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Megan Marshall estimated that it might take her 3 ½ years to write her first biography. In would up taking 20. Her commitment was worth it, though. In this episode of the Drafting the Past podcast, Kate interviews Megan Marshall about how she approaches the subjects and structures of her books, and what has kept her going—plus, why she believes biography is essential now.

Megan is a writer and biographer who got her start writing book reviews. Her first biography was The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism. It was awarded multiple prizes and became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography and memoir. Her second book, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, won the Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and her third book was Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, a biography of the poet, Bishop, interwoven with chapters from Megan’s own life leading up to her study with Bishop. She has also been awarded the BIO award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization.

This year, she published a book of essays called After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart. It includes pieces on her family’s history, her own encounters with historic events, and some further investigations into research that didn’t make it in to her other books.

Mentioned in this episode

• Megan Marshall, After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart
• Megan Marshall, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
• Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life
• Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism
• Megan Marshall, “How Do You Like Your History? With Imaginative Leaps or Grounded in Fact?” New York Times, March 7, 2025
• Biographers International Organization
• Megan Marshall, “Born in 1810, Margaret Fuller Was Labeled a Child Prodigy. She Later Used Her Intellect to Ask Important Questions About Women’s Role in America,” Smithsonian Magazine, Summer 2026
• Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian

Welcome to the Drafting the Past podcast. I'm

Kate Carpenter, and in each episode, I interview a historian

about how they research and write history. Today's guest

thought her first biography might take her three and a half

years to write. It took 20, and at times, she told me, she was

afraid she might not finish. What a gift to all of us that

she did, and has gone on to write three additional books. I

was thrilled to be joined for this episode by Megan Marshall.

Thank you, Kate. I'm really excited for this

particular podcast at this particular time because history

is under assault, and we have to do our best to keep getting the

stories out.

Megan is a writer and biographer who got

her start writing book reviews. Her first biography was *The

Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism.*

It was awarded multiple prizes and became a finalist for the

Pulitzer Prize in Biography and Memoir. Her second book,

*Margaret Fuller: A New American Life* won the Pulitzer Prize in

biography, and her third book was *Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle

for Breakfast,* a biography of the poet Bishop, interwoven with

chapters from Megan's own life leading up to her study with

Bishop. She has also been awarded the Bio Award, the

highest honor given by the Biographers International

Organization. She has also won many other honors that I won't

list here, but suffice to say, those 20 years were well worth

it. This year, she published a book of essays called *After

On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart.*

It includes pieces on her family's history, her own

encounters with historic events, and some further investigations

into research that didn't make it into the other books. Our

conversation was such a pleasure, and you'll hear from

Megan about how she approaches the subjects and structures of

her book, and what has kept her going. Plus, why she believes

biography is essential now. Enjoy my conversation with Megan

Marshall.

You know, I didn't necessarily start out to

be a biographer, although looking way back when I was a

child, my grandmother was the children's librarian in

Pasadena, where I grew up, in the main library, and I spent a

lot of time there with her. And I loved children's biographies,

particularly of women, Amelia Earhart and Marie Curie, and I

loved reading, you know, novels about brainy little girls as

well. You know the the children's biographies were

about brainy little girls or adventurous ones who grew up and

did something, and then there were the, you know, Little Women

and Little House books, and and I loved books also that made me

cry because you know something moving took place towards the

end, and I always thought you know I did want to become a

writer. I thought it'd be the greatest thing possible to move

somebody else to tears by reading something I had written.

So it seemed like that was something to aim for, but I had

no idea how to do that. And I was-I had skipped a grade in

school, so I was always kind of a little behind. And if we were

doing writing things, you know, mine was never the one put up on

the board, and I never made it into the poetry club in high

school. But by the time I was in college, I kind of I took some

time off and came back as a transfer student to Harvard,

where I was lucky to get into some poetry writing classes. And

suddenly, poetry became the thing I thought I would do,

particularly because you know I was always writing papers for

classes, and it got you know these long, long things, and

poetry seemed wonderfully short. But at the same time, I was an

English major. We were studying American literature for the most

part. That was my interest, and and it was in the era still of

New Criticism where you didn't talk about the authors at all.

But I found myself kind of secretly reading biographies of

Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and that sort of thing, just

wanting to know what the lives of these writers was like. So I

had that interest in their lives and letters that was kind of a

subversive one. And then I had was taking classes, poetry

writing classes, with some eminent writers, Robert Lowell

and Elizabeth Bishop, and kind of getting glimpses into their

lives. So when I left college at a time when there were few jobs

in academe, I thought I'm not going to try that, and I began

working as a freelance writer, writing book reviews. The thing

I most enjoyed was, you know, looking, kind of analyzing

books. How did they work? And I was writing some reviews for the

New Republic of American history and biography, and and then I

wrote a first book that was about women today. You know,

single women who I considered the pioneers of feminism and the

sexual revolution and the, you know, entering the professions.

This was in the early '80s, and I thought this was going to you

know make a big splash because this was news to everyone. What

what were these women really doing? What and and in the end,

I think the book came out too soon. It was, you know,

misunderstood by a lot of people, and I thought, I'm going

to just leave this women today thing behind. And go back to my

interest in how people grew up to do whatever it was they did.

I and I thought, you know, I was interested in at that time not

just one woman but a group of women. How did they make the

different choices that they did? And that led me to the Peabody

Sisters, my first biography, which you know I had not done

any kind of research in archives before, I was teaching myself on

the job, and I was lucky to be based near the Massachusetts

Historical Society, where there were very generous archivists as

well as fellow scholars working on papers there. So you know, I

was launched into this whole world of reading zillions of

handwritten letters, and often they were from the 19th century

that were in sometimes difficult handwriting and cross writing

where they'd write across you know one page.

Anyway, I just fell in love with that process, and it took me a

long time to finish that book. But I had found what I really

wanted to do that brought together, you know, the brainy

girls growing up to do something, the American

literature, the biography that interested me, and and the kind

of close reading that I had learned both in you know as an

English major and in these poetry workshops where you know

every word had to matter, so it all kind of came together, and I

felt very good about what I was doing, but it was taking a very

long time. I was raising kids, you know. I used to give a talk

called "Writing in Waiting Rooms" because that was so much

what I was doing. I would, you know, write when the kids were

in school, and then, but a lot of the time they weren't in

school. They're going to the doctor, they're having the

physical therapy, or whatever the orthodontia, and that became

my method really. So the trajectory: then a couple more

books. Each one took less time because I had learned more, and

I was also not doing the quite so much early, you know, first

time through of the archive kind of thing. That, the people I was

writing about afterwards were better known. So and their

papers, many of them were in print in one way or another. So

it was kind of easier to get through those, but the, I really

learned on the Peabody Sisters.

We are going to get back to all of that, but

first I want to ask a little bit about the practicalities of your

writing. When and where do you like to write?

Ah, well, you know that's that's kind of a

trajectory question too because it's changed so much over time.

You know, I've always, almost always, since since my first

child was born in 1984, had to fit things around whatever, you

know, the schedule of the children. Or later, when I was

teaching, the schedule of teaching. So it's very hard for

me to say that I, you know, start working in the morning and

take a nap in the afternoon, and in fact, that was I had some

wonderful mentors when I was starting out. One of them was

Justin Kaplan, the great biographer of Twain and Whitman,

and I knew that he was subject to some kind of skin allergy,

eczema, and so he would write steadily in the morning, and

then he'd have lunch, and then he'd take a nap and then do

other things, and it took him about seven years to write his

books. And and when I signed up to write the Peabody Sisters, I

thought, well, I'm not going to need that nap, you know. I'll

say it'll take me three and a half years to do this book

because I'm going to work morning and afternoon. And I I

had my first child by then, and there's no way I could do that.

So I guess the thing that might be helpful to say is, for people

who are trying to fit a lot of things in at the same time, it's

very hard to keep yourself from being distracted. And maybe

that's the message I can give because there was constant

how to stay in the chair and keep writing. It was

easy for me to stay in the chair in the archive and keep reading

manuscripts, but to stay in the chair at the desk and keep

writing, my, a trick that I had, and it might not work for

everyone actually, but was I had as a kid growing up and through

college, I was a pretty serious musician, and I had been trained

that you know you never, if you're at a concert, you never

get up during you know somebody's playing something,

and so if I, I used to think I had to work in absolute silence,

you know, but I started putting on in the case of the Peabody

Sisters, it was a recording of Chopin's etudes, and and I just

had this feeling that you know once it was going I couldn't get

up, I shouldn't get up, and I would start listening and again

it was maybe it's the etudes the first one, the second one pretty

soon I was engaged in the writing and you know it'd be at

the end of the CD, which luckily there's more music on a CD than

an LP you know, so I could I could fall into the

concentration then. And the other thing I also developed a

habit was I did a lot of printing out, and this was part

of the writing in waiting rooms method because you know I would

write at my desk while my kids were at school and while I was

listening to the CD. And print out what I'd written, and you

know, might be another-- and I would print out from the

beginning of whatever chapter it was, or the section, and then I

would take that with me as I was in the waiting room or whatever

it was. And, or if I didn't have to go out, I'd take it down to

the kitchen and read through that and make corrections and

additions and that sort of thing, so that when I would

start in again the next day, I always had something to do. I

had that, those corrections to make. I wasn't looking at a, you

know, at a finished paragraph from the day before. And ah,

where am I going to go? So I think that's for me another

great habit, and I still do that to the to this day. I print out

a lot. I mean, I used to partly do it because computers were

less reliable then, and they might, you know, collapse, and

you'd lose whatever you'd done. And I just wanted to be sure I

hadn't lost what I'd done. But, and you know, that can still

happen now.

But I really think, and I try to get my students to do this: that

reading, you know, if you're just reading on the screen, it's

not you. Kind of fool yourself into thinking something's great,

and when you print it out, for me, you print out and look at

it. It's a whole different process. You're reading it to

yourself the way you're reading a book to yourself, and and the

rhythms or whatever, the clarity. There's so much that

can be done that way, and then there's the kind of pleasure of,

I'm fixing it. You know, when you're starting the next day,

you're happy. I'm fixing this. I'm, I'm moving forward, and

then the next words come. I also walk a lot, and I often find

that, you know, sentences come to me as I'm walking. If I'm the

middle of writing, or if I get to the point where I'm about to

start writing, you know, the first sentence might come to me,

and I have to get home or memorize it or something like

that. Get home. So walking, walking, I find really helpful.

Are you a writer who finds it important to write

every day, or does it come in spurts?

You know, I wish I could write every day. I mean,

when I'm, I mean, I, well, I guess to answer that, really,

you know I rarely take a day off. So, but I'm not necessarily

always writing. There's all sorts of other work kinds of

things I have to do when I am writing. I mean, I've lately

been writing essays and shorter pieces, and when one gets going,

I generally don't like to take any kind of break of a day. You

know, once it's got going, it's in my head, and I'm hearing it

as I'm walking, and so I-I guess you know I can't any longer sit

for hours and hours. I have some back trouble that I may have

gotten while sitting in the archive so much, that sort of

thing. But so I get up. I now actually work at a standing

desk, and I'm talking to you now from standing up. But I, you

know, I get up and I go read, you know, what I printed out at

the table, and that sort of thing. So it just, you know, I

need a lot of, I, you know, somebody might, if they were me,

they were doing what I'm doing, they would say, "Oh, I have ADD,

which I think is very terrible for people to sort of

self-diagnose. But I, I think the breaking up some of of the

rhythm sometimes helps to you know go off and do a crossword

puzzle or put the laundry in the washing machine dishwash--in

the--put the laundry in the washing machine. I don't have a

dishwasher! And then you know it frees you up a little bit if

you've gotten kind of written yourself into a corner.

How do you like to organize your research?

Organizing my research, well, with the

biographies, it's always, chronology is so important. I

mean, you don't want the finished book to be reading sort

of and then and then, but you need a chronological spine to

follow, and so I've always, you know, there's sort of two

organizing principles. One is organized by the archive that

I've been to. You know, so that I'll have a, when I was working

on the Peabody Sisters, I would go to, you know, there wasn't so

much, or really hardly anything, nothing you could do online. So

I was going all over the country to different archives in Ohio

and Virginia and blah blah blah California, and I would make

notes, you know, and bring them back. This was before there were

portable computers, so it was all hard copy and typing things

out. And I had a whole, you know, lateral file, two cabinet,

two cabinet drawers of all these letters from different archives.

And I knew I didn't want to lose where they had come from. You

could do this on your computer by labeling these things. I

didn't want to lose track of where they'd come from, and

then, but then I realized I also needed to kind of shuffle them

around the way you would, you know, with a printed book and

you mark it up or something like that. So I made photocopies of

all those, you know, couple 1000 pages of notes, and then I

reorganized them chronologically, making sure

that I kept track of what, you know, archive it had come from,

so that I could go back and do the endnotes. But the

chronological files, and for me, working from you know hard copy

transcripts of letters, typescripts of letters, and and

journals passages, I still really like it. I like to mark

them up by hand, so. Chronology is very important, and

organizing by archive so you don't lose track of where the

thing has come from. And then you know once you put them all

in order, you-- there are a lot of course when you're reading

people's private letters, they don't always put dates on them.

You know where, when when did they write this letter, and you

can start figuring out from internal evidence that they all

took place in a certain time, and and if you juxtapose all

these letters, it just, you know, it's magic. Suddenly you

you have you have a story that wasn't there before. It's it's

it's organizing, but it's also creating the narrative, and

that's another exciting part that I can, I don't need the CD

playing to keep doing it.

Where in that research process do you feel

ready to start writing?

You know, I was just thinking about this today

because I'm working on a shorter essay about my family and and

their origins in Kansas in the 19th century in a small town, in

Concordia, and I had gone out there last May and I'd been

reading lots of papers, and I started, things started

proliferating. You know, somebody I discovered a whole

branch of the family that I hadn't known about or hadn't

known how to contact, and I wrote to one of them who said, I

mean, just to give a kind of an example, my great great

grandmother had, I knew from the documents that my family had,

had in 1866 attended a medical college in New York City, but we

didn't know if she finished her degree. And these other people

in Kansas said when I said, "Are you related? They said, "Yeah,

yes, yes, and we have Letitia Truesdell's diploma from medical

school." I thought, "Oh, that's great!" So I write back and

said, "I'd love to see that diploma." And you know, these

people weren't-they weren't like me. You know, they weren't going

to scan the diploma, and she probably didn't even know where

it was in her house. And she just said, "I'd love to see

you." She's in Colorado now, and then she's in Kansas. I've only

been to Kansas one time in my whole life, and I probably don't

know if I'll ever go again. And I just thought, you know, I know

now that she finished the medical school. Maybe, and this

person isn't probably going to tell me too much more, and maybe

I don't need to know much more. So maybe it's time to start

thinking about writing this. So my answer to you is that you

know, you come to a point where you think you have enough, and

and you know that you're going to do you know some other

research along the way, but but suddenly you get kind of sick of

turning over these stones and looking under them, and and you

want to say something. And I had even kind of come up, I was

lucky to have a writing residency in Italy for two weeks

in June, and I had decided I wouldn't take my computer. I

would just try writing longhand, and I didn't want to be, because

of my back, carrying a lot of heavy stuff around. So while

there, I kind of came up with a beginning sentence. Not that I

can tell you what it is now. I wrote it down, but you know, a

way to, a way into this essay, and then I came back and all

this sort of stuff and you know going through what I'd found in

Kansas and trying to contact these people and I thought, but

you know now I'm like eager to go back to whatever that

sentence was with some apprehension in case it's

actually no good or doesn't fit anymore. But you know that's a

kind of mini example of it. I think in the, for the

biographies, I I really did need to feel that I had gone through

everything, you know, everything that I was going to refer to,

and or organize it to some extent. I mean, in the case of

Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Bishop, there were many of their

letters and journals were in print, so I didn't do the same

thing of photocopying, and and but you know I still, their

materials were more or less chronological. And when I'm

writing, I guess maybe this is helpful too. You know I always

tend to always think that certain things are going to fit

into a chapter. You know, and I I will in my document, enter you

know usually a whole bunch of quotations that I think I want

to get to from you know that help the narrative go forward,

and inevitably I never get through all of them.

But then I have this kind of store of them that I transfer to

the next document for the next chapter, and I can start in

again and then adding on, and you know that's that's kind of

fun too. You have to fool yourself into thinking you've

mastered the organizational principle. You know this chapter

is about this and it's going to end there, and that gives you

the you know impetus to go forward because it's all planned

out. But you might get there and well, you know it's not quite

that. But I can see how that would start the next chapter or

you know something like that.

I know you've talked about how you like to to

print pages off as you go and and do some work on fixing them

and and getting them ready before you tackle the next part.

Do you have an approach to sort of larger form revision once you

have a draft?

I, that--as you phrase that, it's actually not,

not the way I work, especially the last several books. I mean,

the-- I don't have a draft and then go back. You know, I get it

right as I go along, and in, it's not, it was not true

entirely in the case of the Peabody Sisters when I didn't

know what I was doing. I I did in that case, and actually the

first book that I wrote, same thing. I I wrote a whole version

of it before I had a vision of what the structure would be, and

then I went back and wrote a new first chapter, and and then it

was you know in both cases the first two books the non

biography and the first biography you know what I end up

writing after that envisioning finally of the structure was

kind of a whole new book, you know, wasn't like I was fixing

what I'd written before. It just wasn't right. So, in the case of

the Peabody Sisters, which is about these three women of

19th-century New England, who one of them marries Nathaniel

Hawthorne, and one marries Horace Mann, and the third is a

kind of intellectual impresario who brings all these people

together, and Thoreau, and Emerson, and Margaret Fuller,

and all this stuff-very exciting and thrilling lives. And I had,

as I was working on it, had thought I'd cover their entire

lives from you know 1803, 1803 when Elizabeth, the oldest, is

born and dies in 1893. You know, a huge thing. And I did research

most of that, but and then I was writing, and actually my initial

idea was to start with a chapter when their mother was dying in

1853, and that's when the three sisters were kind of set up. The

marriages had taken place, and the older sister was on this

kind of roving residence, she called it, peddling historical

texts and stuff like that, and very amusing and entertaining

and and anyway, and I wrote that and then I went back to the

beginning and started writing you know their childhood, and I

had gotten like 450 pages and they were still teenagers. I

sent that to my editor. This must have been you know at about

the 15 year mark I think and I had had by then she was my

fourth editor for all this time. One, the first one who was

wonderful died, Roby Macaulay, and then the others moved on to

other things. This fourth person, she took, she didn't

even read it for about a year and a half, during which time I,

you know, I wasn't satisfied with it, and I had always hoped

to write-- I had always thought this is too big a life to do in

one book, and I thought, you know, but they wouldn't let me

do two volumes on these obscure women. So I had this sudden

vision in talking to a friend that I would, I don't really

know how. I actually, I guess, I went with a friend to her. She

was, you know, Megan. We were at her mother-in-law's country

house in Vermont for a weekend where she was writing intensely,

and I was thinking, "What am I going to do?" She said, "Megan,

you know you could quit this. You don't have to do it. People,

you know, change their minds all the time." And I thought, "Ah,

you know, I can't. I cannot quit this. I'm, I'm just too in too

deep. This is like 15 years in, and and I can't let them down.

And I'd had fellowships. I can't let those people down." And and

somehow in this moment, being away from my desk, and you know,

this vision came to me of how I would frame it, which was to

begin with the wedding of the, the first wedding. The first, I

mean, these two weddings to the interesting guys took place

within a year of each other, 1842 and 1843. But I thought

I'll start with the first wedding, and then we'll cut

back, and then we'll end with the second wedding, and that

really covered their, the height of the transcendentalism

movement and their involvement in it.

I mean, not that it didn't go on after that, but anyway, and

while I was there, I started to draft that first chapter, which

suddenly had a very confident voice to it, and and from then

on, I was able to you know basically throw out most of what

I'd written before and and wrote the book in you know maybe five

years time. In the case of Margaret Fuller, I had, you

know, if I if you had asked me while I was working on the

Peabody Sisters if I would write about Margaret Fuller, I said

absolutely not. She was not nice to the Peabody sisters, and too

many people had written about her already. But when I finished

the book and I started saying, "Well, you know, these are the

women of the transcendentalist movement that people, you know,

are overshadowed by Margaret Fuller, people would say, "Well,

who was Margaret Fuller?" You know, she'd been forgotten from

the kind of she had a peak of of popularity in the you know 70s

and early 80s. There have been a number of biographies, and

scholars were working on her quite a lot between that time.

But she was sort of forgotten by the public. So I had the thought

of writing a a short biography of Margaret Fuller. That was my

plan. After having written a very big biography of the

Peabody sisters, I thought this is one person. She died at age

40 tragically in this shipwreck, and coming back from the you

know Roman Revolution, in which she had been a foreign

correspondent and a ran a hospital, and she'd fallen in

love and had a baby and all the stuff. All were drowned. I

thought this is this would make it just a great short biography

and dramatic and and and it was around the close to her

bicentennial year, which would have been 2010. I could do that,

you know, and I signed up to do that, and of course it got

bigger. But my- there, I in that case, and in the case of the

Bishop, I had a vision of how I would structure it quite early

on, and in the case of Fuller, you know, there had been these

many biographies of her, but the very first one, which is much

criticized, by her male friends Ralph Waldo Emerson, William

Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clark, you know, people

have criticized this for a number of reasons. One is that

these people messed with the documents and you know edited

them and then chopped them up, so it's hard now to reproduce

what they were working with. And then they also wanted to

downplay and her radicalism and her scandalous love affair. So

you know they got a lot of criticism, but these were her

closest friends, or some of her closest friends, and they had

organized it in a very helpful way by the places that she had

lived, for the most part. Anyway, I just thought I'm going

to take the same chapter titles and kind of an homage to them.

I'm not; it's not going to be the same book in any way, but

that that somehow was very helpful to me, connecting me

with her earliest biographies, biographers, and and it just

seemed to make sense. And I also, I guess, very early on

when I started to read wonderfully this fabulous editor

of letters, Robert Hudspeth, who he published six volumes of all

all of Fuller's letters, and after that, that was done in the

early '90s. I think after that, he began publishing all of

Thoreau's letters, which he just finished, and then he died

recently. Very sad, but what a life of gifts to writers and

scholars. Anyway, I was, as soon as I opened up book one. I

wasn't even in the archive, but I opened up book one of her

letters, and the very first letter she'd written to her

father when she could hardly write. I did want to go see how

it looked in the handwriting, which I did. But she says, "Dear

father, it is a heavy storm. I hope you will not have to come

home in it." He was off in Washington D.C. as a

congressman, and I thought, "Wow, this is where the book has

to start." I mean, because it foreshadows her death in a heavy

storm.

I mean, how could any book start any other way? And it happened

that there was somebody else working on a biography at the

same time, I knew, and I thought, ah, you know, how could

anyone not use that letter? And I was so worried when his book

came out a year before mine that his can start in the same way,

you know, but it didn't. It's you know just proves the truth

that everybody sees the historical record, you know,

differently or makes a different, will make a different

story. But anyway, and then the Elizabeth Bishop was really an

exciting formal experiment in that I had been a student of

hers, so I knew I would, wanted to include some of my own

experience with her, alternating with the biographical sections,

and and this book was actually originally also meant to be a

short book and a series of biographies that all had the

form where you'd give the the author's name or the the

subject's name, and then a quotation or some or something

afterwards that would be illuminating. So I liked this

book was called Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast,

which was the title of one of her two sestinas. She hadn't,

you know. It's another reason I thought, she didn't, you know,

only published about 100 poems in her life. I could surely do

this short way, and it'll be somewhat personal, so it won't

be like a big, you know, biography. But I love the

sestina, and I love the title. And then, as I was looking at

the New Yorker, excerpts of the Peabody Sisters,

the sestina, I realized that the end words-- this sestina is a

poem of six stanzas with the six lines each, and the end words of

the first stanza, the ending words of each line, are repeated

as end words in the following stanzas in a specific order, and

I realized that the end words were ideal for for organizing

her biography. So there was, I think, the the biography goes,

balcony, which is there were some key moments on balconies in

her early life, and it also sort of you know looking forward

towards looking out towards the light, balcony, crumb, coffee,

river, miracle, and sun. And then my plan was to use the way

the sestina does use all the six words in its last little envoi

of three lines or two lines, I guess it is. I wanted to use all

the six words in the last sentence of the book, which I

did, and so the whole thing, you know, really, I wrote that book

much faster than any of the others. It didn't turn out to be

a short book because it turned out that there were a lot of new

materials to work with, letters that her last lover had saved,

and and were full of explosive things. So it became another big

book, but it still had that structure and and my own

memoirish interludes as you know it has sort of a I guess you

wouldn't call it quite a parallel track, but they were

tracks that ultimately converged. My little story that

kind of goes from my life growing up and meeting with hers

in 1977, 76 and seven, and then she died in 79. So it was,

worked really well. Very proud of that.

and and I had had the ear of somebody there, and I said, you

know, how about how about writing about this for the

centennial? And that went through, and and I was really

glad and and interested, you know, finding out a lot of

things about my family's past that I hadn't known, and what

what I had thought I would find was actually very different from

my, what I did. My grandfather had been kind of a closed down

person later in life, and I knew he'd had struggled with

depression through his life. And I thought I was going to find

out that he had you know experienced shell shock, but

that wasn't what I found. I found the opposite. This was

like the best time of their lives, even though it was very

scary and bombs falling down the building across the street and

and a lot of stress, but it was also the first year of my

grandparents' marriage, and they were lucky to be able to both

get to Paris before my grandfather was inducted into

the AEF, so that they were living, you know, in a pencil

with a view of the Eiffel Tower while all this was going on, and

having their first child, and and it was after that that

things kind of got dark. But I mean, not that it was obviously

not happy all the time and going to the front, whatever. Anyhow,

so that was the first one, and then my own partner died shortly

after that, having been unwell for quite a while, and and you

know that I was just derailed by that, and derailed then by the

pandemic, which came so soon after, and that led to writing a

couple of the other essays just as an attempt to write something

at all, you know. And I think I finally had three of them, and I

thought, oh, you know, maybe this would make a book if I did

a few more. And it's a very interesting grouping of essays

that are part. Some of them are family history. I guess another

kind of. I mean, the the second one that I wrote had to do with

really about my partner missing my partner and the and the

pandemic and a period of time that I'd spent in Japan and and

a hermit there who's you know 13th century hermit who was

writing was like the whatever it was a kind of a experimental

meditation that actually I'm really proud of but you know it

also kept me going and then after that I recognize another

important anniversary was coming up, which was the 50th, my 50th

high school reunion, which was also brought to mind the 50th in

in 2020, the 50th anniversary of the death of a classmate,

Jonathan Jackson, the younger brother of the Soledad Brother

George Jackson, who died in a very unfortunate effort to do a

hostage-taking plan and free his older brother, who'd been in

prison for 10 years on kind of ridiculous charges.

Anyway, Jonathan ended up killed, and this was a famous

courthouse incident in Marin County, and he was using guns

that belonged to Angela Davis. It's a big, if you were around

then, or even not, you might know about this Marin County

courthouse shooting. And so I thought I would write about

that, and you know, something I had wanted to write about for

pretty much as long as I'd been a writer or journalist, but

hadn't really known how to find a way into it because it really

was his story. I didn't want to appropriate his story, but it

was also as I ended up writing a kind of parallel growing up

narrative of my life and his in Pasadena, which was you know

really an exemplary, an exemplar of communities that were going

through you know bussing crises in the wake of the Civil Rights

movement, the civil rights victories that then kind of

turned into Black Power movement, all of which had their

great idealistic successes, but also dramatic tragedies. So

those were the three, and then I thought maybe there's some way I

can keep doing this and write more about things I learned as a

biographer and other meaningful experiences in my own life that

that kind of reverberate with larger themes about historical

writing, biographical writing, you know, a little bit like the

theory behind confessional poetry that Robert Lowell

originated with others like Sylvia Plath that you know your

own experience is not, you know, I'm not saying I'm so important

but my, what I experience has some is a window into the larger

world of those times.

Yeah, it's a it's a beautiful book. I I

really enjoyed it. I'm wondering if you might be willing to read

this excerpt for me from the beginning,

This is from the--it's not the first essay

that that I wrote, but I, in fact, it it's one of the later

ones. But it does have the title "After Lives," and like some of

the some of the essays, it's drawing on material that I had

learned, but didn't include in in the books, and it also is

drawing on a very unusual experience that I had that sets

this off.

Dead men tell no tales. But dead women do—at least to me. They

speak in questions. Una Hawthorne—the eldest child of

Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, whose puckish disposition as a

girl had been grafted by her father onto little Pearl, Hester

Prynne’s willful out-of-wedlock daughter in The Scarlet

Letter—was the first and most insistent. Una would not let me

go. I’d given two decades to researching and writing a

biography of the Peabody sisters, the youngest of whom

was Nathaniel’s wife, Sophia, a promising artist at the time of

their wedding in 1842, active in her studio through their first

year of marriage. That’s where my book ended, with Una’s birth

in 1844, the year Sophia turned thirty-five and Nathaniel,

forty. By then the Hawthornes and Sophia’s two sisters,

Elizabeth and Mary, were well launched, along with the bold

intellectual and social movement—transcendentalism—they’d

done so much to initiate. As an aspiring writer who struggled to

make time for my work while raising two daughters, I’d been

reluctant to face Sophia’s renunciation of her talent in

motherhood, her decision, as she once wrote to a wealthy friend

who’d offered to pay for a nanny after the birth of Una’s baby

sister, Rose, Sophia’s third and last child, so she might return

to her easel: ‘painting—for the present must go by the board--&

what is more, shall go.’ Her children would be ‘the best

pictures I ever painted.’ Sophia Hawthorne never completed, or

even commenced, another work of art. Now, on a warm evening in

late June 2006, a year after my book was published, I was facing

both mother and daughter in death. The Dominican Sisters of

Hawthorne, New York, an order of Catholic nuns founded by Rose,

who’d taken vows in midlife, had arranged for the transfer of

Sophia’s and Una’s remains from Kensal Green Cemetery in London,

where they’d been buried in 1871 and 1877—Sophia at sixty-one,

Una at thirty-three. The two women were to be ‘reunited’ with

Nathaniel, as the Dominican Sisters thought of it, on

Authors Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, a popular tourist site

in Concord, Massachusetts, where the town’s famous literary

families were interred: the Emersons, Thoreaus, Alcotts, and

Nathanial Hawthorne, whose wife and children had died too far

off to keep him company in the afterlife. We were seated on

folding chairs in a small, windowless assembly room at the

interior of Rosary Hill Home, the hospice for impoverished

cancer patients Rose had established in 1900 and the

Dominican Sisters still operated, Sophia and Una’s first

stop on their way home to Concord. Sister Mary Joseph, the

Dominican Sisters’ public relations officer, had invited

me and a fifth-generation representative of the Hawthorne

family, the poet Alison Deming, to witness the Hawthorne women’s

return to the United States. A plain wood casket—child-sized,

Sister Mary Joseph said—lay before us on a table. She

slipped out of the room, the white skirts of her habit

rustling as she shut the door, telling us, ‘You can look inside

if you’d like. But you won’t find much, just bits of bone and

cloth. It’s been a long time.’ More than 120 years. Raised

Unitarian in a family that prefers cremation and

long-delayed ‘celebrations of life’ for our dead, I’d never

attended a wake or viewing the ritual I assumed Sister Mary

Joseph was permitting us to enact in private. The undeniable

curiosity I felt was mixed with dread, despite the assurance

there would be no skeletons. I deferred to Alison, the blood

relative. She lifted the lid.”

Thank you for reading so much. I just I enjoy

your writing in these essays so much. So I'm glad to treat

listeners to it a little bit.

It's also a pleasure to read and reminds me

of while I was writing. I'm always reading over, and lately

I've gotten more into actually reading aloud to myself

sometimes if I'm particularly perplexed by what I'm trying to

say, does it make sense? So, anyway, I'm used to used to

hearing hearing it in my head.

As a biographer, did it feel strange to write

these essays with yourself as as part of the narrative, or was it

freeing?

Maybe a little bit of both. I think I've always

felt, I mean, I think all writers write from a personal

motivation to be heard. You know, they weren't listened to

when they were kids, or they experienced things that they

couldn't speak of. And it's that delayed wish to to tell and to

be heard that motivates. And so, even while I was writing about

the Peabody Sisters. I was, you know, their stories reverberated

with me, and that's part of what I write about in the

introduction to to this collection of essays. That I

mean, I don't think necessarily. I mean, I don't, I work very

hard not to let my own connection with the subject

affect what I'm going to present about, I mean, inevitably

they're the things I'm interested in that maybe another

person wouldn't be, such as you know the first letter in the

Margaret Fuller story. But I'm not, I didn't pick that because

I, you know, knew somebody who drowned or anything like that. I

was, or I had almost drowned. It's just to me, you know, as a

writer, that was a way way to start. But you know, I think

there is an urge to tell and to bear witness, I guess, and I

think that was behind the stories in that are personal in

my book, but they're mostly not about me. They're about people

whose lives I witnessed that you might not think to know about,

such as my grandfather, or whose life I didn't really know about,

but can now tell about because it was representative of the

kinds of lives that were living. You know, people who were living

through a just a global crisis in as that war broke out, and

how did they go from the kind of settled times into this just

huge, you know, worldwide calamity? And I think that

reverberates with feelings we have now. Same with the story of

Jonathan Jackson. You know, you you witness this wrong in his

case, the wrong done to his brother, and what what is he to

do? You know, the desperation that sent him to. How are we to

think about and understand that? It's very contemporary. So I

think I think I I felt comfortable doing this because I

was doing it the way a biographer would, and I was in

archives or in you know sometimes in my case actually

because of a move I had to make most of the letters I was

reading and working from that were family letters were

actually in archives because I'd had to find a place for them. I

didn't, you know, feel safe transporting them from one place

to another endlessly. So it it felt in some ways the same,

except of course I was discovering things about my

family, and and I guess I didn't put all of them in because you

know they weren't all of interest to the reader, but they

were all of interest to me.

You wrote an essay for the New York Times

last year. I'm going to quote you here. You said, "Part of the

thrill in visiting the past through books comes from

learning about its physical makeup, its inhabitants,

customs, and ways of expressing themselves, feeling as if you

are there." In this passage you just read, I think, you

certainly do this. You know, you make us you make us feel as

though we're there. But it's also true in in your biographies

that you really you're not just sort of recounting to the

reader, but you make us feel as if we were there in the setting

and alongside the characters. What are your strategies for

writing in that way?

I think it comes out of a kind of a philosophy of

what biography should do, or what I want to do with biography

for the reader, which is to help them feel as if they're living

through life with this person and seeing life through their

eyes, and and it's a way of I can getting to essentials in my

view, but also stripping away some of the in the case of the

Peabodys and Fuller and even Bishop, you know, people could

say negative things about these people. They were-I mean, not

that I'm ignoring the negative-but Fuller and some of

the Peabodys really rubbed people the wrong way because

they were strong women. Elizabeth Bishop was a shy

person and and not easily known. So if you can use their words,

which luckily I had them, you know what they're saying. And

and in the case of the Peabodys and Fuller writing in this

period, they were writing letters and journals in a time,

you know, before Freud, where they weren't necessarily

examining their thoughts for subconscious motivations. They

just wanted to get it out there. Their inner lives. They had this

term, the innera, that they took from German. You know, my

innera, my inner self. You know, and so there was a lot of

confessional stuff and a lot of effort, very powerful effort on

them on their own part to say really what it was they were

feeling or thinking. You know, it wasn't when biographers get

together. They talk a lot about how can how can you trust

letters or journals? Are they presenting a self, you know,

different self to others? And you know, there's I felt very

little of that from them. They were trying to get their true

self out onto the page. In the case of Elizabeth Bishop, she

was a closeted. Well, on what term she would have used, I

don't know. You know, lesbian loved women, and when she was

writing to those women, she was being very authentic. And she

was writing to friends who, with whom she could trust that

secret, she was being very authentic. And you know, I just,

I just anyway, I was lucky to have that kind of material I

could work with. One of the great finds that made my book

get bigger about Bishop was a series of letters she'd written

to her psychoanalyst in 1947, I think it was. So she was 36

years old, and and you know, it's as if it's hard to know the

motivation, you know why she wrote these letters. But it was

sort of as if maybe the analyst said, you know, you're better at

writing than talking, so why don't you write out what

happened, you know, or some key moments and a and a little, not

a little, you know, kind of psycho history. It was just

astonishing, and you know, very she, you know, wasn't hiding

things from this. I mean, obviously, probably she was in

some way, but some of the things were just so out there that, you

know, only things she would only say to the analyst or to her

closest friends. So anyway, trying to get back to answering

your question, my philosophy of biography of you know showing

showing letting letting the reader kind of be in the shoes

of the subject and see the world through their eyes, and that of

course brings a lot to to this feeling that you are there and

you had the material to do that, and also you know evoking the

places. Places are extremely important, and then finding out

lots that I can about you know Margaret Fuller visiting a

mesmerist to deal with her pain in her shoulder because she has

curvature of the spine. Well, what was mesmerism, and what was

that treatment exactly like? Or the same with Sophia Peabody,

who had various illnesses, and luckily, my God, her the

physician she saw and relied on most, Dr. Walter Channing, had

written a book later, you know, later in his life called

"Bedcase" about nurses. Then what we he didn't call them;

they were bed cases. Women who took to their beds, and and

Sophia was bordering on that at times. She was a bed case, and I

had not just his book about women who were experiencing

that. This was before the later 19th century, you know, rescue

stuff.

This is a different view that he had very early on. But you know,

I also had letters in which she described what kind of treatment

he offered her, and I don't know all these just miraculous things

that came together, or that her she was also an artist, and I

knew her drawing teacher who thought a lot of her, and and

you know you'd think well maybe these men were kind of

discouraging women, but quite the opposite. In fact, this

drawing teacher. I'd written a novel about a woman artist, and

so I was able to find this novel in the Widener Library, and just

the whole picture shifts the more, the closer you get to the

books they were reading, the places they lived. You know, I

just very I went to all of them. In the case of Fuller and the

Peabodys, I didn't quite so much. In the case of Bishop,

because some of the places I had been to previously myself, and

then I also she described them. She was quite known for

description, so I didn't really feel I needed to go to Brazil to

describe the Brazil that she saw. But I did go to some places

that she didn't describe because, or didn't describe at

at length because she was ashamed of them, and one of them

was her house where she grew up in where she was living with an

aunt. She was essentially an orphan and raised by aunts and

uncles, and she was living with an aunt and uncle in Revere. And

this is the place. This is the balcony store, balcony opening

chapter the an abusive uncle who once hung her over the railing

of of a balcony by her hair and so I went to find that place and

then I also went to the apartment house she lived in in

San Francisco where her after her partner Lada had died by

suicide and she was there with a younger lover, and you know I

don't think anyone had gone to see those places, but they meant

a lot to me because they were you know private and places of

some torment for her.

Writing biography well takes a long

time. In the case of the Peabody sisters, 20 years, but your

other books were not were not quick turnarounds. How do you

keep the faith as you know life keeps continuing to happen to

you as as the project is still in a very nebulous form? How do

you how do you keep going?

Well, one thing that I did as I as soon as I

started on the Peabody Sisters, I didn't know it would take me

20 years. As I said, I thought it would take me three years,

but or three and a half, half of seven, but because I wasn't

going to nap. But I had, yes, I had had a kind of lunch group of

women writers that I had been in for a while, who were novelists

or poets, whatever. But I thought I wanted to start a

group of women biographers that would meet regularly once a

month, and I, I already had a friend Susan Quinn who'd written

a biography of Karen Horney, the pioneering psychoanalyst who

refuted Freud's penis envy thing. Wonderful biography, and

she was working on Marie Curie, and between the two of us, we

came up with, I think, four other people. One, most of us

were working on women's lives, but one person was writing about

Rodin, the sculptor. Anyway, and we started meeting every month.

To initially, we did share our work and read to each other now

and then. But over time, and this group is still meeting.

It's changed the membership slightly in the early years

because somebody moved away or other person finished the book.

But I think we've had the same members for about 20 years now,

and it's so 1985. This is a 40-year group, so that was

really really helpful to me. Sometimes on a practical level,

but also just because I had a place to go and talk about this,

you know, what I was worried would come to seem to my

daughters and to my husband like an obsession that was just you

know they were sick of it. So I you know I think that was it was

a good idea, and it was very helpful. But I also think that

it was kind of a woman's thing to do to sort of hide out with

my passion. Whereas I once heard about Martin Sherwin, who spent

30 years on the biography of Oppenheimer, that he ultimately

joined forces with Kai Bird to publish to get it finished, and

he evidently it was just kind of a joke in the family. He was,

you know, never going to finish it. I was in his office all the

time working on this, and I, I don't know if I were a guy, and

I if I had he was like a tenured professor at Tufts, and so it

was kind of a joke. Whereas for me, this was the only thing I

was doing. Was I really doing anything? You know, it was very

painful, and to me, a lot of the time, that my sense that I

wasn't, maybe I would never finish. I really had that

feeling until quite near the end, actually, because you know

that's the way it is. If it's not finished, it's not finished.

And so the the group was really very helpful. And and one of the

members of the group was part of a a kind of collective of women

in the Boston area who every May would rent a large house in

Duxbury, Massachusetts, on the beach and share the cost of it.

And use it for a kind of writers' retreat. And I went

there a couple of times. Once our whole biographers group took

it over for for a week, and and those were really important

times too. So I guess looking back, I'm glad I did it. I think

I would have been less furtive about it. Almost should have

been, but you know, life teaches you a lot of lessons.

At the very start of our conversation, you

you mentioned being pleased to be on this podcast because of

the importance of history and needing to defend it in this

moment. I know you've been really involved with Biographers

International and helping to promote biography as as other

people write it as well. How do you think about the importance

of biography right now?

You know, I think thinking about the

historical profession, we've kind of emerged from a period

where biography was frowned upon. You know, you don't want

to look at individual lives, privilege the individual life,

and really you need to do kind of population studies and look

at movements, and and I think we really need exemplary lives to

inspire us now. I think we always do, and regardless of the

times, you might find different things in a life depending on

what urgencies are around you and that you're feeling

personally, I was really, really pleased to be asked by the

Smithsonian to the Smithsonian Magazine to write a short

profile of Margaret Fuller for their semi-quintennial semi

whatever it is the 250th issue this summer, which was and is

did come out about American innovators, and they included

Margaret Fuller, they included Frederick Douglass, you know,

and Lonnie Bunch wrote this really you know brave opening

statement about the importance of learning all of history,

everything we can find out, and I just felt so happy to that you

know we'd been talking about this piece for since before the

election of Trump, and and they were able to hang on to this

vision of what the 250th could be in their publication. So I

really recommend to everyone to to look at that while it's

there. I don't live in D.C. but there's an organization called

Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian. If you live in D.C.

find out about them, and they are now doing some actions at

the Smithsonian as we're speaking now. It's just after

that wretched statement by Trump that he wanted to put warning

signs all over the place about the language in the placards.

Margaret Fuller is currently featured in the National

Portrait Gallery. I was so pleased to see that last summer

when I was in D.C. and I I had to wonder would would that stay?

She's in a room with Douglas and and other forget whether they're

called resistors or you know, you know, can that room stay?

And she's aside from that, I was so happy to see this. She's her

portrait, which only recently was donated to the portrait

gallery. They had it had been on loan, and you know, it's so

important to me that it's there. It's the only portrait oil in

oils of her that exists from when she was in Italy, but as

you're you know wandering about, there are various guide things

on the walls in the hallway, and there's a you know reproduction

of this portrait saying you know think about portraits. What do

they tell you? What what mood did they convey? And they chose

Margaret Fuller's. What do you think she's thinking? What do

what can you tell about what she's wearing? About what the

times are, and and what do you see in the background? You know,

you see Italy. Ah, why is that? You know, she's American. I'm

just so happy about that, and I I dread the thought that that

might be painted over. We don't want a revolutionary like

Margaret Fuller, who you know said I'm. I'm getting towards

the end of her life, which ended at age 40. You know, I'm. I'm

becoming more and more of a socialist. She writes. You know,

this is probably not something that the current administration

wants featured. So anyway, I think biography is, you know,

supremely important and well told and well researched,

carefully researched. You know we're always revising and

understanding our subjects newly, and and the thought of

new visions being squelched is just very very discouraging. So

go out and buy biographies, and if you're a writer, write

biographies and take heart.

That's a marvelous note to end on. But I,

I do want to know: Are you working on another biography?

Well, I think I really found I like these the

essay form, and I do an enormous amount of research to write any

of these essays. You could tell the part part. That I read, I

was I was reading. I thought, whoa! I did a lot to find out.

Just you know, the Rosary Hill home and then this and then

that. But I've been I live very near Mount Auburn Cemetery in

Cambridge, and I walk there a lot. And I've become fascinated

with certain groups of people. Not like they're not all buried

in the same spot, but you know different biographical

narratives that I could derive from that, for example, there's

an enormous obelisk marking the grave. It just says Cushman on

it. You know, everybody would know what that was at the time

when Charlotte Cushman died, but nobody knows now. Charlotte

Cushman was this fabulous Shakespearean actress, American,

but had a career in America and Europe, and and a cross dresser,

and had a menage, a more than a salon, because they were often

living there in Rome with women sculptors, and some of whom were

her lovers at various times, and and some of them are buried in

Mount Auburn Cemetery, and one of the sculptors, Edmonia Lewis,

who was part of that group, a black woman sculptor who's being

revived now. There's a sculpture by her in Mount Auburn Cemetery

that honors the first woman doctor in Boston, Harriet Hunt.

And then, aside from that 19th-century story, actually,

there's another sculptor and her partner, who they died in late

19th century, early 20th. They are buried together with their

names on this same tomb or same stone, which was a really

unusual thing to do. These two women, and in Massachusetts, you

probably know that Massachusetts was the first state where

same-sex marriage was legal, and there are a number of stones

now. I mean, this was in 2004, I believe it was. I'd have to

check that. But one member of the partner has died of the

marriage has died. One spouse, and soon both will have, I'm

sure. But in the ones I've seen just one dies and they put up a

stone or a inscription on the wall that gives the names and

and the date of death of the person who's died and and the

date of the marriage that's you know within a few days of the

when that ruling became official in May of I think it was May of

2004. I think maybe the ruling was in 2003, but it took six

months to, you know, be cemented, something like that.

So anyway, I just find that very moving. The the continuum of the

history that you can find in the cemetery, which was, you know,

founded and begun in 1831, the first garden cemetery in the

United States, modeled after the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris,

so it's a beautiful place. There's a lot to write about

there. So I might, I'm hoping to write a collection of essays,

biographical for the most part, about interesting people there.

That truly sounds like delight. So I, I

hope you do. I can't wait to read it, Megan Marshall. What a

pleasure for me! What a treat to get to talk to you about your

writing process. Thank you so much for joining me on Drafting

the Past.

Well, thank you, Kate, for such wonderful

questions and close attention, and and the opportunity to talk

about my work.

Thanks again to Megan Marshall for joining me on

this episode of the Drafting the Past podcast. You can find links

to her books and other things we mentioned in the show notes. If

you haven't already, check out the newly redesigne

draftingthepast.com. Read all about how Megan Kate Nelson and

I are creating a space for reviews and writing dedicated to

nonfiction history books. Subscribe to the newsletter

while you're there so you don't miss any of the cool things that

are coming. Thanks for being here and for listening. Remember

that friends don't let friends write boring history.