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.

All Nonfiction Coverage

Filter by genre

Al Roker

by Priscilla Kipp

With Ruthless Tide, Al Roker offers a riveting account of the 1889 Johnstown Flood, one of the worst disasters in U.S. history, and shines a light on the human causes behind this tragedy.

Essays, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Essays

Pamela Druckerman

Interview by Lily McLemore

by Lily McLemore

In her crackling, honest memoir There Are No Grown-Ups, Pamela Druckerman (Bringing Up Bebé) navigates life, friendship, marriage and parenthood in her 40s while living in Paris and trying to remain (somewhat) sane. We asked Druckerman a few questions about the French approach to aging and coming to terms with the unsettling realization that when it comes down to it, no one really knows what they’re doing.

What’s the most impressively adult thing you’ve done lately (besides, of course, writing a book!)—something a younger you would never imagine yourself being capable of?
Earlier this month I gave a speech to American college students who were studying abroad in Paris. I explained how studying abroad changed my life, and I offered some advice. The “adultness” of this was partly structural, since I was more than twice their age. But it also came from the fact that I was extracting lessons—and even a few morsels of actual wisdom—from my own experiences. These were insights that I didn’t have when I was younger. It had taken years for them to crystallize.

Maybe it’s true what the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said: “The first 40 years provide the text, the next 30 provide the commentary.” By your 40s, you have a critical mass of experience, and the distance to look at the same things you’ve seen many times before, but see them differently.

Looking back, what advice do you wish you’d heeded in your 20s? Do you even think it would have been possible, or, as they say, is youth wasted on the young?
I wish I’d been more ruthless in my assessments of other people. I should have spent less time fretting about what others thought of me, and more time deciding what I thought of them. One of the joys of the 40s is that your neuroticism—your obsession with yourself and your own issues—declines. You can look at other people more clearly, and spot narcissists before they ruin your life. And if you don’t want to talk to someone, you don’t talk to them. I also wish I’d realized that practically no one in my peer group would partner up or start having kids before their 30s. I panicked when I wasn't married by 27—the age when my mother got married. I thought I was way behind schedule, and that I wouldn’t catch up. I didn’t realize that the schedule had changed. I really should have Googled it.

What’s the most surprising thing about being your 40s?
I’m surprised that I actually look like I’m in my 40s. Looking young had always been my superpower. Into my 30s, bartenders asked me for ID. I thought my body wouldn’t know how to look middle-aged, or that I’d have to give it explicit permission. But then people started calling me “madame” instead of “mademoiselle.” And elderly men started to flirt with me. Even more surprising was realizing that I’d changed on the inside, too. I had actually managed to learn and grow a bit.

How do you think French and American women view aging differently?
The American ideal is to look as young as you can for as long as you can (I had definitely striven for this). Nobody minds looking young in France, either. But the more realistic ideal is to look like the best version of the age that you’re in. (“Trying to look young is the quickest way to look old,” an older French model says.)

There’s a different sexual narrative for women, too. In America, the 40s can seem like a woman’s last viable years before she plunges into the sexual abyss, never to be heard from again. When I turned 45, a friend asked me, “Do you feel like you have five years left before no one wants to sleep with you anymore?”

The American statistics are pretty grim. A third of American women in their 50s haven’t had sex in the past year, and nearly half of women in their 60s haven’t. The 70s are practically celibate. (Men fare much better at all ages.)

I thought this decline was sad but inevitable. But then I saw that the French have a different story. Most people here also believe that younger women are sexier, and French women do have less sex as they get older. But it’s a gentle slope, not an abyss. I see couples in their 60s perusing lingerie racks together, and there are plum movie roles for older women. I interviewed older Frenchwomen for the book and heard some amazing stories. It turns out that what I thought was biologically inevitable was actually culturally determined. Knowing this feels liberating.

You write about the idea of being an expert, and that perhaps men are more easily viewed as such—you say you once had “mistaken being a grown-up for being a man.” How do you think men’s experience of aging and adulthood differs from women’s?
I’ve always been comforted by the idea that there are people—real grown-ups—running things. They know more than me, and they make life seem orderly, empirical and safe. If I’m an expert, it means that I'm one of those people. It’s existentially a bit scary, since even though I stand behind my work, I know my own limitations.

I’m not sure this feeling qualifies as “imposter syndrome.” But I’ve been surprised by how many accomplished women have some version of this. They say they’re not really qualified for the jobs they have, and they're afraid of being found out. One Ivy League-trained professor told me she’d absolutely understand if she doesn’t get tenure at her university, because she doesn’t really deserve it, and her colleagues are much smarter than she is. Whereas a male professor roughly the same age described the moment in graduate school when he realized that he could perform the same intellectual feats as his own professors. He felt ready to join their ranks. I’ve seen studies in which men overestimate their expertise, and women underestimate theirs. The two genders should probably meet somewhere in the middle.

You write about being considered a parenting expert after the success of Bringing Up Bebé, but feeling uncomfortable being labeled as such. What do you consider yourself an expert in?
By your 40s, if you’ve been honing one skill for several decades, you really do get better at it. I still find writing excruciatingly hard, but these days, after many rewrites, I can usually get to something decent.

You write, “When I meet a pretty mother from my son’s school, I no longer think, in a pointless loop, ‘She’s so pretty, she’s so pretty, she’s prettier than me.’” Instead, age has allowed you to hone your ability to decode and perceive people for who they really are. You’ve come to the realization that “that’s what the forties are: they’re a journey from ‘everyone hates me’ to ‘they don’t really care.’” How did you make the switch?
Another advantage of becoming less neurotic is that it’s easier to understand what’s going on. It’s amazing how much you can learn by just paying careful attention to other people and noting patterns. In my 40s, I notice what others care about, what their strengths and weaknesses are and—crucially—whether they have a sense of humor. I also realize that they usually aren’t thinking much about me.

It’s a relief to suddenly see more clearly. The world has become less perplexing and more pleasurable. I haven’t suddenly become the Buddha, but I’m in less of a fog.

In this state it’s easier to make friends. Instead of feeling isolated and different, you realize how much you have in common with other people, and you can trust that you’re having shared experiences.

Aging gracefully seems to be a trick mastered by French women, who are “not in permanent mourning for a previous version of themselves.” Do you have any tips on how to adopt this attitude?
I think this involves accentuating and enjoying the qualities that are specific to you, rather than striving for cookie-cutter perfection. As women get older, they look like they have a story. The French adjustment is to treat that story not as unwelcome baggage, but as part of a woman’s specificity and allure. “The beauty is to see the humanity of someone,” a Parisian beautician told me. “We don’t want to look like we come out of a box. We’re not frozen, we’re alive.”

What’s next for you? Do you have any thoughts, fears or big plans for 50?
I spent much of my 40s trying to chronicle what the 40s are like. It’s a very meta way to age. I’m looking forward to experiencing life in a slightly less examined way. Though of course I’d also like to write another book. I can’t help taking a few notes.

You’re a collector of rules and pithy phrases like, “Only friends can disappoint” and “Dress British, think Yiddish.” Your litmus test for their worthiness is if you can imagine uttering them as your last words. Do you any last words for us?
I’ll leave you with a French expression: “Old pots make the best soup.” Though for the record, I don’t qualify as an old pot yet.

Photo credit Dmitry Kostyukov

In her new memoir There Are No Grown-Ups, Pamela Druckerman navigates life, friendship, marriage and parenthood in her 40s while living in Paris. We asked Druckerman a few questions about the French approach to aging and coming to terms with the unsettling realization that really, no one knows what they’re doing.

Nell Painter

by Alice Cary

In her memoir Old in Art School, Nell Painter surprises everyone by returning to college in her 60s to earn degrees in one of her passions: painting.

History, Nonfiction, True Crime

Nonfiction True Crime History

Margalit Fox

Interview by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

Margalit Fox vividly remembers the day she first read about a case she could hardly believe: Arthur Conan Doyle personally investigated and helped commute the sentence of Oscar Slater, a wrongfully imprisoned German immigrant in Glasgow, Scotland.

Fox was riding the A train on her way to work. “I almost dropped the book in the middle of the train,” she recalls. “I thought, my God, the creator of Sherlock Holmes turned real-life detective and used those same methods to overturn a wrongful conviction. Why on earth isn’t this story better known?”

That was about thirty years ago. Fast forward to the present, and Fox, now a New York Times journalist, has brought the story to light in the endlessly riveting Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World’s Most Famous Detective Writer. The case was certainly a sensation in its time, and Fox begins her account in storybook fashion: “In Glasgow at the turn of the twentieth century, there lived an old lady whom few people liked.”

“She didn’t sound like a particularly nice woman,” Fox notes, speaking by phone from her office at the Times. “That said, she certainly didn’t deserve what happened to her.”

Eighty-two-year-old Marion Gilchrist was bludgeoned to death in her apartment on December 21, 1908, her face and skull smashed, most likely with a wooden chair. Gilchrist owned an expensive jewelry collection, but nothing was stolen except a diamond brooch. Residents in the apartment below heard strange noises, and one neighbor—along with Gilchrist’s maid who was returning from an errand—arrived at her doorstep just in time to see a mysterious, well-dressed man stroll out.

Slater was a Jewish immigrant from Germany, a gambler and an easy scapegoat for this high-profile crime. He was accused and wrongfully convicted, although police had determined his innocence within a week.

“It’s terrifying,” Fox says. “What just ripped my guts out is he had literally made arrangements for his own burial, and his sentence was commuted to a life at hard labor 48 hours before he knew he was going to be hanged. You’re not supposed to know the date of your own death. That just sends chills down my spine.”

Death is something that Fox deals with every day, having written obituaries for the Times since 2004 (she’s featured in Obit, a wonderful documentary film about the department). The work, it turns out, has been perfect training.

Speaking in the crisply enunciated, fact-filled sentences one might expect from a seasoned journalist, Fox elaborates: “Writing obits is really extraordinary training for writing narrative journalism in general, and particularly narrative journalism in which the lens of an individual life is used to examine larger social issues. And in this case, the social issues are all about the things that we see in the papers every day today: racism, xenophobia, class tension.”

As a writer who chooses each word with a surgeon’s precision, Fox could not be more clear-eyed about the importance of this story. “History is very, very much appearing to repeat itself,” she says, “so this 1908 murder in Glasgow has never been more relevant to America in 2018.”

Conan Doyle believed in Slater’s innocence from the start and became publicly involved with trying to free him in 1912. He was obsessed with the case; he scoured court documents and spotted myriad inconsistencies and fabrications by police and prosecutors. Despite Conan Doyle’s efforts, Slater continued to languish in prison for more than a decade, when a freed prisoner managed to carry a secret message—wadded into a tiny pellet hidden beneath his dentures—from Slater to Conan Doyle. The short message urged Conan Doyle to renew his efforts, and by 1927, Slater was freed, having spent more than 18 years in prison. Fox says, “Conan Doyle used almost to the letter the methodology of his most famous literary creation—and it worked.”

“History is very, very much appearing to repeat itself, so this 1908 murder in Glasgow has never been more relevant to America in 2018.”

The story has been largely untold, however, requiring herculean research on Fox’s part. She began in Scotland in 2014, requesting documents at various archives. She visited Peterhead Convict Prison in Aberdeenshire (which is now a museum), about which she notes: “It is freezing cold and wet and raining. I took a picture of the state of my umbrella after waiting for a bus for 20 minutes, and the umbrella had been completely decapitated and had its spine snapped. I can’t imagine 18-and-a-half years [there].”

Back at home, bulging files soon began arriving at Fox’s doorstep, “easily three or four thousand pages of documents,” including trial transcripts, police records, interview notes and letters to and from Slater’s family. It took Fox about 18 months to go through everything.

“I used the same skills we use doing daily obits on deadline,” she says. “The research is exactly the same. . . . [You’re] trying to distill all of these diverse, often atomized, often seemingly unrelated documents into one cogent narrative that one hopes gives the sense of a life.” In the meantime, she was riding back and forth to work and reading Sherlock Holmes stories during her daily commute. “Basically I was really tired and had no social life,” she admits.

The publication of Conan Doyle for the Defense marks a bittersweet time for Fox, who will soon retire to write books full time. She already has her next idea: a prisoner of war’s escape story.

“I know it has to be narrative nonfiction,” Fox confesses, “because I, unfortunately, was not born with a fiction gene. I would love to be able to just make stuff up and be relieved of the onus of having fealty to historical facts—but no such luck for me.”

This article has been modified from the edition originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Ivan Farkas.

Todd Richards

by Lily McLemore

In late May, Atlanta chef Todd Richards published his first cookbook, Soul, which celebrates his evolving relationship with Soul food. For Richards, Soul food is far from narrowly defined—it encompasses a myriad of influences and regions, from his mother’s love of Chinese food to a childhood predilection for fried pies. It’s also deeply personal.

Arts & Culture, Essays, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Essays Arts & Culture

Alice Bolin

Interview by Lily McLemore

by Lily McLemore

In her debut collection of essays, Dead Girls, Alice Bolin explores America’s undeniable fascination with murdered, maligned and silenced women. Here, we ask her about serial killers, Britney Spears and LA freeways.

What do you think is the driving force behind America’s obsession with dead girls?
There are probably too many forces to get into. The noir Dead Girls are like contemporary America’s version of Catholic virgin martyrs, whose bodies were also the site of both veneration and violence, and whose deaths often sprang from male hunger and rage. These are ambiguous icons. Dead Girls are the most potent evidence we have of our culture’s misogyny—but their prevalence also seems like a way to police women’s behavior, a warning that theirs could be our fate. The popular obsession with dead women is symptomatic of America’s deeper feelings and biases toward women. What do you think some of these deeper feelings are? I think it probably says more about our feelings about men—the way their primacy in our society bulldozes everyone else’s desire, success and freedom. Violence against women is startlingly common. Women are so often collateral damage in men’s refusal to deal with failure or frustration. Many noir stories take this everyday misogyny and make it about—who else?—men. Fascinatingly twisted and broken murderers take helpless victims while stoic detectives face the evil of humanity by avenging the Dead Girl. Women’s daily desires and fears are often completely absent in these stories.

The Dead Girl is everywhere, from “Twin Peaks” to popular fiction and “Dateline.” Can you give a general character sketch of the titular Dead Girl?
I would say in general a Dead Girl is a pretty, white teenager who is either mysteriously missing or horribly murdered, though those demographic markers vary. Most importantly, the Dead Girl captures the popular imagination—the Dead Girl obsession is absolutely related to what Gwen Ifill famously called “missing white woman syndrome” when discussing the ways that media coverage of white female victims took precedence over every other victim of violent crime. These dead women have more in common with glamorous poster girls than “characters”—we don’t know the Black Dahlia or Natalee Holloway or a victim on “Law and Order: SVU” in anything other than smiling snapshots or gruesome crime scene images.

Why do you think there is a tendency to mythologize serial killers, to make them seems almost supernatural and hyper-intelligent, when in reality, they are, as Jess Walter writes, “the kind of broken, weak-minded loser who preys on women on the fringe of society”?
The myth that serial killers are superhumanly charming, manipulative, intelligent and cruel keeps us from finding more systemic reasons for why many men have gotten away with brutalizing and killing women over and over again for years—law enforcement’s attitudes towards both marginalized women and middle class white men, for instance. It also makes one feel less guilty about our very basic fascination with hideous violence.

Can you explain the evolution of your understanding of the Britney Spears song “. . . Baby One More Time”?
“. . . Baby One More Time” came out when I was in fifth grade, and I swear I had this weird, immediate sense that it had changed the paradigm of pop music. The song’s lyrics are opaque, but its sonics are unforgettable; the images in the music video are so vivid, and yet they do very little to illuminate the song’s meaning. I was 25 when this repeating lyric in the song struck me: “My loneliness is killing me.” What a strange and yet appropriate thing for a teeny-bopper to sing! Loneliness is one of my abiding interests in this life, since we all go through it, but we go through it alone. It made me think deeper about Britney and her genius.

What about your relationship with the writing of Joan Didion?
Didion is one of my heroes, as she has been for a generation of women writers. I essentially moved to Los Angeles because of her. I wanted to absorb some of the brainy, sun-soaked alienation she traded in. I have evolved from simple hero worship with Didion, though, especially in writing this book, where I have had to confront some of the problems I see in her approach. I always loved her as a writer of place, but her California mythmaking is attractive because it calcifies a complex, changing place to an idea. Her stubborn romanticism about California is interesting because in general she is so skeptical, which is probably her strength as a writer; in her analyses, she takes very little for granted. But when you are skeptical of everything, it is difficult to make moral judgments. The concerns of the rich and poor, the powerful and powerless are all equally hollow and ridiculous.

Do you see parallels between media’s coverage of attractive murdered women and the coverage of female celebrity icons?
Yes! That is one reason why I chose to think about those living icons—Britney Spears, Joan Didion, Patty Hearst—in the same book as the dead ones. To me this is about that damaging, amoral concept of glamour, where women are valued for being sexy, stylish and mysterious, and a woman can be equally glamorous walking a red carpet or, as Patty Hearst did, spraying Crenshaw Boulevard with bullets. There is a very cruel glamour to being a Dead Girl, which is why the #deadgirl hashtag on Instagram is filled with selfies from living, if spooky, women. Being valued for your loveliness and silence, for the mystery you represent, is not limited to Dead Girls, and is a tendency I think living women should be wary of playing to.

The only thing I think about when I think about Los Angeles (a place I’ve never been) is freeways. Didion writes that the experience of driving in LA is a “kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway.” What’s your relationship to LA’s famed roadways?
I grew up in Idaho, where, as my dad so often said, “There are no roads.” It is one of two states without a north-south interstate highway, and much of the state is wilderness. I had never experienced driving on freeways like the ones in Los Angeles before I moved there—like, ever—and had to learn the rules of driving on them by Googling it. But because I grew up in such an isolated place, driving for hours and hours to get somewhere feels very natural to me. Driving across LA on a congested freeway felt like an extension of, say, driving the lonely stretches of I-90 in eastern Montana. Nevertheless I walked and rode the bus far more than anyone else I knew in LA, for financial reasons and because if I moved my car there was always a chance I wouldn’t be able to find another parking place. Those alternative modes of transportation were just another dimension to the impossibility of getting anywhere in LA and more public opportunities to listen to music on my iPod and cry.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Dead Girls.

Photo credit Justin Davis

Robert Anthony Siegel

by Lily McLemore

In his deeply personal and compassionate collection of essays, Criminals, Robert Anthony Siegel explores his unusual upbringing as the son of a charming, erratic criminal defense attorney, whose ethically dubious practices eventually send him to prison, and a culturally eloquent mother who was always reaching for more. I asked Siegel a few questions about his family, the Hells Angels and the unexpected solace he found in Eastern traditions.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Camas Davis

Interview by Lily McLemore

by Lily McLemore

Camas Davis cares deeply about the integrity of animals’ lives. She is also a butcher. In her beautifully written memoir, Killing It, Davis makes it clear that these two aspects of her life can peacefully coexist. Davis’ lucid, striking prose recounts a life-altering journey that began when, directionless and brokenhearted, she booked a flight to France with the last of her funds to spend seven weeks learning how to be a butcher in Gascony.

I met up with Davis at an airy coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, where she now runs the Portland Meat Collective, a school where Davis and various chefs and butchers teach classes about responsible meat consumption. Using animals sourced from local and trustworthy farmers dedicated to raising animals humanely, the collective instructs the curious on slaughter, butchery and cooking practices.

But the road to the Portland Meat Collective was a crooked one for Davis. Growing up in rural Oregon, Davis regularly went hunting and fishing with her father and grandfather, both avid outdoorsmen. “I wasn’t squeamish about dead fish or guts or plucking feathers from ducks,” she says. “It was just a part of how I thought about the world.” In her teens, however, the hunting and fishing fell by the wayside, and she eventually became a magazine editor and entered a long-term relationship with the man she thought she would marry.

“In my late 20s, early 30s, I was very orthodox. I worked for magazines, that was what I did, that was my career. I was going to do it forever.” And then it all fell apart. After leaving her relationship, she lost her job as a magazine editor in Portland. Davis was despondent, but she also realized that she was now free to do whatever she wanted, and what she truly longed for was authenticity—not to just write about the genuine article, but to live it.

It was then that she decided to return to her childhood connection to land, life and death by exploring butchery. “I’ve sort of been fascinated with it for years, as a food writer,” she says. “I was always very excited to work on stories about butchers or about chefs who did butchery, or even just a cut of meat. For some reason, that subject matter felt like it had more of a story than a tomato—which is not true. A tomato has as much of an interesting story as anything else. But I guess the story of the tomato is much more accessible, and I’m always the person that’s like, ‘I want the inaccessible story.’”

Staying with Kate Hill—an American living in France who hosts travelers on gastronomic journeys—on her compound in Gascony, Davis ventured out to find the inaccessible. She went to work for the Chapolard family on their farm, and it was with them that she found something she felt was truly authentic. The Chapolards raise their own pigs on grain they grow themselves, and they own a nearby co-op slaughterhouse. The family gathers together to butcher the animals, and they turn every part of the pigs into hams, loins and the more obscure delicacies that Americans balk at: head cheese, blood sausage, trotters. They then sell the products at market. Davis was enamored with their practices, but she doesn’t romanticize it.

“I think, generally, we’re weirdly afraid of food.”

“There’s so much about the disappearance of the agrarian way in modern times. It’s now becoming this myth, this caricature,” she says. “There’s definitely this sort of nostalgic ideal of what a butcher is.” Davis makes it clear that there’s not much about butchery that is charming. “I really struggle with that in the work that I do. I never want to give the impression that any of this is easy—that it’s easy to kill an animal, or that it’s easy to raise good meat, or that it’s easy to sell the whole animal.” But Davis is committed to bringing meat to the table that comes from animals that lived good lives and died as humanely as possible. It’s a serious matter, and Davis is a serious, deeply curious woman who is driven to poke at what others find unappealing.

Like pig brains, for example. In Killing It, Davis reflects upon the brain from a pig’s skull that she’s just cleaved open: “So much of what we do is in the service of keeping opposing ideas at bay inside ourselves. Isn’t this what we’re doing when we eat meat without taking part in the process that brings it to our tables, without ever being required to stare back at the animal that made that meat possible?”

To take part in this process is to grapple with a uniquely American wariness of food, in particular raw meat. “I think, generally, we’re weirdly afraid of food [in America]. We’re afraid of what it will do to us, we’re afraid of how to use it in the kitchen, we’re afraid of where it comes from. And yet, we don’t really do anything about that fear.”

Davis doesn’t shy away from that fear; she seeks it out and confronts it. She begins her memoir by recounting a pig slaughter, watching the life drain out of a 700-pound sow. “There’s a lot of assumptions we make about what that moment [of death] is like,” Davis explains, “and some of those assumptions are correct. It can be gruesome. It can be like horribly haphazard. It can be mechanized and scary. But it doesn’t have to be.”

Davis surmises that a large part of Americans’ unease toward meat is ultimately wrapped up in the big fear: death. Davis wants to inspect that fear, handle it and understand the whole bloody mess of it. “Everything I’m writing about in this book about [the] death of animals for food is really just a larger metaphor for how we think about death in general, and the ways in which we hide all of that.”

When asked about her favorite cut of meat, Davis’ answer comes as no surprise. “I tend to like the cuts that no one else likes. . . . They tend to be cuts that you have to cook for a long time or smoke or grill on indirect heat. The complex cuts.” In that same spirit, Killing It puts uncomfortable, complex truths out on the table, no matter what they are, and digs in.

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Cheryl Juetten.

Maxwell King

by Kelly Blewett

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

Art, Arts & Culture, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Arts & Culture Art

Mary Beard

Interview by Alice Cary

by Alice Cary

Mary Beard has an extraordinary knack for making art history palatable. She has been called “Britain’s most beloved intellectual,” and this summer Queen Elizabeth II honored her many achievements by naming her a dame.

She is a classics professor at the University of Cambridge, but her scholarly journey seems to have started with a piece of cake. As a 5-year-old in 1960, she visited the British Museum, where she desperately wanted a better look at a 3,000-year-old carbonized piece of cake from ancient Egypt. That’s when a curator did something she’ll never forget: He reached for his keys, opened up the case and put that piece of cake right in front of the wide-eyed little girl.

Speaking by phone from her home in Cambridge, England, Beard acknowledges, “The idea that some old guy, or so he seemed to me, sees a kid trying to look, and what he does is open the door for you—that’s a moving moment.”

Opening up doors to history is exactly what Beard has been doing in her long career as a professor, television host and author, including in her bestselling revisionist history of ancient Rome, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. This spring, she was featured in a new BBC series, “Civilizations,” which is now available on PBS.

In highly readable prose accompanied by a wealth of pictures, her companion book to the series, How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization explores both the depiction and reception of ancient art. She examines images of the human body, and also of God or gods. In doing so, she travels the globe and gallops through history, witnessing a sunrise in Cambodia at Angkor Wat, visiting art-filled caves in India, traipsing through the Mexican jungle to see Olmec heads, wandering through the ranks of China’s terra-cotta warriors and admiring a modern Turkish mosque in Istanbul.

“You start to see how these things are incorporated into our own lives and the lives of people of the past.”

She’s a plain-spoken, down-to-earth guide, from the top of her long, flowing gray hair down to her fashionable sneakers, which allow her to get up close and personal with a cavalcade of art masterpieces. Her enthusiasm is contagious as she clambers alongside a 65-foot-high Roman statue, the Colossi of Memnon, saying, “I’ve waited half my life to be here!”

“Blimey!” Beard recalls. “That’s when you realize it’s vast. I’m sitting on his foot, and that’s big, and there’s a whole statue there.” Later in our conversation she circles back to how affected she was by these encounters: “If I look impressed and a bit moved, it’s because I was. It’s kind of exciting and slightly terrifying in a way, to be so up close to those things. I’ll never forget it.”

Unlike many art historians, Beard doesn’t simply focus on the lives and methods of artists, whom she describes as “one damn genius after the next.” Those stories interest her, but she points out that there’s much more to contemplate.

“I think that just as—or more—interesting is what people made of [the art], how they saw it and what they did with it,” she says. “Simply to concentrate on that one moment in which this work of art was created—usually by a male creative genius—is not to see enormous amounts about the history of the object: [not only] what it was for at the time—how people understood it then, how radical it was then—but also what happened to it over 2,000 years and how people have used it differently and thought about it.”

She notes, “We’re in the picture, too. That all has to be part of the discussion. It’s widening the sense of what the history of art is. As I say, ‘putting us back in the picture.’”

Take nudes, for instance. Today’s art viewers take them for granted, or as Beard phrases it, “not just one damn genius after another, but one damn Venus after another.” But the idea of displaying the naked female body was once really “in your face,” as first evidenced by the Aphrodite of Knidos, carved by Greek sculptor Praxiteles around 330 BCE. Nudes have now become “part of the stereotype of the greatest hits of world art,” Beard says, then offers a counter perspective: “It’s quite important to think about why something that we now think of as very much part of the standard tradition was, once upon a time, so difficult, awkward and upsetting, actually.”

While affirming that she’s a great admirer of museums, Beard cautions that they “encourage you to look at objects in kind of standardized ways.” In contrast, she loved seeing artworks that were “either somehow in their original setting in churches or were kind of out there, just in the world.” One high point was a visit to an unfinished sculpture still in its quarry in Naxos, Greece, which offered a very comfortable place to sit.

“This sculpture has been in the world of this village for two and a half thousand years now,” she notes. “You start to see how these things are incorporated into our own lives and the lives of people of the past.”

Beard hopes that both the book and television series will give museum-goers more ownership of what they see. “I hope they’ll feel closer to [the art] and have a sense of a right to speak about it.”

She also offers this important advice for museum visits: “Don’t spend too long. Spend an hour there, look at three things, and then go away. Actually go and really get to know something. There’s nothing worse than watching people being somehow herded through museums.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m getting old,” Beard says, “but I find I get terrible museum legs after about an hour and a half.”

This article was originally published in the September 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Robin Cormack.

Anne Boyd Rioux

by Carla Jean Whitley

In the loving and extensively researched Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Anne Boyd Rioux explores the history and enduring power of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women on the 150th anniversary of its publication. In a Q&A with Rioux, we asked her about her own relationship with Alcott’s novel, the March sisters and other female authors of the era.

American History, History, Nonfiction

Nonfiction History American History

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Interview by Deborah Hopkinson

by Deborah Hopkinson

Award-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has coalesced her presidential expertise in her stunning book on four presidents, Leadership: In Turbulent Times.

You were already familiar with these four presidents: Lincoln, two Roosevelts and Johnson. What surprised you most as you looked at them again?
Collectively, I had studied these four presidents—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson—for almost five decades, so I thought I knew them pretty well. But when I went back to study my guys—as I like to call them—anew, through the exclusive lens of leadership, I was surprised by how much there was still to learn about their lives as young people, when they first realized in themselves that they were leaders, and how they grew into their leadership positions through loss, self-reflection and experience. I got to know them more intimately than ever before—and I hope the reader feels the same.

Perhaps historians shouldn’t have favorites, but you close your book with reflections on Lincoln’s death and legacy. Is he perhaps your favorite president?
Yes, you are correct on both accounts. I’m not sure I should have a favorite, but I do—and it’s surely Abraham Lincoln. Confident and humble, persistent and patient, Lincoln had the ability to mediate among different factions of his party, and was able, through his gift for language, to translate the meaning of the struggle into words of matchless force, clarity and beauty. For me, it is Lincoln’s legacy that burns the brightest. He saved the Union, won the war and ended slavery forever.

Neither Franklin Roosevelt nor Abraham Lincoln lived long enough to lead the peace they worked so hard to achieve. Do you feel America would be different had they finished their terms?
Though Abraham Lincoln recognized that the challenge of Reconstruction was even greater than winning the war, he was without doubt the best man to face that challenge. Above all, he wanted a healing tone toward the South as evidenced in his Second Inaugural. Yet at the same time, Lincoln would have been fiercely protective of the rights of the newly freed slaves. As for Franklin Roosevelt, how I wish he could have lived to see the end of the war and the beginning of the United Nations. I do believe, though, that Harry Truman carried out much of what FDR would have done.

If you were to add a fifth president to this book, who would it be?
If I were to have added a fifth president to this examination of leadership, it would have been George Washington. I realized only when I finished the book that taken together, my four guys—Lincoln, Teddy, FDR and LBJ—form a family tree, a lineage of leadership that spans almost the entirety of our country’s history. Lyndon Johnson looked to Franklin Roosevelt as his “political daddy”; Franklin Roosevelt’s hero was Theodore Roosevelt; Theodore Roosevelt saw Abraham Lincoln as his role model; and the closest Lincoln found to an ideal was George Washington.

Have you ever been tempted to write about a living president?
No, there’s not been a living president that I’ve been tempted to write about because I am so in need of handwritten diaries and intimate letters and the kinds of correspondence you wouldn’t have with a president living now. Communication today is much, much faster, which may prove a challenge for future biographers. With email and social media, we have a breadth of information but I don’t think a depth that we had in the past.

Today we have more former presidents living than at any other time in history. If you could get them in a room, what is the first question you would ask them?
I would ask them why there’s not a club for former presidents. It’s such a small, exclusive group, yet they rarely meet or advise each other. When Barack Obama was president, he asked me to help organize a group of historians who would come to the White House as the presidents we’ve studied—not dressed in costume but bearing their stories and offering advice and camaraderie.

Your interactions with Lyndon Johnson gave you first-hand experience of this president. In a few years, we’ll be coming up on the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Which of our early presidents do you wish you could interview in person?
I would love to get the Founding Fathers all in one room and talk to them—a historian’s dream come true!

You write that the example of Lincoln’s leadership has provided the leaders who came after him with a moral compass. How can Americans in a divided nation rediscover a shared purpose and vision?
What history teaches us is that leadership is a two-way street. Change comes when social movements from the citizenry connect with the leadership in Washington. We saw this with the antislavery movement, the progressive movement, the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement. Whether the change we seek will be healing, positive and inclusive depends not only on our leaders but on all of us. What we as individuals do now, how we band together, will make all the difference. Our leaders are a mirror in which we see our collective reflection. “With public sentiment,” Lincoln liked to say, “nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.”

Americans seem to witness new tensions between the press and the White House on a daily basis. Are we in an entirely new era, or has this all happened before?
There have always been tensions between the press and the White House, especially with presidents bristling at criticism. But I do believe we are in new and dangerous territory now in the era of President Trump deeming the press the “enemies of the people” and frequently making “fake news” claims. Think back to Teddy Roosevelt’s time and the kind of collegial relations he formed with the press—inviting reporters to meals, taking questions during his midday shave, welcoming their company at day’s end and, most importantly, absorbing their criticism with grace. A celebrated journalist mercilessly lampooned Roosevelt’s memoir of the Spanish-American War by claiming Roosevelt should have called the book Alone in Cuba, since he placed himself at the center of every action and every battle. Roosevelt replied with a capacity for self-deprecation: “I regret to state that my family and friends are absolutely delighted with your review.”

Many Americans feel we are living in turbulent times. As a historian, what advice do you have for us?
People stop me on the street, in airports and restaurants and ask, “Are these the worst of times?” We are living in turbulent times, certainly, but the worst of times—no. I would argue that it’s the lack of authentic leadership in our nation today that has magnified our sense of lost moorings, heightened our anxiety and made us feel as if we are living in the worst of times. The difference between the times I have written about and today is that our best leaders of the past, when faced with challenges of equal if not greater intensity, were not only able to pull our country through, but leave us stronger and more unified than before. We cannot ignore history, for without heartening examples of leadership from the past, we fall prey to accepting our current climate of uncivil, frenetic polarization as the norm. The great protection for our democratic system, Lincoln counseled, was to “read of and recount” the stories of our country’s history, to rededicate ourselves to the ideals of our founding fathers.

You will be traveling across the country this fall to talk about your book. What do you think audiences will most likely want to ask you about leadership in turbulent times?
With Abraham Lincoln on the cover and my four guys on the back of the book jacket, people have asked me how this book is relevant today. Using history as my guide, I sought to shine a spotlight on the absence of leadership in our country today through the analysis and examples of leaders from the past whose actions and intentions established a standard by which to judge and emulate genuine leadership. The study and stories of Presidents Lincoln, the two Roosevelts and Johnson set forth a template of shared purpose, collaboration, compromise and civility—the best of our collective identity in times of trouble. Through Leadership: In Turbulent Times, I hope I’ve provided a touchstone, a roadmap, for leaders and citizens alike.

What are you working on next?
I am still thinking about what’s next! In the meantime, I am working on some film and television projects and preparing to spend the next three months traveling around the country talking about leadership.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Leadership.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo credit Annie Leibovitz.

Award-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has coalesced her presidential expertise in her stunning book on four presidents, Leadership: In Turbulent Times.

Susan Orlean

by Alice Cary

The idea began with an interview. Susan Orlean’s then 6-year-old son had a school assignment to interview a city employee in their new hometown of Los Angeles.

Want more BookPage?

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Trending Nonfiction

Nonfiction Politics Memoir

How to Stand Up to a Dictator

Maria Ressa

By Sarojini Seupersad

Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.