-winning film The Shape of Water, which was inspired by Milicent’s creation of the Creature?

Besides being a Creature fan, I’m also a massive fan of Guillermo del Toro, so I went to see The Shape of Water opening night. I burst into tears during the opening credits, cried throughout most of the movie and was sobbing so hard by the end of the film that my best friend had to bring me to the bathroom to clean all the mascara off my face. Seeing a film where the Creature was the hero and the protagonist was a woman with agency made my heart explode.

You note that “Women have always been the most important part of monster movies,” and yet horror is the least likely genre in which women work. Why is that, and is this changing?

There is a myth that women are less capable of making action-packed, violent or scary films. Therefore, less women get considered for jobs and hired. Male filmmakers get the jobs and get more experience, and are then considered more often and get even more work. It’s a cycle. It is changing, but slowly. The ratio of public outcry versus the amount of women actually getting hired is still pathetic. That’s why it’s important for fans to pay attention to who is making the films they see and to support the films made by women and gender-balanced crews.

What’s the scariest movie you’ve ever seen? And the scariest book you’ve ever read?

I saw Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining  when I was a kid, and it ruined me. It still scares me as an adult, even though now it’s one of my favorite movies. For books, I have a really high tolerance for scariness. The last book that really terrified me was Stephen King’s It, which I read as a teenager. I gave my copy away afterward to get it out of my bedroom!

Have you gotten any more life-changing tattoos? 

So far, none of the tattoos I have gotten have caused such a monumental shift in my life as the portrait of Milicent has. Although I will say that one of the tattoos I have gotten in the past couple of years holds a clue to what my next book will be.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Lady from the Black Lagoon.

Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women, tells a story of female pleasure and pain—of three women’s search for sexual fulfillment and the different ways society punished them for achieving it. She spent nearly a decade with these women, embedding herself in their lives to paint an intimate, breathtakingly reported portrait of desire.

Lina is a homemaker and mother in suburban Indiana, languishing in a passionless marriage to a man who won’t even kiss her on the mouth. Starved for affection, she reconnects with an old high school boyfriend and embarks on a life-changing affair. In North Dakota, we meet Maggie, a 17-year-old high school student who begins a romantic relationship with her married English teacher. A few years afterward, with no degree, no career and no dreams to live for, she steps forward with her story—and is met with disbelief by her community and the jury that hears her case. Finally, we meet Sloane, a gorgeous, successful restaurant owner in the Northeast who is happily married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men and women. For years, Sloane has been asking herself where her husband’s desire ends and hers begins.

We asked Lisa Taddeo some questions about the reporting process for this provocative, unparalleled book.

In the book, you talk about how the process of selecting your three subjects was somewhat organic, with some subjects taking themselves out of the running or dropping off for various reasons. Among the three women whom you ultimately wrote about, there’s a fair cross-section represented of socio-economic status. Maggie comes from a working-class family, Lina seems solidly middle class, and Sloane comes from money and is upper class—and it obviously colors their experiences. Was this cross-section intentional?
To an extent, yes, the cross-section was intentional. One of my many hopes for the book was that it would be geographically and socioeconomically and racially variegated. I also wanted there to be a wide range of sexual orientations. I was also still looking for male subjects, in some capacity. One of the first drafts I turned in to my editor had a wide range of subjects, satisfying most, if not all, of that range. But it was these three women whose stories were the most infinitely relatable and also the longest of the segments, because they had given me the most, told me the most. They were the most trenchant and clear and raw. The ways their communities reacted to them were the most indicative of the way society treats the marginalized, the disenfranchised. While the other smaller segments were interesting, they were not anywhere near as powerful as these three final subjects. And it felt that including anything more would have watered down their narratives.

One of the best things about the book is that it’s narrative journalism that reads like fiction. There’s rich internal monologue supplied for each woman. Are these detailed, private thoughts things they explicitly spoke to you about? Or were they things you extrapolated from the intimacy of your time together and the things you did talk about?
The depth of the internal monologues came from my asking the same questions multiple times and spending a great deal of time with them. It also came from being open about myself, from rendering myself as vulnerable to them as they were with me.

Obviously some considerable intimacy was achieved between you and the women you profiled. Can you talk a little bit about that process of earning their trust?
It was slightly different for each. Maggie was difficult because she had felt so terribly misused by the press in her state. Sloane is a very private person in a small community and was concerned about her reputation and that her children might find out. Overall it was a matter of spending a lot of time with each of them; of making the commitment, in two of the cases, to move into their communities; to assure them of my goals and hopes, that I would not sensationalize their stories but speak their truths in the best way that I could. As I mentioned earlier, I also gave a good deal of myself, when appropriate. I told them my own stories, talked about my own pain and passion. I believe a two-way street is the only honorable way to interview someone about their innermost thoughts.

Do you remain in touch with any of the women?
Yes, with all three of them. I hope we will always remain in touch.

As I read the book, I found that there were some parts that troubled me. Like the women in the accounts you present, there were aspects of female desire that I hadn’t considered very deeply, and the ones that hewed too close to home left a sense of discomfort. Was that any part of your experience, as you explored this sometimes unexpected territory?
Certainly, at times. Though mostly I felt comforted that others had experienced the same difficulties and tragedies. I felt united by having felt the same sort of passion, of having sacrificed for it.

Were you present during any of the events you describe? Or did the bulk of your descriptions come from interviews after the fact?
I was present for a number of them. In the cases when I wasn’t, I would try my best to re-create the milieu of the experience. For example, with Lina, I would often drive to the spot by the river or the clearing where she had just come from seeing Aidan, and I would sit there and take in the smells and sounds of the surroundings. For Maggie’s part, after asking her multiple questions about not just the interlude with the teacher but about everything she saw and heard, I would visit the locations where she had described being with the teacher. I would look at the same things she had described looking at. I would sit in the parking lot where she told me she’d sat, waiting for him, outside the restaurant. I drove through the streets she named. I did the same thing with Sloane’s story.

How did you find each of the women who would ultimately make up the narrative of the book?
I was in Medora, North Dakota, checking out a lead about a group of women who were working as waitresses by day and then, at night, being trucked into the local oil fields to have sex with the men who worked there and lived in trailers. In a coffee shop, I read about Maggie’s trial. I called her mother’s house and introduced myself, and the next day I was driving to Fargo.

I found Lina after moving to Indiana, somewhat to be close to the Kinsey Institute but also to get out of New York City, where I felt I was too much inside my own world. Far from where Lina lived but close to where her doctor practiced, I started a women’s discussion group, of which Lina was a part. She was right in the middle of wanting to leave her husband and of embarking on this all-consuming affair with her high school boyfriend.

With the third woman, Sloane, I had already been talking to several other people who lived in her community and had fascinating stories. I began by speaking to those other people first, but then I heard about Sloane through the grapevine. Gossip, mostly.

Maggie’s family in particular was extremely traumatized by the events she went through and how much the fallout shook them. Was it difficult to speak to them about subjects that had resulted in so much pain?
Yes, very much so. That was one of the hardest parts.

Though one of the women had occasional female partners, the book overwhelmingly focuses on female desire in the male/female dyad. Was this intentional? Or was it simply because of the women who ended up being in the book?
Not at all. It was purely because the final subjects made up the largest and rawest and most revealing segments of the book. Plenty of other subjects (included in the first drafts) covered the wide range of sexual proclivities, genders, races. But ultimately these three were the most comfortable with my presence in their lives at length and across poignant moments. And as a triad woven together, they told the most arresting—individual and yet cohesive—narrative.

You began and ended the book with your mother. Tell us a little bit about her and why you made that particular choice.
I thought it was important to give of myself at least 1% of what the subjects in the book gave to me and to the world. I also found, through my research, and as I say in the prologue, that it is most often other women who impress upon each other the most—who can make us feel bad or good about ourselves. Moreover, I found that mothers are such a powerful and lasting force in our lives. Part of the societal-social lexicon has always been the notion of “daddy issues,” which I think is, in and of itself, a very male take on the way a woman walks through the world. With most of the women I spoke with, I found it was, rather, the influence of the mother that weighed the most heavily on their life decisions.

My own mother was very quiet about her past, as I think women have historically felt they needed to be. She was wise and omnipresent but also removed. Her removal—the way that I could never really grasp her beyond what she presented to me—was fascinating and horrifying to me. She had a life in her brain that wasn’t meant for anyone but her. I think women are more reticent to speak of that inner life, those inner fears and desires, and that was something I wanted to show.

Did you meet any resistance from the men who were involved in the women’s narratives? To what extent are they aware of their place in the narrative?
I did meet resistance. I tried speaking with most of them. In some cases, the women I was speaking to didn’t want me to speak to the men in their lives. They were worried. I knew that if I pushed on that, I wouldn’t be able to tell the stories of the women.

But that resistance also pushed me into a new clarity, which was that these women’s stories deserved to be heard without echo. I did confirm the facts and feelings of some ancillary subjects of the book, but ultimately I was very satisfied with telling the stories from these women’s perspectives, as though they were writing their own histories.

As a woman writing for Esquire (a men’s magazine), did you find that those professional experiences colored the direction of the book?
In the beginning, to the extent that I had been on a male “beat” for a long while, yes. But that quickly changed.

With each woman, there were elements of their story left unresolved. How did you decide where to wrap up each thread?
With Maggie I was fairly set that her story would begin with the alleged relationship and stretch through the trial and beyond into the immediate aftermath. It was a clear beginning, middle and end. With Sloane, it was after she told me about certain events that transpired when she was a child, which brought her own realizations about herself to a sort of “conclusion.” Though of course life goes on for all of us, and for these women, I had to find an end for each of them. That said, I remain so very interested in all of their trajectories. I find the way Sloane navigates her life to be very strong and self-assured. Maggie’s trajectory, meanwhile, has changed the most; she is now an incredibly empathic and strong social worker. She has alchemized her pain into being a succor for others. With Lina, I think I could have gone on reporting forever, but I stopped myself because it had been nearly a decade.

What do you hope for male and female readers to take from this book?
I hope that all people realize we are all together in this—that hearing about someone’s heartache in depth is, unfortunately, very often the only way to stop condemning them. These three women have had moments of pure passion and of feeling exalted and utterly seen and lusted after and loved; they have, in turn, given up a lot for those moments. They have faced public and private scrutiny. They have been in agony at the hand of their choices but also at the hand of the experiences that were chosen for them, against their will. They were the heroes and the victims of their own stories, which often changed by the hour of the day.

Finally I hope that readers take away the truth that judgment is brutal, that nuance is vital to understanding one another, that we are all afraid, and we shouldn’t project our fears onto someone else’s choices.

What are you working on next?
I am thrilled to say that Avid Reader Press is publishing my first novel sometime next year and my collection of stories to follow.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Three Women.

Although it’s as well researched as any of the myriad George Washington biographies out there, Alexis Coe’s You Never Forget Your First approaches its legendary subject with a healthy dose of irreverence. We asked the historian a few questions about what it was like to tackle the life of the ultimate Founding Father.

You infused a fairly serious subject with humor and liveliness. How did you do it?
That’s the ultimate compliment! If history is boring, it’s the historian’s fault. I happen to have a dark sense of humor, and I realized early in my career that it was a useful tool—but not the only one in my arsenal. Being funny, being original, being analytical . . . it all requires serious mastery over a subject. Years of careful research and a critical eye allowed me to be funny in one chapter and dead serious in another and, hopefully, seamless in the transition. Oh, and lots and lots of drafts! 

What did you want to bring to the table as a female biographer that would shine a new or different light on Washington?
Previous biographers and I agree on the big goal of a Washington biography, which is to chisel away at the marble statue he’s become, but we go about it very differently. I questioned things they took as a given, and a whole new world opened up to me.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of You Never Forget Your First.

What was your research process like? 
Why are people sleeping on Founders Online, an open access site through the Library of Congress?! I had the absolute best time reading 18th-century letters on there—so much so that I found myself messing around after work hours, too. I highly recommend using random search words like “slut.” You’ll get Jefferson lecturing his daughter, and Washington’s old house manager writing to say that his slut died in the straw, which editors took to demonstrate Martha’s love of dogs.

Your research reveals Martha Washington to have been a reluctant public figure. Were she and George a good match for the life he chose?
They were both homebodies, but when they were in public roles, Washington got to have a lot more freedom and fun with it. But I do think they were a good match. He got the rich widow he needed to make it big, and she got the hunky, same-age husband she hadn’t had the first time around. They worked hard to make each other happy. That meant she had to spend a lot of time out of Virginia, and he had to raise her ne’er-do-well son and grandson. 

“If anyone could have changed the fate of black people in America, it was George Washington.”

One of the most fascinating aspects of your book is your unflinching reporting on Washington as a slave owner. How much does his reliance on enslaved labor tarnish his legacy?
If anyone could have changed the fate of black people in America, it was George Washington. No other founder had the stature, the reputation, the popularity. He could have set a powerful example in Virginia, then the biggest state in the country, by emancipating his slaves, but he didn’t until he was near the end of his life. He knew the world was changing and that he would be judged. And let’s not forget, he passed the buck to Martha. Half of Mount Vernon’s enslaved population knew they would be free when she set them free or died, and it’s pretty clear her fear of being murdered or burned alive motivated her to sign their manumission papers. She didn’t do the same for those she enslaved outright. 

Did this project change your feelings about Washington?
When I came to this project, Washington was a portrait, a hero, a myth. He wasn’t necessarily a real person to me, but now he is, and people are complicated. There are things I like and admire about him, and there are things that absolutely repulse me.

I had no idea our first president faced so many illnesses! And they had such names: carbuncles and bloody flux and quinsy. How much of an impact did Washington’s health have on his politics?
He took far more risks with his health than he did his politics!

What are your favorite books about American presidents?
I love anything by Doris Kearns Goodwin, whom I’ve had the great fortune to work with. I was so scared to show her the manuscript, and her blurb means the world to me. Also, Annette Gordon-Reeds’ work on Jefferson is incredible.

Your book Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis is being developed into a movie. How involved are you in that process, and what’s it like?
I went to Memphis with Jennifer Kent, the director and screenwriter, and walked and talked Alice Mitchell and Freda Ward for days. Since then, I’ve read drafts of the screenplay and given some feedback, but for the most part, I trust Jen! She’s managed to stay true to our girls and the spirit of the book but is also making something that’s also totally her own.

What do you think our Founding Fathers would think of the current state of American politics?
I can only speak for Washington. He would be enraged by the level of foreign influence Trump entertains and horrified at how Republicans continue to support him in order to stay in power.

You can invite any three presidents to a dinner party. Who would you choose?
Washington, of course, although he would probably be too distracted by technology and a woman wearing pants to focus. Still, I’m interested in experiencing his charisma, because that’s the hardest thing to get from descriptions. For that reason, let’s throw John F. Kennedy into the mix, too. And I’d love to talk to FDR! But honestly, with that crowd, I doubt I’d get a word in!

Author photo © Sophia Rosokoff.