With candor and humor, Connie Chung shares the highs and lows of her trailblazing career as a journalist in her invigorating memoir, Connie.

LGBTQ+, Memoir, Nonfiction

Frighten the Horses

Oliver Radclyffe’s Frighten the Horses is a powerful standout among the burgeoning subgenre of gender transition memoirs.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Health and Safety

Emily Witt’s sharp, deeply personal memoir, Health and Safety, invites us to relive a tumultuous era in American history through the eyes of a keen observer.

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Todd McLellan

by Joelle Herr

Biography, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Biography

Jill Lepore

Interview by Amy Scribner

by Amy Scribner

We learn about Benjamin Franklin—the very epitome of an American—from kindergarten onward. But history has forgotten the women who shaped his life, including his youngest sister.

In the remarkable Book of Ages, Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore examines the life of Jane Franklin Mecom.

Largely uneducated, poor, married to a man who likely suffered from mental illness, “Jenny” nonetheless remained close with her famous brother throughout their lives. “Benjamin Franklin’s life entered the annals of history; lives like his sister’s became the subject of fiction,” Lepore writes. “Histories of great men, novels of little women.”

Lepore answered our questions on how she brought to life this unknown but influential woman—and why she wanted to shine a light on what it was like to be a woman in the 18th century.

The scant paper trail for Jane Franklin Mecom nearly caused you to abandon this project. Why did you persevere?

I abandoned the book partly because the paper trail was less a trail than a broken twig every 500 yards or so and partly because it always led to a place of misery. There were 17 Franklin children. Benjamin was the youngest of 10 boys, Jane the youngest of seven girls. Benny and Jenny, they were called, when they were little. You want, in a story about people who start life almost like twins, for them to someday trade places. The Prince and the Pauper. A Tale of Two Cities. Jane and Benjamin Franklin never trade places. Narratively, that drove me nuts. But then I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times about Jane—it’s called “Poor Jane’s Almanac”—and the response I got from readers knocked me out: They wanted to know, they begged, When is the book coming out? And what they loved—what they wanted to read more about—was the sorrow. Who knew. So I trudged back into the woods, and let myself get lost in the misery.

The writing in Book of Ages is almost poetic. Which was harder: researching or writing?

The writing, because I wanted to do right by her—I wanted the storytelling to be worthy of her story—and that was daunting. Jane Franklin never went to school. She never learned to spell. But she loved reading, and she loved books. I wanted to write something that found the words she fumbled for.

Jane was a wife and mother who never had formal schooling. Her brother Benjamin became wealthy and famous, while Jane’s husband was thrown into debtors’ prison. What do you think made these siblings so close despite their very different lives?

She was the anchor to his past. He was her port to the world.

Benjamin wrote to his sister when she was 14—and he hadn’t seen her for three years—to say he’d heard she was “a celebrated beauty.” There are no portraits of Jane. What is it like to write about someone whom you can’t picture? Did it matter to you?

It killed me. It’s not only that there’s no portrait but also that no one ever describes her, except for this one throwaway “celebrated beauty” business, and it’s hard to know how to take that. (Franklin teased her all the time.) In “The Prodigal Daughter,” a New Yorker article I wrote about the writing of the book, I tell the story about how, when I went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to look at a mourning ring that Jane once owned, I slipped it on, when no one was looking. It was so tiny. It barely fit on my pinky. I thought, “She must have been so small.”

You write that Edward Mecom, Jane’s husband, was either a bad man or a mad man. Which do you think he was?

I expect he was a lunatic. Two of their sons went violently mad and Jane makes all kinds of vague remarks that, to me, suggest that whatever was wrong with them was wrong with her husband, too. Madness doesn’t often survive in the archives, though. People will do just about anything to destroy evidence of insanity.

Geraldine Brooks has written about your book that Jane “was trapped by gender, starved of education.” What do you think Jane could have been in another era?

I am a huge fan of science fiction that involves time travel but, as a scholar of history, I believe that we can never know what people would be like in an era other than their own. We live in a place in time; we can’t be unmade.

We learn about Benjamin Franklin—the very epitome of an American—from kindergarten onward. But history has forgotten the women who shaped his life, including his youngest sister. In the remarkable Book of Ages, Harvard professor and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore examines the life of Jane Franklin Mecom. Largely uneducated, poor, married to a man […]

Andrew Solomon

by Kate Pritchard

We talked to the author about the families he spoke with, the writing process and how his research on parenting has influenced his relationship with his own children.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Pat Conroy

Interview by Jay MacDonald

by Jay MacDonald

Long before Augusten Burroughs was running with scissors, a big-hearted Southern whirlwind of a writer named Pat Conroy served as America’s unofficial poster boy for family dysfunction.

The eldest of seven siblings raised under the violent iron fist of a celebrated Marine Corps fighter pilot, Conroy sought refuge and revenge by channeling his nightmarish upbringing and its aftereffects into such gut-wrenching, cinema-ready novels as The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides. The success of his prose on page and screen didn’t prevent the real-life marriage meltdowns and numerous personal breakdowns that come with having the devil himself as your muse.

More than a decade in the writing, his new memoir The Death of Santini marks Conroy’s coming to terms with his “Chicago Irish” father, Don (nicknamed the Great Santini, after the trapeze artist, for his aerial prowess); his indefatigable Southern belle mother, Peg; his unsinkable grandmother, Stanny; sister Carol, the prickly family poet; and brother Tom, whose suicide plunge at 34 from a 14-story building came to manifest the malignant memories that haunt his siblings.

Conroy was inspired to undertake his memoir in 1998 after writing the eulogy for his father, which he uses to close this book, both literally and figuratively.

“I needed some kind of summing-up, a wrap-up for the direction that my career has taken me,” Conroy says. “I’ve been so family-obsessed that I wanted to try to figure out what it all means and come to some conclusions.”

Despite the book’s dark subject matter, readers may be surprised to find The Death of Santini uplifting, and at times downright funny, as the author casts off punch lines and personal demons with every page. Conroy approves but takes no credit for this reader-friendly chiaroscuro.

"I've been so family-obsessed that I wanted to try to figure out what it all means."

“When you say it goes from light to darkness, that sounds like it should be, but I’m never very good at that,” he admits. “I had good editing, good people reading the book from the very beginning and arranging it.”

One of those clever souls was Conroy’s wife, the novelist Cassandra King (Moonrise), who helped steel the author through his father’s final days. The couple married a week after Don Conroy’s death.

“My father adored her,” Conroy says. “Dad used to say, ‘What does Sandra see in you, son?’ And now, poor Cassandra has been marinated in the Conroy family madness.”

Fiction provided a means for Conroy to process the constant belittling, badgering and physical and mental abuse the family suffered at the hands of his larger-and-scarier-than-life father. But when the budding author dared to expose the family secrets in the guise of the Bull Meecham brood in his 1976 debut novel, The Great Santini, the family was horrified.

“One of the things my brothers and sisters have had to ask ourselves is, did this all happen? What was the result of it happening to us? How do we relate it to our children or our wives or husbands?” Conroy says. “We’re all screwed up, coming through Mom and Dad. That was a difficult country to travel in, but we traveled it, we made it through, and somehow we survived it.”

That fragile illusion would be destroyed years later when Tom, who’d had a minor role in the film version of The Great Santini, ended his life in Columbia, South Carolina.

“But Tom did not survive it,” Conroy continues, choking up. “Tom can bring us to our knees. We all feel we failed him, left him behind. We were not watchful or vigilant enough with Tom to help him survive.”

Conroy’s mother, who tirelessly encouraged him to pursue a writing career, was in her glory when the film premiered in her hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina, where it was filmed. She would later submit the novel into evidence in her divorce from Don.

As for Don, the best-selling novel and the film that followed sparked a love affair that knew no bounds.

“With my father, it wasn’t a flirtation with Hollywood, it was a marriage,” Conroy recalls. “When he finally realized that I had killed him in the movie, he was furious for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t figure out why until he said, ‘You f__ked up the sequel!’ He did take that role utterly seriously. There were license plates of the Great Santini, hats of the Great Santini. Going to Dad’s apartment was like going to the county fair, only the county fair was based entirely on him and all the rides were Santini rides and all the clowns were Santini clowns. He could not get enough of it.”

The family uproar over The Great Santini and his subsequent novels continues to this day. When his siblings got wind that big brother had a memoir in the works, Conroy couldn’t help having a little fun at their expense.

“They always said, ‘You won’t be able to write this, Pat, because no one will believe it.’ My brothers and sisters are terrified of this book,” he says. “Of course, I was telling my brothers that I was giving them sex-change operations and my sisters that I was going to have them marry monsters and their children were going to be the devil’s spawn. But now that it’s coming out, I’m worried about their judgment.”

Having exorcised his demons, Conroy is working on a new novel and his first young adult book, neither of which involves family ghosts.

“I’m going to try to leave the family in peace,” he vows. “There are other things to write about. Of course, I’m ashamed that I didn’t think of this until I was 90 years old!” (Conroy is slightly inflating his age: He turns 68 just before his memoir’s October 29 publication.)

But his dark journey did lead him to a surprising conclusion about the family that fueled much of his career.

“Being born into this family was the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “It just took me a long time to realize it and 40 years to write about it.”

Long before Augusten Burroughs was running with scissors, a big-hearted Southern whirlwind of a writer named Pat Conroy served as America’s unofficial poster boy for family dysfunction. The eldest of seven siblings raised under the violent iron fist of a celebrated Marine Corps fighter pilot, Conroy sought refuge and revenge by channeling his nightmarish upbringing […]

Mark Nixon

by Lynn Green

Memoir

Memoir

Chris Hadfield

Interview by Joelle Herr

by Joelle Herr

On July 20, 1969, 9-year-old Chris Hadfield decided that he wanted to be an astronaut. The difference between this Canadian boy with stars in his eyes and the millions of other kids who experienced the same revelation after watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon? Hadfield became one. From that day forward, he resolutely strove toward his goal, attending a military college, becoming a test pilot for the Canadian Forces, and eventually beating out more than 5,300 other applicants to become a Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut in 1992.

Over the course of 20 years, Hadfield spent more than 4,000 hours in space, capping off his distinguished career with a five-month stint serving as the Commander of the International Space Station (ISS). You may recognize him from the video of his (David Bowie-blessed) rendition of “Space Oddity,” which racked up an out-of-this-world 10 million views in its first three days on YouTube and now—five months later—boasts nearly 19 million views.

In his best-selling An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Hadfield takes readers on a fascinating and exciting journey while offering insightful—if somewhat unconventional—wisdom applicable to everyday life here on Earth. Hadfield spoke with us about the book from Chicago, just one stop of many on his international book tour.

The thrillingly detailed description of your first Space Shuttle launch (aboard Atlantis in 1995) left me holding my breath, feeling as if I could at least somewhat imagine what it must have been like to experience. How much—if at all—did you struggle with writing this part?
Launch is an overwhelming physical experience. It’s immensely powerful and multisensory and hugely anticipated. I’ve thought about it, of course, a lot. It’s one of those things that you’ve trained for and thought about so long that during the event you’re hyperaware. I’ve had a chance to describe it many times, to students and organizations. The way I write is to kind of blurt it all out, and then I go back and selectively prune and edit and look and see which words I’ve repeated and things I could have been a little more expressive with. But as for the launch itself, I’ve thought about it and tried to describe it to the best of my ability, and writing about it was just a natural extension of that.

You’re afraid of heights? How does that jive with being an astronaut?
I think being afraid of heights is a good thing. There are some fears you ought to have. You should be afraid of zombies. You should be afraid of a Tyrannosaurus rex—anything that is a large and expected threat to yourself. For me, standing on the edge of a cliff with no way to stabilize myself—that’s fear-making. It’s one of the few things that give me a real irrational, physiological reaction, where my heart speeds up and I feel kind of a weird falling sensation in the pit of my stomach, and my legs don’t behave properly.

To me, though, that’s OK. It’s my body telling me: Don’t do this. But the real key is, what do you do about it? Do you let the fear keep you from trying things that might be inherently interesting to you? How do you come to terms with it so that you don’t end up denying yourself maybe some of the greatest pleasures of your life?

In the book, I talk about how irrational fears are mostly just limitations on opportunities in life, and if you can truly break down what it is about that fear and understand all of the key ways to avoid that fear of doing what it is that scares you, then you can manage [the fear], and then do some things that you wouldn’t do otherwise—like do a space walk or live onboard a space ship.

You point out that most astronauts are not daredevils, which may surprise a few folks. Can you elaborate?
Thrill seeking and being a daredevil would kill you if you were an astronaut. The way it’s portrayed in a lot of movies as kind of this cowboy attitude of free-wheeling and taking great chances—you can’t be that way at all. For one, the consequences are very high. It’s not like you’re just in your own backyard trying out a diving board. This is extremely complicated equipment—someone else’s equipment—and you need to treat it with reverence and respect. But also, the risks are really high, and what motivates astronauts is not blindly taking risks and hoping that you survive, but instead very methodically understanding the risks and never taking one where you’re not convinced that you’re going to win.

When I was a test pilot, I did some things that might seem inherently crazy if you don’t consider the yearlong efforts in advance to understand them so that you knew, yes, there is still a risk there, but I have done my work up front and in such detail and with such attention to sweating all of the small parts of it that I’m confident that I will prevail, and to this point in my life, I’ve been right. I’ve done these things that have an inherently high risk, but I’ve done them because I thought the results were worthwhile. And I’ve managed the risk to the point that I haven’t had to deal with unintended consequences. That’s the real beauty of it all. It’s the adrenaline rush with the ability to manage the risk so that you can become successful. That’s the real thrill and the pleasure of it for me, and I think that’s true for all astronauts.

Hadfield channeling David Bowie onboard the International Space Station (photo: NASA)

It’s unusual for someone to be promoting “the power of negative thinking.” What exactly do you mean by it?
Well, a lot of people say: Visualize success. And I’ve never understood that. Visualizing success to me is like visualizing [pause] ice cream. It’s nice, but it doesn’t get the ice cream made. It doesn’t keep the ice cream cold. If you really want to be successful, then you have to actually visualize the reality of it, and if you want to improve your odds of succeeding in something complicated, you’re much better served to visualize failure.

But don’t just visualize failure, of course, because then you just get depressed, thinking about failure all of the time. Visualize what it is you’re trying to do, and recognize that it’s probably not going to go that way, and then look at all of the ways that it could fail, and then have a plan of attack for when those things happen. The more you have visualized failure in advance and figured out how you’re going to react when this goes wrong, if that happens, then you can apply it to anything, to a family picnic or setting up a new business.

If you want to walk across Niagara Falls, set up your tightrope one inch above the ground and do it a thousand times, and drop your pole sometimes, during a big gust of wind sometimes and . . . with bees [laughs]—anything else you can think of that might go wrong—and then you have a much greater chance of success.

With this come an optimism and a confidence. You don’t live in fear of things that you haven’t gotten ready for. Instead, you live with a nice serenity as a result. It may seem kind of odd that by visualizing failure, you can achieve serenity and calm and optimism, but that’s how I feel about pretty much anything. And I apply it not just to riding rocket ships, but to how I approach everything in my life.

And would you describe yourself as an optimist or a pessimist?
Oh, I’m an optimist. Absolutely. You can’t ride rocket ships for a living if you’re a pessimist. I’m very optimistic, but I’m a very carefully reasoned optimist. I’m not optimistic because I think that things are going to randomly turn out well. I’m optimistic because I’ve looked at things closely enough that I really understand the plusses and minuses and risks and benefits of all of the little variables that I think are going to affect my life. And then I’ve put myself in the position that—if you exclude acts of God and random things—I’m ready for. This gives you a comfort and an optimism that are reinforced all the time and become a way of life.

Your extensive worst-case-scenario training enabled you to keep calm during some seriously panic-worthy moments. Is there one that you look back upon and marvel at your ability to avoid panicking?
A big part of it is being able to ignore everything that you shouldn’t do, and part of that is repeating to yourself: What’s the next thing that’s going to kill me? That’s a really exaggerated way to put it, but in the cockpit of a rocket ship, it is the truth. You can’t be thinking about what’s going to happen three hours from now or about how things are going back home or any sort of distraction, because there are things happening in the next 10 seconds, 30 seconds, where if you don’t do your job right, it will kill you.

For example, coming into dock with the Russian space station Mir, we had complete disagreement between all of the sensors that were [guiding us], coupled with a tiny window of time that we had to do the docking. It was only the second time that it had ever happened in history, and a tiny little target and tremendous pressures, and yet even though it did not go as planned at all, I had to focus and say: OK, none of that other stuff matters. The fact that nothing’s going as planned matters. What matters right now is this is the information we have, and this is the objective we have to focus on. How can I use what I have in front of me to be successful?

I ended up just eyeballing it and saying: What’s the truth that I have? The lasers are letting me down. The main systems are letting me down. What I have is that I know this thing is 15 feet long, and I know that thing is three feet across, and I know where this camera is, and I hold up my thumb up here, and then I do the math with just my wristwatch and say to Ken Cameron, my commander, “Fire the thrusters right now because that’ll get us in the window to be able to dock at the right time.”

So, when I look back on it, it was a pretty stressful situation, but at the time, it was very much the product of all of the preparation and the realistic simulation and kind of a vindication of why we had spent so long getting ready for this thing. Nothing really went as planned, but everything was somewhere within the scope of what we were ready for. And that’s a wonderful way to go through life.

How exactly does one break into a space station with a Swiss Army Knife?
[Laughs] That was such a funny surprise for me. . . . We drove up and plugged the shuttle up to Mir, and I went down to the end to open the hatch, to have the big triumphal moment, the greeting of the crews and all the rest of it. I got to the hatch, and some overly assiduous and enthusiastic Russian technician had tied up that hatch and all of the mechanisms like, I mean it looked like the Mummy—yards and yards all over it.

I was looking at it, thinking I never saw this in training anywhere. The knots were pulled incredibly tight, so I thought, Well, gosh, I have my Swiss Army Knife in my pocket. So I just started digging into it and cutting strapping away. On the other side, Sergei Avdeyev and Yuri Gidzenko are kicking and pounding on the hatch, and I’m waving to them through the little window. Finally, I got all of the stuff cut out of the way and all of the tools freed up and could finally turn the hatch, equalize the pressure and open up the door.

Right at that moment, I turned around and smiled at the camera. Because my brother loves his Swiss Army Knife, it occurred to me that he would love this moment, so I turned around to the camera, holding my Swiss Army Knife, and I floated it at the camera and waved. If you go to the Victorinox Museum in Switzerland, they play that clip over and over.

That was the day I broke into Mir with a Swiss Army Knife.

What was the toughest part of your five-month stint on the International Space Station?
The toughest part was getting enough sleep. I would get up at 6:00, and then the prescribed activities would keep me busy from that moment until about 8:00 at night, broken down into five-minute increments—every single thing we’re supposed to do in five-minute increments, right up to 8:00 at night. So, there’s not much latitude to get ahead of schedule or do anything that isn’t what NASA needs you to do. So, the personal projects that I wanted to do—to really share the experience and get good photography of the world and to record music and stuff like that—I had to do in my personal time, starting at 8:00 or 9:00 at night, when you’ve been up since 6:00 in the morning. I would finally drift off to sleep at about 1:00 in the morning. And I’d do that seven days a week, for five months.

And so the hardest part, I think, was trying to really live the entire experience, to not miss it. It was hard, and I returned to Earth tired and worn out, but immensely satisfied with the work we’d done—we set records for the number of hours of science done, for operational use of the space station. We responded with just a few days left to do an emergency space walk to help save the health of the space station, and we had a huge social media outreach, including millions of people in what we were doing. The hard part was trying to squeeze all of that stuff in, but I returned to Earth very happy with the body of work that the crew and I had put together.

The best part?
The best part was sharing with the guys on board. There were moments of huge communal laughter, of celebrating birthdays, of holidays, of being in the cupola and seeing something magnificent on Earth and having someone else silently float by—just by happenstance—and join you at the window and the two of you seeing something nearly miraculous together and having a chance to point it out to someone else and go Look at that! That’s the best part, to have shared the experience with other people.

The breathtaking view from the cupola of the International Space Station (photo: NASA)

You may have retired from NASA/the CSA, but hopefully you don’t plan on retiring from YouTube anytime soon. What’s next for you?
[Laughs] I think I’ve counted it up, and I’ve retired five times so far in my life. Retirement, the word, has all sorts of false connotations to it. I have all sorts of plans. For now, of course, the book. We just found out that it’s going to be #17 on the New York Times bestseller list, which is hugely gratifying to us.

There’s all sorts of folks who are interested in having me come and talk about my experience, and so I’m doing that. We’re trying to help people—like I’ve been doing for 20 years as an astronaut—to show folks the opportunities that exist, to especially young people, to let them see the horizons, to not just go with their conclusions based on the home or the school or the town or wherever they’re growing up, but really see that there’s the opportunity to take advantage of some pretty incredible stuff that’s out there. That’s the import of why I go speak on the road and why we wrote the book.

Our son, Evan, who managed the majority of the social media during the flight, has been helping with that, and we recently made another YouTube video just sort of showing the whimsy and the fun of the book itself, and that’s gone viral as well, which is really fun to see.

A lot of people are asking me to join their efforts, whether it’s to help run a school or run a business or there are other causes that hopefully I can apply some of the notoriety and influence that I have now to help those causes flourish. We’re in transition right now, climbing down one particular ladder and ready to climb other ladders as time goes on.

Tom Ambrose

by Alden Mudge

Nonfiction

Nonfiction

Andrew & Stephen Schlesinger

Interview by bookpagedev

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. played a unique role in American life. The author of many acclaimed works of American history and biography (his accolades included two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards, the Francis Parkman Prize and the Frederic Bancroft Prize), he also enthusiastically embraced the role of friend and confidant to significant movers and shakers on the national political scene. He was a speechwriter and adviser to presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, and is probably best known for his position as a special assistant to President John F. Kennedy.

Schlesinger was also a prolific letter writer whose wide range of correspondents included fellow intellectuals, literary figures, government officials, Hollywood celebrities and fellow citizens who agreed or disagreed with his views on history or current events. His sons, Andrew and Stephen, have gone through this treasure trove of about 35,000 letters, most of them never before seen by the public, to compile The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. As editors of this new collection, the brothers selected letters “that best articulate his essential beliefs and reflected the movement of the times,” and which highlight that the “abiding theme of his correspondence over a 60-year period is his preoccupation with liberalism and its prospects.”

During a recent book tour stop in Nashville, Andrew and Stephen Schlesinger answered questions from BookPage about the mammoth task of compiling their father’s letters—and what readers can learn from them.

BookPage: Although your father regarded liberalism as a “fighting faith,” in these elegantly written letters there is a tone of respect and candor, reasonableness and civility, even with those with whom he strongly disagreed. Would you speak about the tone of the letters?
Stephen Schlesinger: It’s remarkable. He wrote to Adlai Stevenson suggesting that he should have a more appropriate way of addressing public forums, keeping his thoughts short and clear. He does this to a lot of people he admired. He’s very frank with them, like the remarks he made to John F. Kennedy about Profiles in Courage. Kennedy wanted him to be “ruthless” in his criticism.
BookPage: And he was.
Andrew Schlesinger: He was a college professor accustomed to working with graduate students, and Kennedy appreciated that.
Stephen: It was remarkable that he could have been so frank in [a] letter he wrote to Stevenson before his second nomination in 1956, [but] Stevenson kept him on.
Andrew: His arguments were reasonable. They made sense. For many people he was the liberal conscience.
Stephen: A lot of the candidates wanted his approval. Whether it was Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton, they’re all there trying to get support from him—whether it be verbal or a letter—something that would give them validation with the liberal constituency at large.

BookPage: The letters demonstrate your father’s marvelous gift for friendship with such a wide range of people. Would you give us some insight into this quality?
Andrew: A lot of the people he met during World War II are the same characters who reappear years later. They have authority, which people develop over time. Sometimes he has great difficulties with these friendships.
Stephen: One of the great calamities of this country was the Vietnam War. Three of the people he had considered close personal friends—Hubert Humphrey, Joseph Alsop (columnist), and Henry Kissinger, who had been his colleague at Harvard—he broke with all of them. He was unvarnished in his criticism of all of them and his letters show that. He felt so profoundly about this. In a strange sort of way, I think he thought he was doing them a favor. He writes these letters in each case to continue the argument, to be more persuasive about our involvement in this terrible war, to have an impact on their thinking. And, of course, all of them are committed to the war, so they brush him off. But, I felt that the letters were very eloquent and straightforward—rather persuasive from the standpoint of practicality. As Andy said, he had this passion throughout his life all related to this liberal theme. He was willing to take on his friends. He was willing to be, in a sense, a lightning rod for criticism because he firmly thought this was right. He’s very consistent.
Andrew: He’s a great American patriot. He thought it was his job to protect America, to push this liberal agenda of affirmative government.
Stephen: He was attracted to talent . . . people in their younger years who were going to amount to something when they were older. They continued to pop up in his life.

BookPage: Geoffrey C. Ward has written of this collection of letters, “No one who wants to understand how it was to live through the second half of the 20th century in America should miss it.”
Stephen: I think it’s fair to say this book is a mini-history of the liberal movement over 60 years. It’s a reflection of the many challenges the liberal community faced in all these difficult decades.

BookPage: The collection is so well annotated, so good at identifying personalities and events.
Andrew: We published the (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.) Journals several years ago and we didn’t get the chance to annotate. We had three months to prepare for publication. So this was a great opportunity to identify all those people. Now you can read Journals as a companion volume to the letters.

BookPage: How was your father able to be as productive as he was, as a brilliant writer and renowned historian, among other things, and remain such a prolific letter writer? You mention letters as his “paramount means of communication.” But there are only so many hours in each day. Was he very well organized and where did letter writing rank in his priorities?
Stephen: He did have very good secretaries. But, you’re right. And he was not only doing that [the letters], he was doing 17 books. He was doing eight or 10 letters a week. He was a movie reviewer, believe it or not. He was teaching, a full-time faculty position, dealing with students [and] out on lecture tours. He was writing speeches for politicians. He was a great socializing person. He hosted dinner parties. He had animal energy, that’s what he had.
Andrew: He would work night and day. If he was at home, after dinner he would go to his typewriter or later, his word processor. He would get up early in the morning. He was a very hard worker. He was well organized up until the end.
Stephen: What hampered him at the end was that he had Parkinson’s disease.

BookPage: I was impressed that your father never talks down to people who are not public figures—whether the subject is why does he wear bow ties or [if he] is asked to draw a sketch of himself.
Stephen: We carefully wanted to make sure that we included letters to people who were not public figures—fans, critics, people who had a grudge—just to show he treated people with equal respect.

Andrew: He felt that if someone took the time to write him a letter, he should respond.

BookPage: Your father was different from Henry Adams—quite a different person, different era and issues—but as I was reading your father’s letters, I was reminded of Henry Adams’ letters. Your father mentioned Adams many times in the essays in his book, The Cycles of American History. I felt that your father’s letters had some of the qualities of Adams’s letters and that they would endure.
Andrew: My father would be glad to hear that. Henry Adams was one of his great American heroes.
Stephen: My father even wrote a play based on the Adams novel, Democracy. The dynamo image that Adams talked about [in The Education of Henry Adams] was recurrent in what he talked about—the speeding up of life because of technology was something that very much caught his eye.

BookPage: I was impressed by his letter to the president of Little, Brown—his own publisher. He came back from Europe after World War II and urged his publisher (of his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Jackson) to publish George Orwell’s Animal Farm. But because a key editor, who turned out to be a faithful follower of the Communist Party, opposed, Little, Brown does not publish the book. Your father is outraged at this decision. The book is picked up by another company and is published to great acclaim.
Stephen: My father wrote a piece for Life magazine in 1946 about the Communist Party. He became a leader in the Americans for Democratic Action, a leading anti-communist group, along with John Kenneth Galbraith, Eleanor Roosevelt and other luminaries. But he was one of the key leaders, and he took a lot of fire from both the right and the left because of what he was doing.
Andrew: Rebecca West on the right and Lillian Hellman on the left. Remember—in 1945 the Communists were trying to penetrate other organizations. He helped to found the ADA to confront the popular front that made liberals look bad in America.
Stephen: He wrote the book The Vital Center, [where he attacked] left-wing totalitarianism and fascism on the right: communism on the one side and fascism on the other. Even as he opposed the Communist Party, he didn’t feel that it should be outlawed. He was also persistent about writing letters to Harvard University about not banning speakers because he felt that violated free speech on campus.

BookPage: You knew your father and his work very well. Were there any surprises for you as you worked with his letters?
Stephen: I didn’t know that Groucho Marx had sent him a letter. [It praised a Schlesinger book he had read.]
Andrew: And Sammy Davis Jr. The four or five pages he wrote to Kennedy about Profiles in Courage . . . for me, it was the totality of the letters, his dedication to the promotion of liberalism. There was the letter that our father wrote to Jacqueline Kennedy after the assassination.
Stephen: There was the letter he wrote to John Kenneth Galbraith, his best friend, late in Galbraith’s life. There is a lot of humor in the letters as well as serious commentary.

BookPage: In a letter your father writes, “Through the years, [Reinhold] Niebuhr more than anyone else I have known has served as the model of a really great man.”
Andrew: He was not a religious man. But he saw a line between what Niebuhr preached and what Kennedy did. You have got to act. Everybody has to stand up against evil.
Stephen: Until he met Niebuhr, I don’t think he really understood the nature of sin in terms of human nature.

BookPage: Your father was good at proposing political strategy. Did he ever consider running for office himself?
Stephen: Not that we know of. He was an activist. He was an historian. He had written books about [Andrew] Jackson and FDR, he had worked for Adlai Stevenson, so when the Kennedy years came, he had some ideas about political strategy. He loved politics. He defined his life every four years by the cycle of democratic conventions. From 1948 on, he was at almost every democratic convention.

Scott Stossel

by Alison Hood

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Gary Shteyngart

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

After writing three critically acclaimed novels, Gary Steyngart turned to memoir. Little Failure, published this month, is an unsparing, often funny, account of Steyngart’s anxiety-ridden life from his early childhood in Russia, through his family’s immigration to Queens, New York, and ending with the publication of his first novel. Our reading of the memoir raised some additional questions, which Shteyngart answered via email.

You've written three successful novels. Why a memoir now, earlyish in your career?
Earlyish? I'm 41. That's 76 in Russian years.

You dedicate Little Failure to your parents and to your analyst. Readers will discover why. What does your analyst have to say about you honoring him this way?
He seemed pretty happy, although he doesn't really say much of anything. It's old-fashioned Freudian-like therapy where I just blather on and he keeps mostly quiet.

You describe a father frustrated by his failure to achieve his dreams who was abusive to you. Does he still believe the adage you quote in the book that "Not to hit is not to love"?
I don't think so. Now it's all about love without hitting.

Ok it was a mistake. But your father took you to see the film Emmanuelle: The Joys of a Woman? How old were you?
Old enough to know I was watching the best film ever made, young enough not to know what to do about it.

Like many Russian Jews who left the Soviet Union, your father idolized Ronald Reagan. Early on you did too. You describe your then self as a "ten-year-old Republican." While your father is still a conservative, you are not. What happened?
Oberlin College, that's what happened. Plus a general softening towards people. On my part.

You write that from your mother you inherited, among other things, "fanatic attention to detail." What traits did you inherit from your father?
Dark humor, love of nature.

You were severely asthmatic as a child growing up in Leningrad. Soon after you arrived in NYC at age 7 your symptoms seem to have disappeared. What's the explanation for that?
I think the asthma went away when I hit puberty, which I believe happens to many children.

You didn't entirely lose your Russian accent until you were 14. How much of a conscious effort did you make to speak American English like a native?
I practiced in the mirror like crazy. When I got a TV, I got a Texan accent (“Dallas” was on).

"Soviet vacationing was a rough, exhausting business," you write of your childhood trips to the Crimea in the 1970s. Where do you travel for fun these days?
To the Crimea of America. It's called Miami Beach.

You graduated summa cum laude from Oberlin College—despite the recreational excesses that earned you the nickname Scary Gary. Who coined the phrase and what episode inspired the coinage?
I can't fully recall who coined it. I think at some drunken party someone said, "Oh, look, even Scary Gary is here." A nickname was born.

Really? You never, ever had writer's block?
Sorry. I have many other problems, though.

What's your favorite photograph in the book? Why?
Maybe the one on the cover. Most boys would grab the steering wheel of the toy car, but I was scared out of my mind. I knew what the insurance rates in Leningrad were like.

Little Failure essentially recounts your life until the publication of your first novel. But in passing, jumping ahead, you several times mention your wife. You're married? Do tell.
I am married! To a woman! She's very nice!

Patience Bloom

by Joelle Herr

As a veteran editor of Harlequin romance novels, Patience Bloom has had the enviable job of facilitating fairy-tale love stories between heroric hunks and whip-smart heroines for 16 years. When it came to her own affairs of the heart, though, Bloom's dating life was far from picture-perfect. In her 40s and after many short-term relationships that ended in disappointment, she nearly gave up on love—until reconnecting with a high school acquaintance offered a shot at her very own happily-ever-after.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Carol Wall

Interview by Kelly Blewett

by Kelly Blewett

When Carol Wall hired a neighbor’s gardener to improve her long-neglected yard, she never imagined that the Kenyan immigrant would transform her outlook on life as well. In Mister Owita’s Guide to Gardening, Wall reflects on what she learned from their special friendship.

What did you like best about Giles Owita?
Giles was always optimistic. He always had a smile on his face. He had a deep knowledge of all things horticultural. And I always admired and envied how he was able to fully immerse himself in the work that he loved. He always seemed to give everyone and everything his full attention. And he had a way of explaining complicated concepts with elegance and simplicity. He was a teacher at heart. He taught me to have faith.

You initially resisted some of his ideas for your lawn. How did he teach you to love flowers?
Oh, how I wish he were here to answer that question himself! When I first told Giles I didn’t want flowers, he somehow managed to answer me with an affirmative response. I now understand that since he was so stubborn, this was merely his way of acknowledging my request while at the same time not acting upon it at all. When the flowers appeared that spring, they led me to examine a lot of what I’d been keeping under layers of protective covering: my childhood, my parents, my family and my illness. This probably wasn’t Giles’ intention (though who knows, he was always smarter than all of us) but that’s what happened.

This was originally a book about breast cancer, but your son recommended that you refocus it to include your friendship with Mr. Owita. How did including the friendship change and enrich your manuscript?
I was really struggling with writing this as a memoir about surviving breast cancer. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to write in the first person, believe it or not. Introducing Giles helped me focus the narrative. His character took some of the pressure off, strangely, and made me more comfortable with sharing my experience. It’s poetic in a way—our friendship helped me embrace and accept life, and his spirit has helped me explore and accept my true feelings.

You write that he was the best professor of your life. Yet that wasn’t what you expected when you first met him. Why not?
I expected that he might simply help to improve my shabby-looking yard. I thought of him as a hard-working gardener, but assumed that we had very different life experiences. Little did I know!

What were some of the things that drew you together?
On the face of it we were as different as two people could possibly be. But it turns out we had so much in common: the unexpected similarities in our life experiences, the need to adjust to a “plan B,” the importance of faith and family, the desire to learn and to teach.

This is a book about so much—gardening, life, illness, transitions. What were some of the major life changes that you and Mr. Owita walked through together?
We both had experienced events that involved loss, fear, guilt and shame. Our friendship allowed us to share and process our experiences without fear of judgment.

What do you hope readers will take away from this story?
Giles taught me so many things that changed my life. He embraced and accepted life’s afflictions, something that took me a while to come around to. (His cane in my study reminds me of that.) In the end, I guess it’s that sometimes the loveliest secrets and treasures appear where we least expect them.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of this book.

Madhulika Sikka

by Hilli Levin

Madhulika Sikka's new book, A Breast Cancer Alphabet, is here "for anyone who has been diagnosed with breast cancer and needs a companion."

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